Welcome from the Principal

Welcome back and a happy new (academic) year. I hope you have had a good summer break. We have grown again, and as well as the annual 185 new Year 7 pupils we are welcoming 130+ Sixth Form students, including at least 30 external candidates who are joining us from different schools. To accommodate the growth we have expanded our teaching team again, and new colleagues are introduced below. 

I am delighted to inform you that the GCSE results day was a real celebration, with many pupils receiving exceptional results. The final data will not be published until October, but through our collaboration with Barnet and other schools we do have an indicated Progress 8 score, which shows that the pupils’ results are ‘significantly above the national average.’ At the moment it suggests that Saracens pupils achieved about 1 grade better than the national average in each of their subjects. Most pleasing for me was that pupils who are eligible for the pupil premium grant achieved exactly the same Progress 8 score, which bucks the national trend, where that group tends to achieve nearly a grade lower than children who are not ‘pupil premium.’ 

One contributing factor to the good results was that our pupils’ attendance was 3% higher than the national average. Attendance is the greatest predictor of outcome in exam performance. As you can see from the graph below, the pupils who come to school the most, make the most progress. It shows that pupils with the highest attendance made over one grade more progress in each of their subjects than those with the worst attendance. So is the best thing a parent can do to help their child succeed at school simply send them in every day? It certainly appears that way. 

Our target for all pupils is 97% attendance. This means that they can only miss a maximum of 5 days during the year. We know that there will be exceptional times when absence is unavoidable, but please ensure that all holidays are taken during the thirteen weeks of school holiday time, and general sniffles should not prevent someone from coming to school. 

Please remember that we are very accessible, and if you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with the Learning Coach, Year Lead, or classroom teacher by email and we will get back to you within 48 hours.

New Staff:

Miss Ahmadi	SAA	Teacher of English
Mr  Abkenar	AAB	Teacher of Maths
Mrs Bogle-Rookwood	DRO	Subject Lead Social Sciences
Mr Banks	ABA	Teacher of Geography
Ms Begum	KBE	Teacher of History
Mrs Brown	EBR	Teacher of Science
Miss Daswani	VDA	Teacher of Computer Science
Miss Hart	AHA	Teacher of English
Mr Hunt	JHU	Teacher of History
Mr  Hawkes	WHA	Teacher of Maths
Miss Heybe	NHE	Teacher of Science
Mr Khan	NKH	Lead Practitioner Computer Science
Miss Khalil	IKH	Subject Lead History
Ms Mahmood	AMD	Second English
Mr Muhammad	MMU	Subject Lead Business and Economics
Ms Quirke	TQI	Teacher of PE / Year Lead – Year 11
Mrs Tobin	TTO	Subject Lead D&T – Food
Dr Welderufael	ZWE	Subject Lead Physics