Blog
Review of the Year
We had a heart-warming celebratory day last Thursday, awarding certificates to our Sixth Form students in the morning, and hosting our Achievement Evening awards ceremony in the evening, in the company of Gail Emms, MBE.
Gail began playing badminton at the age of four and dedicated her sporting career to playing at international level, achieving a string of gold, silver and bronze medals across a spectrum of international and Olympic games, including a silver medal at the Athens Olympic Games alongside her doubles partner, Nathan Robertson.
Gail gave an inspirational key note speech in which she celebrated her apparent failures within her lifetime of training, highlighting these times as periods of growth, strength and new opportunity. She reminded everyone of the importance of our ‘champions’ – those around us who support, guide and pick us up when we are experiencing low times.
It was a wonderful feeling to be able to have everyone together again to celebrate our students’ successes. If you were an award-winner who was backstage at the start of the evening, my Review of the Year is given below – what a year it was!
Good evening everyone, and welcome to what feels like the first Achievement Evening in a very long time! I am delighted to welcome you here this evening to celebrate our students’ successes over what has been the most unusual and challenging of years -- I must say it is an absolute pleasure to have you here with us in person for this event after what has been a long two year-break. Our thoughts are with those who would have wished to join us tonight, but who are unwell, and we wish them a very speedy recovery.
The results being collected by our young people this evening have been hard-won. Two years ago, we could scarcely have imagined what lay before us, and nor would we have quite believed that we would still be experiencing the ongoing effects of the pandemic in 2021 and beyond.
Our Year 13 students were in Year 11 in March 2019. Our Year 11 students were in Year 9. Opposite ends of their key stage 4 journey, but none of them at a point in their lives when we would want to see a disruption to school, lessons, learning, exams, support and routine. Our current Year 8 students joined Valley Park in September 2020 but lost out on their primary to secondary transition and the rites of passage typical of Year 6, whilst our Year 9 and 10 cohorts chose their Option subjects online and against the most alienating of backdrops.
I think few of us will forget hearing the news from the Prime Minister that schools were to close and that exams were cancelled, yet that was only the start of the journey, as we now know.
Through lockdowns, returns to school, periods of self-isolation and school closure, times of worry – and the sheer uncertainty of what will happen next, students across the country have had to develop the utmost resilience and determination, in the face of true adversity, and if there is to be a generation of young people renowned for their resilience, I believe I am looking at you now.
Parents and carers, thank you for your ongoing support as ever, but most importantly during these times of uncertainty and disruption. With many of you juggling your own commitments around support for your child or children at home, I know from experience that this is no mean feat, so thank you. It makes the world of difference to have your buy-in and support, whether that be ensuring strong attendance, giving reminders about homework, asking questions about what your child is learning, inquisitiveness about what your child is reading, or attendance at our events. We appreciate this and – students – I very much hope that this will be a message that you, too, convey to your families and your wider support network when you leave us later.
Last but certainly not least, may I say a very significant thank you to the Valley Park team for the huge role that you have played in our students’ lives over the course of the past year, the pandemic, and many of you even before this.
The nature of the work undertaken by any school dictates that these are busy communities buzzing with full classrooms, myriad conversations, clubs, trips and visits, events – in other words that interpersonal, in person, engagement that makes a school a school. Yet we found ourselves delivering to a screen; our red pens swapped for keyboards and our conversations subject to sometimes questionable internet connectivity and predictable time delay.
Colleagues, thank you for your care, attention and time in making remote learning a reality, something that felt to me to be an impossibility back in March 2019.
What have we learned? I think we have come to appreciate in-person experiences, the industrious hum of a school that is full again, and the thrill of live performance; kindness and compassion really did come to the fore. We switched Decaf, our Dementia Café, to a remote event, delivering care packages to the local community, and separately collected a large number of donations for the Salvation Army’s food bank in acknowledgement that times were exceptionally difficult for some members of our wider community.
We raised a record £5,500 for Children in Need last November – and are currently running this year’s events in school, inspired by the success of 2020. We saw students looking out for one another, contributing poems to our Decaf packages, writing to isolated residents of local care homes and using their time to bring home shopping for immobile neighbours. When you hear incidences such as these, during times of such turmoil, it does highlight how fortunate we are to belong to such a community.
This year, we return to our live carol services at the end of term, but last year we needed to use our creativity to come up with an alternative that could be enjoyed by everyone from afar. It is fair to say that it did exactly that, uniting people across the distance. As did our Art auction back in March, which raised £10k when our virtual attendees became quite competitive in their bids for 60 pieces of artwork and sculpture!
Sixth Form students overcame the national regulations about performance and worked, often virtually, with the National Theatre Connections programme and the Marlowe Theatre to produce their own performance of the documentary-style play, THE IT, which was selected to be shown as part of the National Theatre Festival. They were filmed by a visiting film crew back in June and their film went live nationally in September – such an achievement given the circumstances, and hopefully a tradition that will continue well into the future for our students.
V in the Park returned in July under the guise of its younger sibling “V on the Plaza” and it was such a uplift to once again experience live performance – allowing us to believe that the world was starting to open up once again. And this of course was preceded by several other popular virtual events like our Spring Concert in March and Live Lounge in July.
In a long-established Valley Park tradition, now, our Year 8 students – also back in July – launched their very own published books, following their work during Year 7 honing the craft of being a successful writer.
Year 10 scholars worked with artist Kerry Lemon to create a community sculpture based on Maidstone’s paper-manufacturing heritage, and now sited at Springfield’s old Mill.
In our first ever Campus Collaboration for Sport, our Year 8 football team won the VIAT Sports Fusion event, and we held our very first Summer School in August for our newest intake, supported by many of our staff and our students who gave up their summer break in part to ensure that the start of secondary school was a smooth and enjoyable one for our youngest recruits.
Across all the Arts, including Drama and Musical Theatre, we’ve been delighted to host visiting primary schools once restrictions permitted it once again, and as a result we are ready to coordinate another Trust Charity Art Auction in December – so watch this space for more details.
In Sixth Form last year, 87% of Year 13 students were graded at C or above – or the vocational equivalent. Nearly 30% of grades were A*, A or the vocational equivalent. And this was not any different to previous years’ results, so those of you who have returned from your next steps this evening – many congratulations, your hard work has been a credit to you in very difficult circumstances indeed. In Year 11 last year, students achieved our best-ever set of results, with 76% of students reaching grades 4 and above in English and Mathematics, and 43% gaining the ‘gold standard’ grades of 5 or more also in English and Mathematics. 80% of all grades awarded were at grade 4 or higher, and 60% were at grade 5 or higher. Again, a credit to you in challenging times.
My parting remarks then, are to yourselves, students… Let no-one convince you that your achievements are sub-standard in any way. You worked hard. You overcame adversity. You showed excellence. You showed a determination to succeed that goes above and beyond normal circumstances.
You are tomorrow’s leaders. You already have experience of dealing with the unexpected – so be sure to take with you all that you have learned, your compassion, understanding, empathy and kindness towards others. Your success will then be inevitable – good luck and do let us know how you get on if you are already in the world beyond Valley Park.
