Date: 11/03/21
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEA Trust.

I’m delighted that all of our schools are fully open again. After the challenges of ‘homeschooling’, I’m sure that many parents share this sentiment! Despite some of the gloomy news stories that have being doing the rounds in the media, our pupils have returned with smiles and are very happy to be back in school. As I’ve said before, children are very resilient, they are positive about being back and are just getting on with their school work and activities.

Being fully reopen means that we can now focus on creating a bright future for our pupils. This will be through a carefully planned curriculum, which allows pupils to consolidate work covered in home learning, but that also introduces new content to make the curriculum interesting and exciting. The return also means that we can start to work on some longer term changes intended to further improve the education provided by NCEAT schools.

This week we launched a public consultation on a plan to change Bishop’s from one huge primary school into five separate primary schools – one at each of the existing campuses. The key reason for making this change is we believe that it will bring each school closer to its local community, while retaining all of the strong partnership work. There would also be a very significant funding increase through making this change, which would allow more investment in IT, books and other resources.

The consultation is the first part of a process set out by the Department for Education (DfE) for schools who wish to make a significant change. If the consultation shows parental support for the change, then we then will prepare a business case to submit to DfE. If you would like to know more about the consultation, click here.

We will also soon start an exciting programme to bring Mandarin and Chinese culture lessons to pupils in all of our NCEAT schools. We will be working with the Swire Chinese Language Centre in Newcastle to deliver lessons to pupils in every school. I hope that this will be the first step towards eventually offering GCSE Mandarin at Duke’s.
I want NCEAT to have the highest aspirations for our pupils and to give them great opportunities for learning and enrichment. Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world, yet only a very small number of pupils in England have the chance to learn it. China is the world’s second largest economy and as Britain looks to increase its trade with China, knowledge of Mandarin could give our pupils a huge advantage for future employment.

Swire Chinese Language Foundation will very generously provide resources and fund the teaching initially; we will have four days of teaching time across our schools for the rest of the school year. All of our pupils will have the opportunity to learn about Chinese culture and participate in some fun, educational activities such as learning to write their name in Chinese characters and learning some Mandarin words and phrases. If this is successful we will expand the programme in following years, with the ultimate aim of some pupils taking GCSE and having the opportunity to visit China as part of their course. I’m delighted that we can bring a learning experience to our pupils that previously has only been available in a handful of schools.

While the immediate future for all of us might be uncertain as we wait to see how well the government’s roadmap out of lockdown works, one thing for sure is that at NCEAT, we’re taking nothing for granted and we’re now firmly looking forward.