Dear Ash Mount Community,
What a week.
For months we have been talking about our founding team, introducing colleagues to you and planning everything we want Ash Mount to become. This week, having our teachers together has made it all feel very real.
There is something quite special about watching a new staff community begin to form. People who, only a few days ago, were meeting some of their colleagues for the first time are already planning together, sharing ideas, laughing together and beginning to make Ash Mount their school too.
And, just like our students will very soon, they are finding their way around a new building, learning new routines, asking lots of questions and working out where everything is!
That matters.
We talk a lot about belonging at Ash Mount, and this week has been a lovely reminder that belonging is not something that simply happens because you put people in the same building. It grows through relationships, shared experiences, trust and a sense of common purpose.
Our staff induction has therefore been about much more than systems and procedures. Of course there are plenty of practical things everyone needs to know before we open, but we have also spent time talking about why Ash Mount exists, the kind of school we want to be and the experience we want every child and family to have.
We have returned again and again to our vision: learn with purpose, live with compassion and lead with courage.
We have talked about our commitment to being deliberate by design; about our Ash Mount Pathways; about inquiry and purposeful learning; about wellbeing, inclusion and safeguarding; and, importantly, about knowing every child as an individual.
Our teachers have also begun spending time in their learning spaces, looking at resources and thinking about how their classrooms will work when the most important people finally arrive: the children.
That is when a classroom really becomes a classroom.
As teachers, we can prepare beautiful spaces, carefully planned learning and exciting provocations, but the children will bring those spaces to life. Their questions, ideas, personalities, friendships and interests will help shape what happens within them.
This is very much part of our thinking as an IB Candidate School too. We want students to have agency within their learning and to feel that school is something they are part of, rather than something that simply happens to them.
So, whilst we have been getting ready at school this week, what can you be doing at home?
Keep it simple.
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We’re Getting Ready… And Now It Really Feels Real
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Start moving bedtimes and morning routines gradually towards school timings.
For younger children, practise getting dressed, carrying their own bag, opening containers and looking after their belongings.
For older children, begin handing some of the responsibility back to them. Where will their uniform be kept? What do they need to remember each morning? How will they organise themselves?
And across every age, start talking about those first few days.
Ask: “What are you most excited about?”
Then perhaps: “Is there anything you’re wondering about?”
Listen before trying to solve it.
Starting somewhere new can bring excitement and uncertainty at exactly the same time. Our job, both at home and at school, is not necessarily to remove every nervous feeling. It is to give children the confidence that they can manage those feelings and that there will be people around them to help.
Our teachers have experienced a little of that themselves this week. They have walked into a new school, met new people and begun building new relationships.
Very soon, our children will do exactly the same.
And we will be ready for them.
There is still lots to do, plenty of boxes to unpack and, I suspect, more than a few lists being rewritten each day.
But this week Ash Mount has felt different.
The buildings are becoming a school.
The staff are becoming a team.
And very soon, our founding students and families will complete the picture.
We’re getting ready.
Are you?
Best wishes,
Abi
