All Saints' Family of Schools Development

Officer

This is a Government initiative which aims to create schools which support families and their communities.

It has five strands:

Childcare – Families should be given reliable information on childcare available in the area. Childcare can be provided on school site from the hours of 8am to 6pm, if there is a sustainable need.

Varied Menu of Activities – Children and young people should be able to take part in enjoyable and active pursuits outside of school hours, such as sports and art clubs.

Parenting Support – Families should be supported by the school. This can range from parent meetings about their child’s transition to secondary school, to setting up family learning sessions.

Swift and Easy Access – Young people and their families should be signposted to outside agencies who can offer them specialist support if needed. For example All Saints’ provides access to a Family Social Worker.

Community Access – Schools should provide access to facilities such as IT, sports and performance area to community groups, where possible.

The All Saints’ Family of Schools is already meeting many of these objectives, and actively seeks to build on, and improve services.

Our aim is to keep the All Saints’ Family of Schools in the news, which helps to tell our communities about the positive work we do with children and young people.

We have a good relationship with our local newspapers the Mansfield Chad, Newark Advertiser and Worksop Guardian. Our schools have also been featured on radio stations Mansfield 103.2 and BBC Radio Nottingham.

We also keep our school communities in touch through The School Gate newsletter, which comes out every half term. It has information about recent events, newspaper coverage, good news and ‘diary dates’. To see previous editions, click here.

Schools budgets are always tight, so we actively seek funding from other sources to support our activities.

Recent projects have included:

• A successful bid to Lotto funding body Awards for All for £10,000 towards laptop computers, for a family computer club at Holy Family Catholic Primary in Worksop.

• Playground Partnerships, supported by Woolworths. Claire Brown has been working with children in the primary schools to help design their own playground. These projects have been turned into funding bids – Holy Trinity Catholic Primary in Newark were shortlisted by the judges and received £250 contribution towards making their design a reality, well done!

At All Saints’ we are developing a new school allotment and have bid for Lottery funding to support the project.

All Saints’ Sports Council has also bid for money from the Nottinghamshire Youth Initiative Fund to buy two new trampolines to help continue the success of the after school club.