As the school is at the moment, there is a litter problem arising within and around the school grounds. There are two main reasons for this: - firstly – Pupils are becoming increasingly lazy as not to walk over to put their litter in a bin. Secondly – there are a lack of bins in some areas, where there are bins they are also not emptied often enough. The problem with the locations, or lack of locations, for bins is quite a concern of mine as ‘A dirty school, is an unhappy school.’ When pupils see litter on the floor they feel unmotivated to keep the school tidy therefore drop more litter, and this continues until the employed cleaners clean the school. Solving this problem would create money for the school as not so many cleaners would need to be employed. My solution is this – position more bins around the school site that are fixed to walls and floors as this then will not allow mischievous pupils to alter the bin locations and causing further problems. With less litter on the site the school will have saved £10k in cleaner’s wages per year. However pupil laziness is a problem which cannot be cured by adding more bins, the only way I see that pupils will improve is to offer incentives where if X number of bags full of rubbish are collected per week, then there will be no homework the following week. But that may not be feasible in many situations.
Thirdly I know that you are aware of this point already, but I feel that it needs to be stated for political purpose. The toilets are in an appalling condition, allowing for the spread of bacteria, germs and therefore illness. There is a concern of pupils that the toilets don’t offer running water to clean their hands after using the facilities. Then many pupils don’t use the toilets very often if at all! Therefore from your point of view pupils will be spending more time in lessons. However this is not the case as the toilets spread illness pupils are more likely to become ill thus spending a considerable less time in lessons. The toilets require heavy investment to improve significantly. But to start with a simply suggestion if I may, pupils will appreciate running water in toilet facilities as you would expect in other public places.
The school was built in an era before the availability of home computing. 90% of pupils have access to computers at home. And the remaining 10% have access in school. This I believe creates an area for greater pupil teacher’s communication. As has been realised by other schools. Other schools offer an internet resource of guidelines for homework and coursework, which then aids in the production of homework by pupils and increases pupils performance. As other schools are far behind the level of achievement at Caerleon School, I feel that it is important to widen that gap even further. By offering this same service to pupils. Thus increasing pupil performance even further at this school. Also I feel that the traditional method of pen and paper learning is becoming ever more an inconvenience as well as a redundant technology. To become an innovative head teacher, looking into the future, I feel that you should have some plans to issue laptops computers to students to work on instead of textbooks and exercise books which over the year’s pupils accumulate hundreds of useless sheets and text. This could cut out all together and there would be no more waste as all work could be store and computer disc.
And finally an elementary point to make, but some class rooms such as science labs. Still force teachers to use black boards instead of new white boards. The new white boards are inexpensive and should urgently replace the existing black boards. As it has been proven the prolonged exposure to chalk dust from blackboards can put teacher’s health at risk.
In conclusion, many of the problems we have at the school can be inexpensively and easily solved within the course of one year. This would create a greater attendance to the school by pupils. And give pupils a more positive outlook towards learning and will achieve higher levels than in many other schools.
