First day for new Year 7 & Year 12 Students, DofE Gold and TA Way...

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Welcome to our new Year 7s…

It was wonderful to welcome our new Year 7s into the school on Thursday. They had a very successful transition day in July and they built on that this week by having a great couple of days with us. They have already shown themselves to be a lovely year group full of very polite and hard-working boys and girls. They have made a very positive impression upon all of the staff at the school. I am sure that it will not be too long until I am reporting lots of academic, sporting and other extracurricular successes from this year group in the blog.

And to our new Year 12s…

Our brand new cohort of Year 12 students enrolled this week to start their journey with the Sixth Form. With them all meeting their academic tutors, getting involved with team building and ice-breaker activities as well as getting prepared for the year ahead, I expect them to have been exhausted by the end of the day. They are a great bunch of students for which we have high hopes for.

On Friday, we also welcomed back our wonderful Year 13 students. They joined in with the new Year 12s on our annual Student Conference that involved workshops to do with establishing their vision, developing great habits, managing stress and strengthening their resilience and leadership skills. A great way to start the year, ready for the term ahead.

TA Way
On Friday, we welcomed back all students in school.  We spent the day going through our TA Way.  The day is split into a number of different sessions that will support them during the course of the year.  There are assemblies in The Platform, going through the nightly revision (homework) in the Sports Hall and sessions with their tutor.

DofE Gold Expedition

The first TA DofE Gold Expedition in 6 years took place last week in the beautiful landscape of the Lake District. The students planned routes, booked campsites, carried all their kit and food, navigated and hiked over a four day, three night expedition. The terrain was more challenging than what the group had been used to previously and each of them commented it was harder than walking on Dartmoor and even harder than it had been on their Practice Expedition in the Brecon Beacons a few weeks previously. The weather had looked promising, but typically for the Lakes proved to be changeable, luckily most of the rain coming during the nights, although this made packing up more difficult in the mornings!
It was a supreme effort by the students and they all completed the fours days. This despite 12-15km hikes each day over steeper ground than they had ever been used to previously – and for Patrick, despite suffering blisters from the first days hiking!
A massive thank you to Mrs Scagell, for remotely supervising the group during the expedition, to Mr Butler, for training and supervising the group over the last year, to Mr Brett, for assessing the group, and to Mr Adams, for assisting the group with their online mapping tasks.
Most importantly well done and congratulations to Emma Harrison, Leah Harman, Jema Soby, Josh Poston, Felix Houghton, and Patrick Handford for such an amazing effort – we are very proud of you all! Good luck for the other elements of your DofE Gold Award.

Air ambulance landing site

Having taken on the lease for the Cricketfield pitch, we were delighted to be able to work with the Devon Air Ambulance to install a landing site near the pavilion.  The project has involved the installation of new lighting with a remote switching system which means the Devon Air Ambulance can operate the lights at Cricketfield Road playing field in an emergency. The lighting helps their crews by illuminating the area during landing and take-off as well as helping medical teams when moving around the ground and for the safe carry and loading of a patient into the helicopter.

We have worked with the Devon Air Ambulance  to carry out improvements to the car park, which will not only help land ambulance crews enter, turn and park at the site, but will also make the unloading and transfer of a patient much easier, cleaner, and quicker.

TA Tubers

One of our after school clubs have been going to Tubers each week.  The students have filmed and produced this film to give you a taste of what they have been doing.

Post 16 Football

Our Sixth Form football programme enjoyed a busy start to the year with some pre-season training using the beautiful surroundings of Torquay seafront.  They also travelled to Millfield School for their first game together and put in a great performance. We have one more friendly next week v Bristol Rovers which will be a hard test setting us up for the start of the ECFA league on the 14th September.
We will keep you all up to date throughout the year on the team’s progress via the blog, but you can also follow them on Twitter – @TeamTA_Sport and instagram @teamtorquayacademy