Keep up to date with the latest labour market updates on our school website. This is a great source of information when helping your child plan for the future or considering your own career pathway.
Please see below a copy of this week’s National Online Safety Guide to parents. The focus this week is an app called ‘Wink’, which has raised a number of concerns.
Wink is a messaging app which allows children to connect and communicate with other users. In a similar style to the popular online dating platform Tinder, Wink uses the ‘swipe’ method for browsing profiles and accepting or declining them. Once two users have accepted each other by swiping on each other’s profile, they can then communicate and play games online together. The fact that Wink allows children to share photos, personal information and their location with other users has caused significant concern.
In the guide below, you’ll find tips on a number of potential risks such as grooming, cyberbullying and inappropriate content.
As up and down the country employers and educators alike celebrated National Apprenticeship Week, Duke’s Secondary School in South East Northumberland announced an exciting new partnership with UK housebuilding giant, Bellway.
The partnership will see a range of opportunities become available to pupils throughout the school, including employer masterclasses, careers guidance and field visits.
The partnership is multi-faceted. As well as supporting Duke’s Secondary School to deliver the National Career Ready programme, it also forms part of a regional pilot project for Bellway to help introduce young people to the wide variety of career opportunities available in the construction sector, including apprenticeships. If successful in the North East, Bellway intends to roll out its school outreach programme across all 22 of its housebuilding divisions nationwide.
To celebrate the official launch of the project, a cohort of Year 12 students from Duke’s Secondary School’s Sixth Form provision took part in a Career Ready Masterclass on ‘preparation for work experience’. Students were encouraged to think about what skills they already have, what skills employers might look for in job candidates and how they can make themselves a model employee.
The full-day visit also included a tour around Bellway’s North East headquarters in Woolsington and also one of its prestigious new build sites near Ponteland.
Danielle Towers, Head of Sixth Form and Careers Lead at Duke’s Secondary School (part of NCEA Trust), commented:
“We are honoured to be working alongside Bellway at the cutting edge of its new school outreach programme.
“At Duke’s and indeed, across all of the schools within the wider NCEA Trust, we are committed to providing pupils with high-quality careers education covering a wide variety of industry sectors to help them make informed decisions about their futures.
“What our pupils have been most surprised by since we first established contact with Bellway is the scope of the career opportunities available, beyond traditional trades and construction. For many of them, it has been a real eye-opener into a sector which they might not otherwise have considered.”
Employing over 3,000 people across the UK alongside several thousand additional sub-contractors, Bellway has come a long way from its humble North East beginnings just over 75 years ago. The five-star rated homebuilder now offers its own in-house apprenticeship opportunities and graduate schemes covering everything from bricklaying right through to architecture and sales.
Laura Bell, Group HR & OD Manager at Bellway, commented:
“We are absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to partner with Duke’s Secondary School. As we strive to help meet the need for more high-quality homes, it is vital that we continue to attract more people to the industry from a diverse range of backgrounds and that we offer them the support and training they need to succeed.
“By showcasing the range of roles available at Bellway and offering opportunities where people can earn while they learn, we hope to open up the possibility of a career in construction to those who may not have previously considered working in the industry.”
For more information about Duke’s Secondary School and Sixth Form, visit www.dukes.ncea.org.uk or for more information about careers at Bellway, visit www.bellwaycareers.co.uk.
On Thursday 20 January, we received an interim inspection from Ofsted to see how we have been getting on with our plan to improve professional standards across Duke’s Secondary School.
A great deal of work has been going on behind the scenes and we are delighted to see that our collective efforts have been recognised in our latest monitoring report, a full copy of which can be found below.
Key summary points:
- Leaders have taken significant strides towards the removal of the serious weaknesses designation.
- Leaders have developed a culture in which school improvement is everyone’s responsibility.
- Faculty leaders, working with their teams, have developed curriculums that clearly identify key learning aims for each year. It is now clear what pupils need to know, and when.
- Staff and pupils are unanimous in praising the transformation in the behaviour strategy since the previous inspection. It is allowing teachers to teach, and pupils to learn.
- Two external reviews of SEND provision have helped to refine the school’s development plan so that pupils with SEND are better supported.
Details of all of our past Ofsted inspections can be found here.
Advance Information is the exam boards’ way of supporting students’ preparation for examinations after the disruption to learning caused by the pandemic. It is a list of the content , or part of the content, that will be assessed in the summer examinations and is intended to help guide and prioritise areas for revision.
Advance information is available for most subjects at GCSE and A-Level with the exception of Art, English Literature, Geography and History where subjects are either not assessed through an examination or have already had additional support built into their curriculum or examination process.
Each exam board has now released its advance information and students can access it to help focus their exam preparation. Please see the links below to the Student Guide to Advance Information and Frequently Asked Questions.
YouTube is a video-sharing social media platform that allows billions of people around the world to watch, share and upload their own videos with a vast range of content – including sport, entertainment, education and lots more. It’s a superb space for people to consume content that they’re interested in. As a result, this astronomically popular platform has had a huge social impact: influencing online culture on a global scale and creating new celebrities.
In the guide below, you’ll find tips on a number of potential risks such as connecting with strangers, inappropriate content and high visibility.
A big thank-you to Duke’s alumni Alex Brown and Cameron Donnelly, who helped deliver assemblies to Y10 and Y11 this week.
They provided key ‘tips’ on revision, planning, discipline, time management and the importance of a strong work ethic to our students. This will hopefully help our students with their forthcoming mock exams.
They are both inspirational role models to our students.
Cameron is studying Sports Science at Sunderland university and Alex is studying Physiotherapy at Northumbria. They both work part time
, alongside their studies.
This week’s Online Safety guidance focus is around apps that go under the broad title of ‘horror games’. A PDF of the advice and guidance poster can be found below.
In the guide, you’ll find tips on a number of potential risks such as adult themes, psychological horror and violent content.
Horror video games come in a such a variety that the genre can hard to define. The overlapping element is that these games are designed to scare or unsettle the player through gameplay, atmosphere, story, music, setting and ‘jump scares’. The most common sub-genres are survival horror, action horror, psychological horror, jump-scare horror and reverse horror. These games originate from a range of developers, including smaller indie studios which release download-only titles (that is, they aren’t physically sold in shops) and therefore aren’t subject to age ratings.
Over Christmas, pupils across Duke’s worked incredibly hard to collect hundreds of food items and raise money for our local food bank which supports people living across our community.
We’ve received a lovely thank you letter from Wansbeck Food Bank which we want to share with you (see below). Well done again to everyone who got involved!
