Principal's Update - 15 November 2024

Dear families

I hope that you have had a fantastic week. This week has been a short one for students at DUA with staff training days on Thursday and Friday. We crammed lots in to the first half of the week with two football fixtures (wins for both Y9 and Y10), a session for Y10 from Leeds University, our winter warmer event (thank you to all families who attended), Y11 mocks and maths week. I would like to shout out Y9 in particular who were working with the Prince's Trust this week, a colleague from that organisation said that we were one of the best schools we had ever worked with!

Next week, as well as continuing with our Y11 mocks, we have sports fixtures in football, netball and indoor athletics and visitors from two local academy trusts who would like to learn from our improvement journey. In really exciting news we also have our Winter Fayre next Saturday morning from 11am to 2pm. Our community events are always well attended but it would be great to see even more families this time around.

Attendance dipped ever so slightly this week so I wanted to take this opportunity to remind you of the importance of attending school every single day. The data is clear: students who attend well, achieve better. As always, if you require any support with your child's attendance please reach out.

Finally, you will have seen that we have tweaked our parent communication this week by providing a daily parent bulletin in an attempt to streamline the communication that you are getting from the academy. We think it's a positive move, but if you have any feedback on this please let me know.

Have a great weekend.

Mr A Jacobs