Dear Parents and Carers

I hope you've had a good week.

We've had a very busy 4 day week, so many highlights to celebrate!

GCSCs are well and truly underway, congratulations to our MFL, Drama and Business students who sat their exams this week. We are proud of your resilience and positive attitudes.

This week I received the report from our most recent Safeguarding review which was carried out by the Trust. I was so incredibly proud to read the feedback, a stark contrast to the Ofsted report the school received back in 2022. Here are a few quotes from the report:

• Leaders at Danebury continue to prioritise safeguarding as a fundamental aspect of Danebury life, ensuring it is firmly embedded as everyone’s responsibility. The commitment and determination of staff at every level to drive forward cultural change is highly commendable.

• The culture at Danebury has been transformed from one perceived as unsafe to a community underpinned by pride, respect, belonging, and mattering — a shift that is both visible and tangible.

• Leaders should be immensely proud of the transformational safeguarding journey since 2022. Through clear strategy, strengthened leadership at all levels, and an unwavering commitment to placing pupils first, leaders are embedding a culture of safety, vigilance, accountability, and continuous improvement. Safeguarding is becoming firmly established as a shared, lived responsibility across the community — with systems, staff confidence, and student voice at the heart of daily practice. This is not simply policy in action but a culture where every student feels they belong, matter, and are safe.

As ever, there is always work to be done to strive for exceptional standards in safeguarding, these are the areas we are working hard to improve:

• Embed the DfE Attendance Banding Tool into daily monitoring routines to support early identification and intervention.

• Explore students’ experience and understanding of online bullying to strengthen preventative education and pupil confidence in seeking help.

• Continue the work on derogatory language, especially the way some of the KS4 boys speak to the KS4 girls.

On Thursday a number of our Year 10 pupils visited St Hilda's College, part of Oxford University, it was lovely to hear the excitement in their voices when they told me about their experiences from their visit. We will certainly be doing more of these aspirational visits going forward. Many thanks to Mrs Martin for organising this opportunity and to Mrs White and Mrs Falkingham for taking the pupils.

Over the last few days we have held a number of activities and events to celebrate the 80^th anniversary of VE Day, many thanks to Mrs Allsopp for organising these events, especially our whole school afternoon tea on Thursday 8^th May. As a school we came together to capture the spirit of VE day and pay our respects to those who served in the Second World War,  affording us the freedoms we have today. We held a 2 minute silence at 12:00pm, followed by the tea party during lesson 5. All pupils enjoyed the lovely cakes our LORIC group made and the generous donations from pupils and families, many thanks for these. We were entertained by some wartime songs sung by staff and pupils, rounders and tug-of-war were popular activities and really captured the community spirit.

Good luck to Year 11 who have GCSE exams most days next week, the majority are working incredibly hard, we are behind them every step of the way!

Have a lovely weekend, fingers crossed the sun shines for us all.