Please be reminded, the deadline to order the CGP books is 9.00am on Monday 3rd November. These are available to purchase on the Arbor School Shop.  

On Tuesday 4th November, Almond Hill will be having a Diversity Day! On this day, children will share and learn lots about all the different things that make them special and diverse and celebrate how wonderful this is. They will learn about many different parts of diversity and make a classroom display too. As part of this, we would love to invite parents/carers/family members of our children in to speak to their child's class about something special about them. We have already had a few volunteers for this so thank you very much! We would love more though! If you are unable to come in yourself, perhaps you could write a few notes for your child to share instead? We're really keen to hear from a diverse range of families. 

If you would be free to help us out, please contact the teachers in your child's year group using one of the following emails: 

Year3@almondhill.herts.sch.uk 
year4@almondhill.herts.sch.uk 
year5@almondhill.herts.sch.uk 
year6@almondhill.herts.sch.uk 

Thank you in advance! 

On the 6th November, Almond Hill will be taking part in a nationwide Outside Classroom Day initiative. We believe that children should spend more time in the natural environment and use this space to enhance their knowledge and understanding. Children will be spending part of the day outside and will therefore need to be dressed appropriately as the weather turns colder and wetter.   

On Friday 7th November, we would like to invite you to a 'Reading Workshop' where we will outline our aims and expectations for reading at Almond Hill. During the workshop, we will share the ways in which we teach reading and comprehension, the additional provision that we provide to further develop the children and the information and resources that are available for you to support at home. 

The workshop is aimed at all parents of children in Year 3 and 4 and parents of children in Year 5 and 6 whose child is not yet at ‘age related’ in reading.  

The workshop will be held in the hall on Friday 7th November 9.00-10.30am and there will be an opportunity to visit some classrooms to see reading lessons in action.  

Our open evening for prospective parents will be on Thursday 13th November where we will welcome lots of families to look at our wonderful school. This is supported by Year 6 children who act as ambassadors for the school and show families round. We always receive positive feedback about this event and are really looking forward to this year’s open evening. Look out for more information in the coming weeks. 

School open events and key dates for secondary transfer 
Moving on 2026 leaflet Information for parents with children in year 6 at primary/junior school. Further information about moving to secondary school in September 2026 will be available at www.hertfordshire.gov.uk/admissions 

The timetable below gives you an idea of what will happen over the next few months. 

Mrs Burgess and Mrs Wright, our Pastoral Leads, will be running workshops for all parents on Therapeutic Thinking. This is an opportunity for parents to gain an insight into the school's behaviour management approach and how we consider what a child's behaviour might be trying to tell us.  They will be hosting 2 sessions.  

The first will take place online (via Microsoft Teams) at 6.00pm on Monday 20th October. 

Join the meeting now 

Meeting ID: 343 587 956 536 6 

Passcode: jn3rU6Vq 

The second session will be in the hall at 2.00pm on Tuesday 21st October. Both sessions will last approximately 1 hour. 

Please visit our website for more information on Therapeutic Thinking: https://www.almondhill.herts.sch.uk/page/?title=Behaviour&pid=177  

These are really useful sessions and I would urge parents to join us if they can. We hope to see as many parents there as possible.    
 

Thank you so much to those parents / carers who have generously donated items on our gift list for our outdoor relaxation space. Plans are afoot and we really appreciate your support.

Our photographers will be in school on Tuesday 21st October to take individual photos of the children. The photos taken of Year 6 will be used in the yearbook so please do your best to be here on the day. Almond Hill siblings will also have their photos taken on this day. Please ensure your child is in full uniform (ideally with jumper/cardigan). If your child’s class usually has PE on a Tuesday, please can they come to school in school uniform and bring their PE kit to change into.  

2024 - 2025 Summary of Objectives

Objectives 2024-25 based on school self- evaluation: July 2024 Yr3-6 assessment outcomes, evaluation of school improvement actions 23/24, consultation with staff and governors, feedback from pupils and parents, May 2021 Ofsted, Attendance data 2023-2024, External visits from HfL HIP and TLAs

2025-2026 Summary of Objectives

Objectives 2025-26 based on school self- evaluation: July 2025 Yr3-6 assessment outcomes, evaluation of school improvement actions 24/25, consultation with staff and governors, feedback from pupils and parents, May 2021 Ofsted, Attendance data 2024-2025, External visits from HfL SEA and TLAs.

