On Saturday 14th June around 60 children and parents took part in our annual Pedalling Picnic (the eighth event).

The majority of participants opted for the long ride - 10 miles from Consett to Swalwell - riding at a cracking pace (for children as young as 5) to reach Swalwell in just over an hour.

The sun shone for the picnic element of this enjoyable event.

Thanks to all who took part and particularly to Gary Haley for his work on the organisation of what has become a traditional summer event at Fellside.

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Year Six took part in the cricket festival at Whickham Cricket Club this week, the weather was fantastic, all of them played brilliantly and each and every one of them displayed great team spirit. As usual their behaviour was superb.

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Butterflies, beans, tadpoles, peas, carrots, cress, radishes, potatoes and children are all growing and flourishing in our nursery. This period of Spring/Early Summer has given our children a wonderful opportunity to study growth inside the nursery, in the garden and in the pond (literally for one child!).

This week children have enjoyed their home grown cress in their own sandwiches and have shared the fascination of all of us watching the painted lady butterflies emerge from cocoons. Tadpoles borrowed from our pond have demonstrated another of these miraculous transformations of nature as legs develop and they change to frogs. Today will see the release of the butterflies and tadpole/frogs into the wild.

These very real early childhood experiences are often those we remember as our memories of the more routine fade with time.

Thanks of course to Lynn and Anna for the extra but essential effort it requires to provide these stimulating experiences for the children. I take this opportunity also to those of you—probably almost all—who have helped in the nursery this year.

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A collective cheer sounded from Year Six children on completion of their final (the 9th) SATs paper last Friday. Their attitude and commitment during the tests week and in preceding weeks has been outstanding. The children have every reason to be confident of excellent results later this term.

Nationally there has been considerable media and parliamentary interest in SATs this year. Issues have been raised around curriculum content in Year Six classes, the purpose of the tests and concerns about stress on children.

From our prospective … We retain a full, broad curriculum as long as is sensible in Year Six with full access to sport and the arts—their residential visit was in the second half of last term. Naturally we ensure appropriate teaching and learning, and revision and practice opportunities in the approach to tests.

The purpose of the tests? Do they test schools or children? I could write pages on this one. Within school we are assessing children and individual results are important to children, parents and teachers. There is no doubt that at a regional and national level results are used to rank schools (newspapers, etc.) and judge school performance (Ofsted, DCSF etc.).

We currently operate at a very high level in these crude rankings (5th Nationally in 2007), which is nice, but are such ‘league tables’ useful or necessary? Probably not.

Are the tests stressful? Well what test taken seriously isn’t? In my experience a combination of full curriculum coverage, expert teaching and massive commitment from children enables every child to enter the tests confident in their own ability to succeed. Our result bear witness.

It seems certain that SATs in their current form have just about outlived their usefulness. Another one, maybe two years left of the current system I should guess. I know that any teacher at Fellside can give an accurate assessment of levels for individual children without any test and we are currently refining this process. Equally I’m certain that government (of any political persuasion) will wish to retain a system for comparing schools and judging performance.

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Today Year 6 became teachers! They introduced the Reception class to Mathletics, one of our most recent software purchases in school. What a delight it was to see our youngest children being guided and supported by our oldest.

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