Dear Parents,

This week it has been a great pleasure to welcome the members of the Council of International Schools (CIS) Accreditation Team.  This very experienced team of head teachers and school leaders have observed and examined every area of the academic and pastoral life of the School, including over a hundred visits to lessons, and they have met and spoken extensively with pupils, staff, parents, and governors. 

The CIS Team’s feedback on the College’s progress since the original Visit of 2015 are due to be presented to staff after the ‘The Week Ahead’ has gone to press.  We will therefore share with you the summary of these next week.  I can say now, however, that Team members have already passed on, informally, many positive comments to both staff and pupils.  Examples of such comments include a very enthusiastic account of a Student Council meeting; references to the positive atmosphere and appearance of the School as a whole, both in classrooms and beyond; and numbers of compliments made directly to me such as ‘you must be very proud of the School’.  (Indeed we are.)

That said we are never complacent so, as a team, we continually reflect and consider how we may improve. Thus we are looking forward to hearing some objective, constructive feedback from CIS, which, as I say, we will share with you next week so that we may all work together to achieve the very best outcomes.  In the meantime, I should like to express greatly appreciative thanks to our incredibly hard-working staff team for all their quite extraordinary efforts in creating such a great educational environment for our young people.  As another example of this, as we go to press, we are eagerly anticipating tonight’s Music Concert in the Seldon Theatre, featuring our new student orchestra, wind and string ensembles, and many individual instrumentalist performances.

With best wishes to all our Wellington families.  

Michael Higgins,
Master

Safeguarding – Keeping Your Children Safe In School
 
The Master and I have both written about our relentless desire to see levels of child safeguarding reflect current best practice in international schools across the world, and I thought this would be an appropriate time to brief parents and our wider Wellington community on the steps we have taken thus far. Keeping children safe from harm is the single most important part of our responsibility as a school. Our CIS accreditation process has allowed us to engage with bodies such as the International Taskforce on Child Protection (ITFCP) and work closely with internationally-acclaimed advisors such as Tim Gerrish, OBE, to help us frame child safeguarding practices that will help us meet this responsibility. 
 
We already have in place some enviable good practice, in the form of our safeguarding policy, trip r