We would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to all our parents and carers that took the time to complete our recent Annual Parental Survey and/or our Thank a Teacher form.

The Survey has been reviewed by the senior leadership team and has helped to inform our strategic priorities for the coming academic year. The Schools Survey platform we use enables us to benchmark ourselves against ‘schools like ours’ (based on Free School Meal proportion) on all of the scaled check box questions. From this we can see we are outperforming other schools.

Communication and school systems were two areas that were both praised and flagged as areas for focus in the Survey. As your views suggest, both are a considerable challenge for schools to get right, particularly in the current technology enabled world. We have put in place two things as a priority to support with this:

We have created a summary of our Systems for Parents – with a clear outline of what each is used for and access links. Ideally we would work with one system that does ‘everything’ we need for our school to run, but this just does not exist currently. Instead we use a number of different systems which we have chosen because they provide the best functionality to run our processes efficiently as a school.
We will be writing to all parents in September to provide you with the link to a Welcome to the Year webpage. This is curated by the Head of Year and will provide a tailored outline for each year group of the curriculum they will be studying, alongside key areas of focus and important dates for the year ahead. If you would like to review any curriculum in detail ahead of this, it can all be found on our website via the subject links on the right hand side here. In addition our 26/27 calendar will be published to our website in early July.

It was fantastic to see such high levels of written praise for our school on both the Survey and Thank a Teacher form. Our staff are committed to ensuring your children don’t just learn, but truly thrive. Hearing that you recognise our staff and appreciate the rich tapestry of opportunities we strive to provide means more than you know – be this the extra curricular activities (through Period 7, Academics, trips, clubs, performing arts, sports and many more opportunities) or the pastoral care and personal development we place at the heart of our school.

Education goes far beyond the textbook, it is about building character, sparking curiosity, and opening doors. To see so many parents highlight these specific efforts tells us that our vision is resonating in your homes. In a profession that demands so much, having that hard work seen, valued, and celebrated by our parent community is a massive boost to staff morale. It fuels our passion to keep raising the bar.

We must also highlight that beyond our immediate school community, your recorded feedback serves as a powerful testament to any external agencies. A parental body providing objective yet overwhelmingly positive evidence of the exceptional work we do at KWS plays a vital role in firmly establishing our reputation as a truly great school – a school is only as strong as its community.

The KWS Senior Leadership Team