Congratulations to 9 of our current Year 13 students who have clocked up 100% attendance for 6 consecutive years.
This fantastic achievement was recognised and celebrated at our Annual Awards Evening last month.
We are pleased to now be able to present them with their iPads. Well done to them all!
Thank you to everyone who supported our Christmas raffle. We have been running 2 raffles side by side – one for a chocolate hamper and the other for a cuddly toy.
Congratulations to our two winners: G.Hands 7M2 and I.Patel 11M2. We hope you enjoy your prizes.
We have raised £140.00, taking our grand total this term to £1,152.81! This is an impressive amount and we are grateful to all pupils, parents/carers and staff who support our charity events. £305.90 of this total has gone to Children in Need and the rest will be split, at the end of the year, between our chosen charities: Humanity First and Birmingham Children’s Hospital.
Well done to our Year 13 Ambassadors for all their hard work in organising and running the charity events. They are already busy planning the next one and looking forward to your support once again!
Year 11 pupils were given mock interviews today by our Year 13 Students. The Sixth Formers received training for this last week and were able to share their recent experiences of real interviews and offer some unique advice.
The Year 11 pupils said:
“I actually enjoyed that. I was nervous at first but the Sixth Former was really nice”.
“I have my actual interview at college soon, so I am glad I did it”.
“I’m so proud of myself, I did really well.”
“I got 49/50 and I want to do it again to get full marks. I know I can do it!”
The Sixth Form students said:
“I was amazed by the pupils I met. They had achieved so much and were really confident.”
“I have really enjoyed supporting Year 11 with their Interviews. I met some lovely people.”
“The pupils were fantastic. Some needed to remember to include examples of where they had developed their skills, but overall I was very impressed.”
“I felt like I had a lot in common with some of the pupils I met and I hope they found it useful to hear I went through the same struggles as them and still managed to get good GCSEs”.
Year 7 pupils enjoyed a festive visit to University of Birmingham where they attended two Christmas Lectures. A lecture from the biology department focused on saving Christmas plants from environmental damage, and a workshop from the Mechanical Engineering team introduced pupils to how AI is helping the manufacturing industry build Christmas presents. The highlight of this was when the Robotic Reindeer entered the room. Both lectures offered the chance for our pupils to get involved with the experiments and gain a taste of what university learning is like.
Every year, we hold a Book Fair here in Barr Beacon School. It’s not only great fun for the students but it also promotes reading for pleasure and helps our school analyse pupils’ reading preferences. For 4 days in November students in year 7, 8 and 9 had a chance to browse our Scholastic shelves during their English lessons. Year 10 and 11 browsed before and after school. Pupils showed great interest in new releases, discounted books and especially stationery! We had over £200 worth of online orders and over £600 was spent by the school on books for Free School Meals students in Y7 and 8. With the total of £807.45, we have beaten last year’s sales! Many thanks to all the pupils and staff that attended. Happy Reading!
Last academic year, we encouraged students to take part in our Summer Reading Challenge over the summer holidays. They had to submit reviews of the books they read for a chance to win a Kindle reader. We were pleased to see that we had many entries and reviews were creative, thoughtful, and beautifully written. We randomly chose a pupil from those who took part, and the winner is N. Hancock 8M1!
Congratulations! We hope you will enjoy the books we uploaded to your Kindle so you can start reading right away!
Come and join the Barr Beacon students for this year’s school production of ‘High School Musical’. This exciting musical will be performed in the main school hall on Wednesday 13th and Thursday 14th December 2023, 6.30pm to 7.30pm.
Tickets can be purchased through Weduc priced at £3 per ticket.
We look forward to seeing you for this celebration of the wonderful talent here at Barr Beacon School.
Barr Beacon School German Christmas Markets Trip – Parents meeting powerpoint
On Tuesday 21st November Year 11 pupils took part in Next Steps Day. Year 11 pupils could choose to either attend a subject emersion workshop at James Watt or Sutton Coldfield College in an area of study that interests them, or sample different A-Level and BTEC courses that are offered by Barr Beacon School Sixth Form. This is an important experience to support our pupils in making the right choices after they finish Year 11 this summer.
Our pupils threw themselves into the workshops and taster sessions at both BMET colleges and Barr Beacon Sixth Form.
Gurleen who attended Barr Beacon Sixth Form experience said “Attending the taster sessions really helped me to confirm my desire to study A -Levels in Psychology and Maths. It has also made me think hard about whether I want to do A-Levels in History or Biology.”
Kai who attended James Watt College said “I’m really glad I got the chance to go to James Watt College. An Engineering qualification is definitely what I want to do after Year 11.”
Macario who attended Sutton Coldfield college said “Going to Sutton College helped me to gain an in-depth insight into what my future may look like”.
Staff at the colleges were full of praise for our Year 11 pupils and the way they conducted themselves.
We were proud to host our first ‘We are Barr Beacon Day’ on Thursday 23rd November. The theme of the day was our Beacon Value of ‘Equal to Everyone’ which is integral to our beliefs as a school community. Our Beacon Values run like a stick of rock through everything we do. This meant that on Thursday we celebrated the diversity within our school with all Year 7 pupils, learning about the diversity within our school, the culture, heritage and beliefs that are within our student body. Year 7s also took part in a drumming and dancing workshop and performed to their year group at the end of the day. Their confidence and committment was absolutely inspiring and we were very proud of them.
Year 9 and 10 pupils also heard from ex-athlete Daniel Caines and they were inspired by this talk: the key message being “You start whereever you start, but where you finish is up to you.” The empowering message really hit home with our pupils, many already reporting that they wanted to recommit to sports and hobbies that they may have left in the past. Daniel spoke about “dotting the Is and crossing the Ts” and helped pupils understand that the route to success is a pure and dedicated committment to what you are doing. It’s too easy to pass off ‘failure’ as not being good at something, instead of accepting the amount of hard work that is really required to succeed.
The award winning Real Direction team also came to workshop with pupils about the impact that choices can make and to help pupils think about the consequences of their decisions.
Overall the day was a resounding success and we would like to thank all speakers, presenters and staff for providing pupils with a wonderful experience.
Barr Beacon School
Old Hall Lane
Aldridge, Walsall
West Midlands
WS9 0RF
T: 0121 366 6600
postbox@barrbeaconschool.co.uk
Monday - Thursday: 8:00 am - 4:00 pm
Friday: 8:00 am - 3:30 pm
