This morning the decision had to be made to close Oldmixon Primary School. This was due to a burst water main external to the school, but meant that the school was left without water and therefore unable to function for children and staff.

Through the use of text messages, the website and Twitter, 85% of children were picked up within 30 minutes with the rest of the children kept safe in school with staff until they could be collected.

Interim Executive Head, Heidi Hudd and Interim Head of School, Laina Pettifor would like to thank all children, parents, carers and staff for their prompt and effective action in response to this situation.

It highlighted how well the staff handled the emergency evacuation plan. The school aims to be open for the last day of term but this cannot be guaranteed this at this stage until the water company are able to make their repairs and confirm that the school is able to open.

On Wednesday, we partnered with Wesport to hold a 'Daily Mile' and multi sport morning. This was done as a way to showcase the 'Daily Mile' within the multi-academy trust and also to give the children from all eight schools an opportunity to try two different sports; disc golf (run by Matt Cutler from Mr. Frisbee) and fencing (delivered by Annie from Little Musketeers).

The Daily Mile is a simple and free initiative. It gets children out of the classroom for fifteen minutes every day to run or jog, at their own pace, with their classmates, making them fitter, healthier, and more able to concentrate in the classroom.

As well as running the Daily Mile and trying two new sports, all children attended an interactive learning session about the benefits of doing The Daily Mile. In this session we gave the children a chance to come up with ideas about how they would encourage other pupils to engage with this initiative. This was a brilliant exercise and the children came up with some fantastic ideas such as putting on their own assemblies in their school, using a Daily Mile buddy system pairing the older and younger years together and getting the teachers involved when they run the Daily Mile. Both the sporting activities and the Daily Mile saw great engagement and excitement from the children.

Seven of our schools now do the Daily Mile and we aim to be the first Daily Mile MAT in the country and a case study for other MAT’s if we have all eight take part.