South Shore Academy

I am delighted to extend a warm welcome to you at South Shore Academy.
We had a fantastic year in 2015-2016 as we worked to become a Good school, and I wanted to take this chance to celebrate some of our accomplishments since the start of the 2016 school year as well as to highlight some of our upcoming activities and future plans.
The year 11 results from the previous year were significantly better, especially when compared to the new Progress 8 metric, which ranked South Shore Academy third out of all the secondary schools in Blackpool.
Over the course of this academic year, we want to build on this success, and we have a number of new initiatives in place to assist us in doing so.
As many of you are aware, there have been considerable changes made to how young people are evaluated both at KS2 and KS4.
Our goal is for all students to graduate with the knowledge, skills, and credentials necessary to seek a rewarding job and to become respectable, responsible, and global citizens.
At South Shore, we are collaborating closely with our feeder elementary schools to make sure that the revised KS2 curriculum flows naturally into the range of KS3 courses we are offering.
Additionally, we have obtained financing for a Saturday School from SHINE, a nonprofit organisation created to improve the outcomes for groups of students in KS3.
For 50 Year 7 and 8 pupils, we plan to launch this facility in January 2017.
However, in order to further these, we also want to create an Academy Parents/Carers Group that can contribute more to the development of the academy and its strategic vision as we go into 2017 and, starting in September 2017, in our brand-new building.
Interest declarations have already come in from a number of people.
After the holidays, Headstart, another organisation that will collaborate closely with the school, will give us even more possibilities to support staff and kids in all facets of their wellbeing.
The HSBC Bank has also expressed interest in aiding our development and has agreed to provide a subsidy of $3,000 to enable our Year 9 students to participate in a 5-day residential that will foster teamwork and confidence in the Summer Term.
At South Shore Academy, we continue to place a high importance on empowering students and creating an environment where they may succeed. For this reason, we have expanded our Student Leadership Team to include a prefect system that runs throughout the whole school year.
These young people play a variety of significant and useful tasks as members of the Student Leadership Team, and they actively participate in contributing to the daily operations of the academy as well as its strategic direction.
Their work is complimented by a team of Anti-bullying Ambassadors who are trained rigorously and regularly present assemblies tackling issues around bullying and understanding, tolerance and respect.
Our kids are now participating in the South Shore Academy Challenge Cohort programme in a number of ways.
These students have been identified according to their academic potential in all year groups within the school.
As a result, we are endeavouring to forge our own links with Universities in order to expose as many of our young people to further educational opportunities as possible.
We are developing extremely positive links with Blackpool Sixth Form who have hosted our students on a number of occasions since September and have included them in University led seminars and events to date.
As stated previously, we value all of our students at South Shore Academy and we are immensely proud of all of their achievements.
We have begun to invest in a number of vocational qualifications and placements for students with a more practical focus.