Moving on 2026 leaflet Information for parents with children in year 6 at primary/junior school. Further information about moving to secondary school in September 2026 will be available at www.hertfordshire.gov.uk/admissions 

The timetable below gives you an idea of what will happen over the next few months. 

Flu has had a serious impact on the health of England’s population over the past two winters. Vaccinating your child helps reduce the risk of serious illness and plays an important role in protecting vulnerable individuals in your community, friends and family. 

The team will be visiting our school soon to offer the flu vaccine. You can choose between the quick, painless nasal spray or a pork gelatine-free injection. 

For further information about the vaccines, please follow the attached link Vaccination UK Immunisation. The form is available in 10 languages— select yours when it opens. If you do not want your child to be vaccinated, please submit a decline via the same link. Note: School aged children cannot receive this vaccination with their GP unless they are clinically vulnerable. https://bed.schoolvaccination.uk/flu/2025/hertfordshire  

Please ensure your child has had breakfast on the morning of the vaccinations.

Our Parents’ Evenings (PTI’s) for the Autumn Term will be held on Tuesday 7th and Thursday 9th October for Years 4-6 only. Year 3 meetings will take place in January to allow more time for the class teachers to get to know the children and for our regular assessments to take place. 

Please visit https://almondhill.parentseveningsystem.co.uk to book your appointment. A short guide on how to add appointments is available on the school website. 

Our open evening for prospective parents will be on Thursday 13th November where we will welcome lots of families to look at our wonderful school. This is supported by Year 6 children who act as ambassadors for the school and show families round. We always receive positive feedback about this event and are really looking forward to this year’s open evening. Look out for more information in the coming weeks.  

We use Bounce Resilience resources as a key part of our Year 5 curriculum and have funded parents to attend similar courses in the past. They tell us these were really good. Although we don’t fund this anymore, these free places offer an opportunity to support parents in this very worthwhile way. 

We work really hard to take part in so many events and we really try to ensure that all children have the opportunity to take part (if they want to).  When you are sent the invite for your child, it will provide the information of event, date, times, location etc along with a deadline to respond to provide your consent.  If the deadline passes without consent/communication, the place will be passed on to someone else. Please check with your child that they want to take part before signing them up. If they don’t, that's absolutely fine but please ensure you have let us know they will not be attending by replying to the invite email. These events are planned by Stevenage Sporting Futures with a minimum/maximum participation requirement that we need to meet in order to attend.  

It is with a very heavy heart I am sharing the news that I will be leaving Almond Hill at October half term as I am returning to Social Work. This was always my plan when both my children joined Secondary school. I have been at Almond Hill for 8 years and started as a one-to-one TA. My role here has grown and I was lucky enough to become part of the Pastoral Team and I then had the opportunity to head this up and help shape it to the needs of Almond Hill as the school grew. I know I am biased but the Pastoral Team here is amazing and last year saw over a third of our children have an additional provision with our aim for this academic year for even more children to have additional input. I am very happy to be handing over the baton to Hannah who has come from Woolgrove in Letchworth and who some of you may already have met or spoken to. She looks forward to taking on the role and supporting all the wonderful families at Almond Hill. For the next few weeks, I will be working very closely with Mrs (Hannah) Wright to provide a hopefully seamless handover so that parents and children are affected as little as possible.   

Moving on 2026 leaflet Information for parents with children in year 6 at primary/junior school. Further information about moving to secondary school in September 2026 will be available at www.hertfordshire.gov.uk/admissions 

The timetable below gives you an idea of what will happen over the next few months. 

We hope you have settled well into life at Almond Hill. We are always looking to better our processes and have been working on improving how we manage 'in year' transition to Almond Hill. As a family who has recently joined us, we are really keen to gather your feedback to help us continue to improve so would really appreciate it if you would complete the quick survey (linked below) to share your views.  

https://forms.office.com/e/FTXz5WTeHB  

Flu has had a serious impact on the health of England’s population over the past two winters. Vaccinating your child helps reduce the risk of serious illness and plays an important role in protecting vulnerable individuals in your community, friends and family. 

