KWS has been given a Saracens Rugby shirt has been signed by all the current first team squad who reached the Rugby Premiership final this month including England stars (and ex Harpenden RFC players) Owen Farrell and Maro Itoje. The shirt was kindly donated by ex Saracens and England sevens player Kevin Barrett. Kevin is currently Head of Academy Strength and Conditioning at Saracens. The donation was arranged by Harpenden Rovers Youth FC who use the KWS facilities on Saturday mornings for training.

We have been awarded a certificate from Total Energies to celebrate the fact we are using electricity that is 100% generated from renewable sources.

The consensus of opinion from our recent consultation with parents and students was two-thirds in favour of changing the length of the school day.  We will therefore be going ahead with the changes from September 2022.

This means that we will re-arrange the school day to finish at 3.30pm from Monday through to Thursday and will continue to finish at 2.30pm on Fridays. The school day from Monday to Thursday will be shortened by reducing morning form time to 25 minutes, shortening lunchtime to 45 minutes everyday and removing the 10 minute ‘break’ between period 6 and 7.

As outlined in our consultation, the advantages of doing this include:

• More productive use of staff and students time in the school day
• Improved staff wellbeing, retention and recruitment
• Continuing Period 7 whilst finishing at a comparable time to other schools
• More time for students to participate in independent study/other activities after school

In addition I would like to address some common questions raised during the consultation:

• Period 7 will remain a key part of our KWS curriculum, running from 3.00pm to 3.30pm Monday to Thursday.
• Students participating in Body options for P7 which require changing into PE kit, will have the option to do so at lunchtime.
• We are currently not using the full serving capacity of our food hall. We have three additional serving hatches which we will use as student numbers increase, along with other potential options to add more capacity, eg. pods in other areas of the site, as used by many other local secondary schools. We will also increase the number of till points in the main serving area.
• We appreciate that the change will cause issues for a handful of families that collect siblings from local primary schools before collecting students from KWS. We would like to reassure you that the school buildings will continue to remain open until at least 5pm and that students can make use of the supervised library facilities to do academic work until at least 4pm.

We have spoken to Herts County Council who will be factoring in the changes to transport, as they commission and co-ordinate external bus services for the next academic year.  We hope to be able to distribute new bus timetables by the time we break for the summer holidays in July.

These changes will commence from 1st September 2022 and we would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who took the time to respond to the consultation.

Tony Smith

Headteacher