🌟 Welcome Back to 2026!

Happy New Year! This year is all about Oakwood opportunities and truly living and breathing our school motto:
“Being Better Every Day.” Our ambition is for all children to be 'ready, respectful and safe' at school (these are our three school rules) and to demonstrate our values of: knowledge, equality, determination and achievement.
We're wanting to continue strengthening our partnerships with families, responding to the needs and feedback from our children and parents to ensure that Oakwood is a school loved by all.

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📚 Staff Training & INSET

The first week back was filled with fantastic training opportunities for staff.
During our INSET day, all staff worked alongside Dr Barry Foster (Educational Psychologist) to explore Emotion Coaching—an approach that helps pupils recognise and regulate their emotions, especially during challenging moments. This will hugely inform how staff interact with pupils, ensuring they feel listened to and supported.

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🎶 Children Settling Back In

The children have settled back brilliantly! Returning on Tuesday, we were immediately greeted by the sounds of music resonating down the corridor—a wonderful reminder of how much our pupils thrive on Oakwood’s broad curriculum offer. There's also a huge buzz in school about our latest musical endeavour of 'Rock Steady'; with many new school bands forming, we can't wait to hear their debuts!
We're also starting to hold an extra assembly each week, specifically to talk about our OPAL playtimes! We'll be covering new games that the children can play outside, our rules for lunch times and ways that the children can manage minor disagreements. We're going to be making these sessions as interactive as possible and look forward to hearing the children's ideas for how we can make our lunchtimes even better too!

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📅 Exciting Events Ahead

We have so much to look forward to this half-term, including:

• Dress Like a Rockstar Day for Number Day
• Exciting trips
• Project days for key year groups
• Parents Evenings

You can find all details and key dates in The Oakwood Branch (our weekly bulletin) so remember to check it out!

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🔔 Important Reminders

• Nursery Hours Update: After consulting with families, nursery hours are now 8:45am – 2:45pm, with wraparound care available for £4/day until 3:15pm. You can book all wraparound sessions via the Arbor app.
• Whole-school Registration: A reminder that our soft-start period is 8:30 – 8:45am daily. After this, class registers are taken promptly at 8:45am for safeguarding. If you or your child arrive at school after 8:45am, you'll be asked to sign in via the school office to ensure that you're marked in and lunch choices are noted.
• Uniform: We want all pupils to feel a sense of belonging, unity and our value of equality and having a shared uniform and standards of uniform plays a huge part in achieving this. We'd love our parents support to consider your child's uniform and to make sure that it aligns with our high standards. Simple changes like wearing the correct jumper or a plain, black tracksuit for PE days, would support us in 'looking the part' and being 'ready to learn'.
• We strongly advise children not to bring in toys from home; as wonderful as new toys are, these are often a distraction in the classroom or contentious item at break times. Where possible, please keep them safe at home!

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👨‍👩‍👧 Parents’ Consultation Evenings

Later this half-term, we look forward to sharing your child’s progress during Parents’ Consultation Evenings. Bookings for this will open from Monday 19th January.

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Here’s hoping for a slightly milder week ahead!

Warmest wishes,
Mrs Morgan
Headteacher