The team will be visiting school soon to offer the flu vaccine. You can choose between the quick, painless nasal spray or a pork gelatine-free injection. 

For further information about the vaccines, please read the attached E-consent letter (below) . Alternatively, click here Vaccination UK Immunisation. The form is available in 10 languages— select yours when it opens. If you do not want your child to be vaccinated, please submit a decline via the same link. Note: School aged children cannot receive this vaccination with their GP unless they are clinically vulnerable. https://bed.schoolvaccination.uk/flu/2025/hertfordshire  

To help families, we have a small scale ‘share box’ which will contain some food items and household necessities (such as toilet rolls/soap/washing up liquid). There will be a labelled box in the quadrant on Tuesdays and Fridays at drop off. Please give generously and feel able to take from it - no judgement.  Please leave non-perishables in it such as baked beans/tuna and be mindful of allergies/unsafe items such as bleach. As always, nut products are not allowed in school. The children will be reminded not to touch. It is only for adults to use. 

There will be a new menu after half term. Please see attached for more information:

We have a number of lost property items at the office. Please check the photos below to see if any of these belong to your child. Items can be collected from the office. Any unclaimed items left at half-term will be recycled. 

Please be reminded, gates close at 8.55am  and if you arrive after this time, you will need to come via the main office to be signed in.  This is to ensure the site is secure and it is imperative children don’t ‘squeeze in’ at the last second as they could get missed if their class has left to go to the hall for example.

Parents will receive a letter in the next few weeks reminding them of the expectations and the new national regulations with regards to school attendance. I would urge you all to take the time to read the information. With the cost of living crisis and more pressure on families, we continued to see an increase in the number of holidays taken in term time last year. I would like to remind parents that I cannot authorise time off during term time unless for exceptional circumstances. I understand parents may feel that the time off will not affect their child significantly negatively however the overall education of the class is affected if the teacher has to repeatedly catch up those who have missed prior learning.

We use Seesaw across the school to share and celebrate the children’s work. Parents tell us they love these updates. New parents will receive an invitation to join the app but only once consent has been given. This has been sent to you via the Arbor Parent Portal. Please allow us some time to get this set up. For more information, follow the link below: www.almondhill.herts.sch.uk/Seesaw

Facebook
For those of you who don’t know, we have a school Facebook page. We already have 217 of you following but would love to see many more of you including our new families! Please follow the link to follow our page: https://www.facebook.com/121almondhill

Other Key Apps
Parents of children who have joined us this term, you will need access to the Arbor Parent Portal. Many of you have already logged in which is fantastic but if you haven’t and need help with this, please contact our office.

There will be times, as parents, where you need to contact the school and general enquiries can be made via the school office by phone or email. You are also very welcome to email the year group email addresses to contact your child’s year group. Please only use the year group email for NON urgent queries/questions as they are not monitored during the day

Year3@almondhill.herts.sch.uk
Year4@almondhill.herts.sch.uk
Year5@almondhill.herts.sch.uk
Year6@almondhill.herts.sch.uk

If you have any questions regarding your child, please make an appointment after school to see the class teacher initially as in most cases they will have the most up to date information on your child. If at this point you still feel you would like to speak to someone at our school, please first contact Miss Simmons, our Deputy Head (admin@almondhill.herts.sch.uk) or if your child has special educational needs or disabilities, Mrs Birchall our SENCo (iep@almondhill.herts.sch.uk). If the issue is of a pastoral nature, Mrs Burgess our pastoral lead can be contacted at burgess@almondhill.herts.sch.uk The Designated Teacher with overall responsibility for Child Protection is Mrs Fordham, with Mrs Birchall, Mrs Burgess, Mrs Barker, Mrs Wright and Miss Simmons as deputies. The deputies (especially Mrs Burgess) deal with day-to-day safeguarding issues but all cases are shared with the whole safeguarding team. Mrs Fordham can be contacted using the admin email address and will respond accordingly. However, depending on the nature of your email, it may be passed on to a more appropriate member of staff for a response.  Mrs Fordham is often unavailable at short notice and an effective and more efficient response is often achieved by speaking to someone else on the team. That being said, Mrs Fordham will always make the time to speak to parents if all other avenues have been exhausted, the matter is extremely urgent or parents have a specific reason why they believe she is the only person who can deal with the matter.

