HEADTEACHER'S WELCOME

Headteacher’s Welcome

A warm welcome to Thurstable School,  a school built on ethos and with a clear aim of building knowledge and growing character. At the heart of everything we do lies our core values of aspire, respect and endeavour, values that are lived and not just laminated. 

We are at an exciting time of our development as we strive to be a school of character and academic excellence and are looking forward to helping your child become the “best version of themselves” and achieve great academic outcomes whilst developing good character. 

Always learning, we ensure that we are constantly improving our teaching by making sure our practice is always informed by the most up to date research and evidence. This is a key focus of our teacher coaching programme and in conjunction with our insistence on exemplary behaviour means we are doing everything that we can to ensure that each and every student achieves the highest exam grades that they can achieve. In the Summer of 2022 the GCSE results were “significantly above average” and in the top 20% of the country (Department for Education) and we are unashamedly clear that academic scholarship, reading and writing are at the heart of our curriculum. We have the wonderful Thurstable Loves To Read programme as well as our innovative Morning Meeting programme based upon cognitive science and are committed that all students leave us with a reading age that matches their chronological age. 

Equally important to our ethos is growing character and one of our mantras is “true character is doing the right thing when no one is looking”. We believe that character is taught, caught and sought and are committed to providing as many opportunities for the students to make memories from foreign exchanges, musical productions, Duke of Edinburgh schemes and numerous sporting opportunities. Our Morning Meeting programme, devised with the support of the University of Birmingham, explicitly teaches the character virtues that will enable our students to thrive in society. We want our students to feel part of something bigger and be fully engaged with their community and to make a positive difference to the lives of others. 

We are deeply committed to our mission statement of "Building Knowledge, Growing Character". We won’t get everything right, but we will always be honest, be led by our values and learn from the best schools in the country. We won’t get everything right but will always be brave in what we do and learn to do better when needed.  We are excited about our journey and hope you would like your child to be part of our characterful, honest and ambitious school community.

James Ketley, Headteacher