Friday 16th September 2016


The standards of students’ uniform, behaviour and approach to learning has been excellent so far this term. It is very much a team effort, so I must sincerely thank parents and carers for working with us to ensure our high expectations are met.

Our first whole school assembly of the year took place this morning on the theme of ‘The New School Year’. Well done to Abi playing a wonderful clarinet piece – Vocalise by Rachmaninov.

We are busy finalising our new prospectus for 2016-2017 and I’m looking forward to sending these out to our local Year 6 students soon. Our Open Evening is at 6.30pm on Wednesday 5th October, with Open Mornings on Thursday 6th and Friday 7th. We look forward to meeting prospective students and parents.

Castell Alun Friends Association are hosting a Ladies Fashion Show and Pop-up Shop on the 7th October at 7pm. 7pm. Tickets are available from school for £5. There will be refreshments available on the night together with a charity raffle.

Well done to Carys, Year 8, on securing a bronze last Sunday at the AMA Northwest Karate Open Championship.

In July earlier this year, several of our GCSE and Sixth Form students participated in the national SETI Cipher Challenge, hosted by Southampton University.The event was held over 5 days, with a ‘code from the aliens’ being released on the SETI website at 9:00am every morning. The competing teams would earn points by decoding these messages, or by creating fun news articles, videos and songs based on them. One of our Sixth Form teams – Team RADS – managed to come second place in the media category of the competition, with our other teams coming within the top 20 teams in the UK. Overall, the experience was exciting and stretching, and many of the students have said they will be competing again next year.

At the end of last term I had the pleasure of joining 9R in their ‘Twentieth Century Cocktail Party’.

The students all came dressed as a famous person from the twentieth century and had to chat with each other as if they really were that person having researched their famous person at home.

I was very impressed at their efforts to play their roles and their excellent knowledge about the character they were portraying.Nelson Mandela, Marilyn Munroe, Winston Churchill, Mohamed Ali, Anne Frank and Queen Victoria were among the guests!