Dear Parents/Guardians,
Please find attached our Information Sheet and Financial Information for 2024/2025 school year. Summer reports are also available on VS Ware. Any difficulty with VS Ware login, please contact our school office by email info@stanhopesecondary.ie.
We are delighted to announce 1st year students will receive free books and some classroom resources e.g. copy books, pens, pencils etc. The book rental scheme will be free to all students in 1st, 2nd and 3rd year students. These students will receive free classroom books.
During the course of the year, we continued to invest significantly in our school and your daughter’s education. In the last school year, we continued to upgrade our school and installed new basketball equipment and marked out our outdoor courts. This investment greatly improved our sports offering.
This year we will order another large shipment of new school furniture, more than 500 new student tables and chairs were purchased last time. This year’s order will be an increase on this. These purchases have revitalised our classrooms, improving our students wellbeing and learning environment.
Our new school roof continues to be delayed but we expect this to proceed later in the school year. We will continue to invest heavily to ensure our community has the most pleasant of environments in which to teach and learn.
We are committed to provide students with the opportunities and the tools to succeed in modern life. To this end, we are committed to ensuring our students are digitally and ICT literate. We invested in our IT infrastructure and purchased 3 large new printers and have also upgraded the speed of our internet connection. Due to the success of our new subject ‘Digital Media Literacy’, ICT classes are being increased from 40 minutes to 2 hours per week.
As our school continues to grow, we are delighted to announce a further expansion of our curriculum to include Music as a subject. Music is a great subject and has been a priority to reintroduce for both students, parents and teachers.
We continued to develop and embed our communication channels within our school community. VS Ware is used by our school community to track attendance, behaviour and examination results. Our focus is on promoting positive student behaviour. Using VS Ware to recognise all the great work of our students each day. In March, we handed out over 183 prizes to students for their positive behaviour. Behaviour reports are available for parents to view on VS Ware. Parents and students can use the calendar on our school website for live updates of school events, closures, holidays etc. This coming year we will continue to improve the quality of communication to you and the teaching and learning for your daughter.
As teachers, our main focus this year has been improving teaching and learning in our school. We continue to invest heavily in our teaching staff through continuous professional development, resulting in improving teaching and learning and better student outcome. Our teacher training this year has focused on the Junior cycle, subject specific collaboration, and restorative practice. This year we completed the final year of a 3 year restorative programme. We will continue to embed this learning within our school community.
You should continue to hear more about how Restorative Practice is transforming our school practice for the benefit of our school community. I hope your daughter has shared some of her positive experiences with you.
Don’t forget to check out our social media pages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Our pages are:
www.facebook.com/StanhopeSecondarySchool
www.instagram/StanhopeSecondary
Finally, I want to thank you for the trust that you have placed in us as teachers and mentors of your children. I wish you and your family a very happy and safe summer break. I look forward to working with you as we watch our school grow and flourish into the future.
Kind regards,
Mr. J. O’Brien
Principal
