Schools Catering Price Increase across XP Trust

Dear parents,

We have recently received next year’s prices from our current catering providers, Doncaster Council Schools Catering Service.

Due to rising food and labour costs, they have significantly increased the price to all of our schools across the Trust. 

Even with the schools heavily subsidising this, we may still need to increase the cost per meal for parents to £3.00. We are greatly disappointed to ask this of our parents, but this is a decision we have had to make due to reasons out of our control. 

We will continue to work with Schools Catering over the summer holidays to try and bring these costs down, whilst ensuring a high quality meal will be provided to each of our students. We will keep parents informed with any updates on this.

We are exploring other providers, and if necessary, we will look to change providers if a more cost effective offer is available elsewhere.

We will do everything we can to keep the price of school meals affordable to our parents, but we wanted to provide early warning that our prices are likely to increase from September 2024.

A sporting week…

This week the children have loved taking part in lots of races, including the egg and spoon race and hurdles! Take a look at them in action…

We have also taken part in a daily mile and even ran the final lap!

We enjoyed a well earned treat when we got back to the classroom…

Year One Sports Morning

What a beautiful morning it was for our annual sports day. The children took part in events such as hurdles, javelin, dribbling the football, long jump, egg and spoon race and our favourite….the sack race! Every child tried their very best and all enjoyed competing in the events. It was a very close competition – the blue team were the winners with the orange and yellow teams coming a close second and third. We ended the morning with a special ice lolly treat kindly provided by FONCA. We all had a great time!

Sharing our Stories: 05/07/2024

Beautiful Work This Week

XP Festival of Arts and Culture – Next Friday 12th July!

Book now

We first opened in September of 2014 in Doncaster and began to offer a creative and purposeful curriculum based on learning expeditions that connect subjects together so that learning is deepened and made relevant. Ten years on we have established a successful Trust that has shared this model with two more secondary schools, XP East in Doncaster and XP Gateshead, as well as five primary schools in the Doncaster area including: Carcroft Primary, Green Top Primary, Norton Infants, Norton Juniors and Plover Primary.

Our students create beautiful work that connects to the community and the world through the creation of high quality products that actively serve to make the world a better place.

To kick off our celebrations we are hosting our first community wide ‘Music and Arts Festival’ at XP East on the 12 July. This will become an annual event to bring together creatives from across the XP community, the wider community and the world to show why the Arts are so important to making our world more just, more beautiful and more humane and why they are at the heart of our curriculum.

We look forward to seeing you at the start of our festivities and hope you will join us as we continue to celebrate and share our stories throughout the rest of 2024 and 2025!!!

Andy Sprakes

Chief Academic Officer – XP Trust

We’re got vacancies across XP Trust!

We’re looking for:

Cleaners at Plover School

Cleaners at Green Top School

A Leading Learning Coach (HLTA) at Plover School

A Learning Coach/Crew Leader at XP Gateshead

Top of the Blogs

Kindess is Contagious! @ Norton Infants

Class 8 Proud Passage Presentations @ Green Top

Early Years Explorers Celebration of Learning @ Plover

DT Baking @ Carcroft School

Farewell Crew Pankhurst @ XP School

C29 Artwork in progress! @ XP East

Baking Bonanza @ Norton Juniors

Share your stories with us!

We now have a new dedicated news email so that you can send your stories, updates or ideas about potential news articles directly to us in Comms.

It might be something you or your students have achieved, a charity you’re supporting or anything at all that deserves a wider audience.

Write to us at [email protected] –  we want to hear about it, write about it and celebrate it!

Kindness is contagious!

The reception children have enjoyed a wonderful treat today. They each received a hand written postcard and a delicious box of chocolate treats from our year 3 and 4 children as a thank you for all their hard work in their recent expedition ‘What happens where the sea meets the shore?’

The children were delighted and it has encouraged us to think about kind gestures that you can make that would make someones day.

KS1 Fieldwork

We have had an amazing day. We started with a walk around the grounds at Cusworth Hall and enjoyed taking part in the history trail. We spent some time at the top of the hill seeing which Doncaster landmarks we could spot – we found Doncaster Minster, the Frenchgate, Doncaster Royal Infirmary and the Eco Power stadium too. We then skipped, hopped, rolled, ran down the great big hill – it was exhausting getting back up the hill though!!

The coach then took us across the city to the Eco Power Stadium. On the way we spotted more Doncaster landmarks we saw a mosque, Doncaster Train Station and lots of restaurants that we recognised too! When we arrived at the stadium we had lunch sat in the seats overlooking the pitch followed by a stadium tour and a PE lesson. We were very excited to meet Donny Dog too.

We had an absolutely fantastic day – it was great to see lots of the landmarks that we have found out about over the course of our expedition.  

Diverse Doncaster Fieldwork

Wow – what day! We started our day having a walk around the grounds at Cusworth Hall. The children took some great notes using their note catchers to use when we get back to class. We ran and rolled down the hill too – it almost tired us out! We spent some time at the top of the hill seeing which Doncaster landmarks we could spot – we found Doncaster Minister and the Hospital too. Next was the coach trip across to the Eco Power Stadium – more Doncaster landmark spotting – we found things like the Frenchgate, a mosque, gurdwara, Doncaster Train Station and we were very excited to see XP and XP East too! When we arrived at the stadium we had lunch overlooking the pitch followed by a stadium tour and a PE lesson. We were very excited to meet a VIP too – Donny Dog ❤️

We had an absolutely fantastic day – it was great to hear the children share lots of knowledge about Doncaster that they have been learning over the course of our expedition.

Well done Class Five

Sharing our Stories 28/06/2024

Beautiful Work This Week

Visitors from around the world…

In 2023, XP had over 1000 visitors from all over the world – including India, Australia, America, Israel, Norway and Spain, just to name a few! As we continue to welcome more visitors, here’s what they’ve said about our students…

Exciting plans for Green Top – watch this space!

Friends of Norton Campus Summer Fair

This week we held our second Friends of Norton Campus Association Summer Fair. We were joined by members of our local community to raise funds for our schools. There were bouncy castles, penalty shoot outs, welly wanging and face painting.

Askern Community Brass Band provided the music – and there were plenty of sweet treats and snacks to enjoy too. Children were spending their pocket money on the hit the teacher coconut shy and sponge the teacher! Not forgetting we were joined by our special VIP’s Lenny and Alan (the alpacas!) We’re already looking forward to next year. 

We’re got vacancies across XP Trust!

We’re looking for:

Learning Coaches at Carcroft School

An EYFS/KS1 Specialist SEND Teacher at Carcroft School

A Leading Learning Coach (HLTA) at Plover School

A Learning Coach/Crew Leader at XP Gateshead

Top of the Blogs

Weekly update for families @ XP Gateshead

Celebrations and Ice Lollies! @ Norton Infants

Year 4 Taking Brownies to the Food Bank @ Green Top

Time to read Crew @ Plover

Acro and Cheer Showcase @ Carcroft School

Year 9 Sports Leaders @ XP School

Crew Malala DofE @ XP East

Kick Off @ Norton Juniors

Share your stories with us!

We now have a new dedicated news email so that you can send your stories, updates or ideas about potential news articles directly to us in Comms.

It might be something you or your students have achieved, a charity you’re supporting or anything at all that deserves a wider audience.

Write to us at [email protected] –  we want to hear about it, write about it and celebrate it!