You can report on the day absence in the following ways:  
by phone (01438 233660 option 1)   
by completing the form on our website  
by submitting on to the Arbor Parent Portal (How to Guide)  

Please do not use the year group emails for this or admin@almondhill.herts.sch.uk. The year group emails are not regularly monitored and there are so many emails coming into admin and with only one person managing this box,  they may be missed. You will still be contacted by the office team to check absence if you have emailed one of these as it may not have been passed on and we have a duty to check children’s attendance.  

We also reinstated the online form for requests for time off in term time. If you are requesting time off in term time for holidays, a religious festival or other events, please submit the form on our website. You will also find a form here to inform us of medical appointments.  Please be advised that the government does not consider holidays to be an exceptional circumstance. These are highly unlikely to be authorised and may incur a fine.  

Please do not email these changes in. As you can imagine, the school email address gets lots of email daily and it is monitored by one person. This means that some requests/emails may not be seen straight away so it is important that if there is a change to collection, you call the school office. These changes need to be called through by 2.45pm to ensure they are delivered to your child’s class teacher in time for the end of the school day. We cannot guarantee messages will get through to the class teacher before the end of the day otherwise. Please note, we do not use a password system for collection.

School policy allows for children in years 5 and 6 to bring a mobile phone to school for safety reasons if they travel to and from school independently. Mobile phones must be switched off whilst on school premises and not be used during the school day. There is no need for parents to inform the class teacher/office if their child is walking home independently. I would ask that children do not however bring their phones on school trips or after school events. Please can I remind parents, especially those in year 5 and 6, unaccompanied children should not arrive at school before 8.45am. I appreciate some children are keen to get to school but the school grounds are not supervised before this time and accidents can happen.

We would expect children in Year 3 and 4 to be brought to the classroom doors by an adult in the mornings and not expected to navigate the car park on their own. We know it is busy but keeping the children safe is always our main priority.

Children in Years 3 and 4 need to be collected by an adult unless we have written permission for children to go home with older siblings. Please confirm this with teaching staff via the year group email. There are no laws about this as such as it relates to the level of the child's competency however we feel that most children in Years 3 and 4 do not have the experience to make safe choices when circumstances are not as they have expected. It is also sometimes not possible for an older sibling to keep a younger sibling safe. Ultimately it is the parents' decision however we are responsible for the safeguarding of the children so will want some dialogue if children younger than Year 5 are not being collected by an adult. As the school has become larger and access routes (both pedestrian and vehicle) have become busier, this becomes increasingly important. 

Children in Year 5 and 6 are allowed to leave school independently. Teachers will walk them up to the gate at the end of the school day but will not monitor collection. If your child is due to meet you from school, please ensure they know where they are going. It is also important to remind children to return to school if they find the person who is meeting them is not where they were expecting them to be.

There are over 300 children arriving and leaving our school every day. In the interests of the safety of all our children, we expect you to observe the parking restrictions when dropping off or collecting your child in a car. Please can you make your child aware that the raised area outside of the school is not a pedestrian crossing.

If you park in the ‘drop off’ zone it must be in one of the marked bays. You may not park on the access roadway around these spaces. Adults who park in one of the allocated parking spaces at the end of the day need to get out of their cars and walk to collect their child. The ‘drop off’ area is for vehicle entrance/exit only NOT for pedestrian use. I am sure like me; you wish to keep our children as safe as possible. I hope the guidelines are clear enough for all parents/carers to follow. If you have any queries or concerns about the use of the drop off, please contact me.

If you are driving to school, please park safely and in line with restrictions. Please also show respect to our neighbours in adjacent roads so their access is not restricted by inconsiderate parking.

​Please supervise younger children in and around the school entrances and if you are waiting outside of classrooms. The main gates are automatic. Sometimes younger children are not supervised and are allowed to climb onto the gates and handrails and run around near the vehicle entrance. KEEP CLEAR OF THESE GATES AND ENSURE YOUNG CHILDREN STAY CLOSE TO PARENTS AND ARE PROPERLY SUPERVISED.

If your child attends breakfast club, please ensure that you walk them to the door. It is not appropriate to let them walk unaccompanied from the main entrance.