Parent Welcome Evening and Year 6 Transition Day – UPDATE

Dear Parent / Carer,

We are pleased to be able to share with you the details for the parent and student transition events that will take place in July. Prior to this we will be visiting all of the local Primary schools in June to meet with teachers, and where possible our students, gathering the necessary information to ensure a smooth transition into our setting.

Our Transition Welcome Evening Events for Parents will be held on Tuesday 6th and Thursday 8th July. This is an informative evening within which the Principal will share her vision for the Academy and talk through the expectations, systems and structures of daily life at the Academy. This event will be held in four sittings over two evenings in St Margaret’s Church Rainham to ensure that we adhere to social distancing rules. We ask that only one parent / carer of each child is present so that all 240 children can be represented in the four sessions, accommodating 60 adults at a time.

In order to book your chosen slot please use the booking forms below. This will be done on a first come first served basis and once all 60 places in a session have been taken the booking for that time slot will close.

Parking is available in the car park next to the church or in Rainham precinct, however we would advise where possible that you walk to the venue to minimise traffic.

During this evening you will be provided with our Parent Student Handbook with links to all the relevant policies and our uniform will be on display with leaflets outlining how to measure your child and order the uniform from our providers, Brigade. We will share with you which College your child is in on this evening to ensure that you can order the correct uniform by the deadline of Sunday 1st August. We advise ordering your uniform as soon as possible after this evening to allow time however for exchanges.

Due to the limited time length of each session, we hope you can appreciate that we will not have the time and capacity to allow questions and answers after the Principal’s speech. Therefore if you have any questions that have not already been asked on our FAQs Website Page please ask them using the survey link at the bottom of this letter and we will aim to build as many of these as possible into our presentation.

The Transition Day for our founding cohort of year 7 students has been arranged for Saturday 10th July, 9am-12pm at Hundred of Hoo Academy. Due to not yet being able to hold this at the LAR site, we will be using one of the other secondary schools in our Medway Cluster of Leigh Academies Trust Schools and while we appreciate this will require transport we truly hope that the majority of our students will be able to come. We want to host a positive experience that would allow pupils to see a secondary style setting, take part in four short lessons across a range of subjects in subject specialist rooms, to meet the teachers and attend an assembly with the Principal to learn about the structures and expectations of the Academy. It will also allow them to meet their College peers and form tutors. While this is at a different site to Leigh Academy Rainham it will build confidence for students in navigating a timetable and site much larger than what they are accustomed to with the supervision and support of staff.

Nearer the time we will contact you with further details about the structure of the day and provide a personalised timetable for your child. We will also provide a virtual tour of the site to post online for children once the site is completed over the August holiday so they know what to expect when they arrive on day one.

To support our planning can you please complete this electronic survey to confirm attendance to our transition events and ask any questions you would like us to try and answer in our Welcome Evening.

Kind regards,

Mrs A Millward | Principal