King’s Meadow Primary School

In our topic we have to decide if they actually saw the monster or not.

The Evidence Committee have been sending us emails to help us decide. We have received evidence from the Smiths, pictures and phone calls transcripts.

In our class we were in groups of 3 and we had to pretend that we were Mr & Mrs Smith and a newspaper reporter. We have lately been making a blog in our class about the Loch Ness monster.

We are also reading the Water Horse by Dick King Smith. We think the whole class are enjoying the topic but the best thing is probably the evidence wall.

Some of the skills we have been learning are how to use Flip Video cameras and how to create our own websites and blogs on Edubuzz with lots of information and pictures. We have also been emailing using our Google/Edubuzz accounts.

By Matt & Andrew

Click the pictures to see

East Lothian Council’s You Pay Now Have Your Say consultation closed in December and everyone is now awaiting the budget due in February. In the meantime, schools have been dealt an additional blow – East Lothian Council have very recently decreed that money for the settlements from the Single Status reforms for school staff will now come from the school budget instead of from the council. This will affect some if not all schools, but for King’s Meadow it means finding approximately an extra £3000, previously unbudgeted for. One effect this will have on the school is that they will not be able to re-fill the current admin vacancy resulting in yet more work for our head teacher & management team.

The EIS teachers union are organising a march and rally Against Education Budget Cuts on March 6th at Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow. As well as teachers attending, they are wanting to encourage parents and children to join the march. They have issued a campaign leaflet and more details will be in school soon.

Some of you may have heard through the media the proposal to have Community Based Management Schools in East Lothian. In other words schools would have a Trust status – it is thought that trusts may make things more favourable financially. Discussions for this are still in their early stages, however, if you want to find out more, and even make comments or suggestions before all the details are set in stone, check out Don Ledingham’s (Director of Education and Children’s Services ) blog.   http://edubuzz.org/blogs/donsblog/

Parents have expressed concern regarding the lack of changing facilities in school and the fact that pupils are sitting around all day at school wearing PE kit. Unfortunately the main issue is with space and money – not having vacant rooms to allow children to change and not having the money to build an additional changing area. Mr McGillivray has said he will look into this and report back to parents.

The school has been working hard to address the issues raised during the inspection last year. In particular a new policy on religious observance has been produced. school-policy-on-religious-observance

Again the school has been making good progress in planning for and introducing the new curriculum. There has been a huge amount of work undertaken in drafting the new framework for teaching of maths which should be up and running now. There is still work to do at introducing cross-curricular topics in maths, but this is well on the way.

Agenda for our meeting this Wednesday 20th at 7 pm.

Our next parent council meeting is on Wednesday 20th Jan at 7pm. If you have any items please contact the office.

As with last year, East Lothian Council are holding a public consultation of how the budget should be spent and where cuts should be made. The exact amount the Council will have this year is still not known, but cuts in services are inevitable. In their document You Pay Have Your Say the council have outlines suggested areas for cutbacks in education.

Suggestions include:
Increasing class sizes to beyond 33,
Reducing staffing in schools – this is likely to mean reductions in Support for Learning impacting on the most vulnerable children in our school, but also affecting all our children,
Increased use of composite classes,
Reduced number of management time in school – we are already one depute down to what we should be, and it is this saving that has meant that so far for our children in the classroom, the impact of the cuts has been has less.
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Mr McGillivray has said that whilst the staff at King’s Meadow are doing an excellent job, he recognises that everyone is working at his or her maximum and does not want to put his staff under any additional pressure.

If you haven’t seen a copy of the consultation paper you can do so at John Muir House or online at www.eastlothian.gov.uk (click on the ‘You Pay, Have Your Say’ link to see what ELC are proposing, and how much money we risk losing) There is an option to comment online. Please do this, or write direct to East Lothian Council. We have until December 4th to respond.