We are all aware that drugs can have a huge and very negative impact on health and wellbeing. It was good to have Dave Parvin in College on Thursday last week to talk about the dangers that different drugs present. The content was hard-hitting, quite rightly, as he talked about several young people who had sadly lost their lives due to taking drugs. His explanation about how alcohol can lead to other drug taking, particularly at parties, is something I would ask you all to be aware of – the dangers are very clear and you have the ability to make the right choices; please make sure you do.

Welcome back to a new term. I hope you all had a very good and restful half-term. Thank you to those students and staff who came in over the holiday to work on preparation for the forthcoming exams – it will definitely help you.

I would like to thank you all for your continued hard work, good behaviour and attitude in and around the College. I mention to you all quite often that we don’t get everything right all the time - no one does, but it is important that even when we get things wrong, we try harder to do better; I see this in our College on a daily basis.

To remind you, our Heads of House are as follows: Austen – Ms Madden, Kipling – Mr Hickman, Tennyson – Mr Chaplin and Woolf – Mr Hancock. We also have new Sixth Form House Leaders, some of you will have seen them in your assemblies last week talking about one of our core values of happiness and raising awareness of Down Syndrome.

Last week on Thursday we celebrated Gilbert Hannam day. Gilbert Hannam was a believer that education should be free and he founded our College in 1672, nearly 350 years ago, for the education of 12 poor protestant boys. His wish that poor students should be educated for free was maintained until the Grammar School merged with the neighbouring  Secondary Modern in 1966.

Last week Mr Edwards announced in his blog that students will be writing the blog once per fortnight and that he will write it in the other week. Other groups of students will also take turns to update you about what they are working on in our College. We have kept the notices and the sports results so that we are all kept up to date! This blog has been written jointly by:  Alex Martirez, Emerson Fisher, Erin O'Sullivan, Cleopatra Dickens, Katie-Mae White and Amber Houghton-Wilson.

You will notice that the title of the blog has changed. Last week, our new Head Boy and Head Girl wrote the Principal’s blog. It was great to read about them and also what they want to do for our College. They mentioned more inter-house competitions, a focus on recycling (going plastic free) and also greater links between Key Stage 5 and the rest of the school. I look forward to seeing these items moved forward in the future.

We hope you have all had a lovely break, and are ready for the upcoming half term. As your new Head Boy and Girl team we’d like to introduce ourselves as well as our vision for the school.

Last week we held several events aimed at helping you with wellbeing. You all know we had Safer Internet Day on Tuesday as well as PSCHE lessons and assemblies with regard to being safe online. You may also have seen on the news that Instagram are rightly going to remove images of self-harm from their platform too, in a strategy to help young people.

On Tuesday this week (5 February) is ‘safer internet day.’ I mentioned this in my blog last week, as you will know. We all use the internet at various times throughout the day. It has become an integral part of the way we live our lives. We use the internet to communicate, play games, TV, learn, complete homework, do shopping and to find out information from a variety of sources. It is a fantastic tool, when used appropriately. Assemblies this week will be on internet safety, as will PSCHE lessons.