What an amazing start!

The children in Class 1 have settled in beautifully this week. They have enjoyed getting to know all the different areas of the classroom…

We’ve loved exploring our new outdoor area…

Time Capsule ⏳

We spent the morning creating our very own class five time capsule. We wrote a letter to our future selves, drew around our hands, measured how tall we are and included a picture of our favourite things. We have sealed it ready to open it on the last day of year two to see how much we have learned and grown.

Introducing the new Class Five!

What a great first day back we had! We started the day with a Play-Doh challenge, followed by bingo! In the afternoon we shared the story Our Class is a Family (Here is the link if you would like to share the story at home!) We made an anchor chart of how we thought our classroom is like a family and added some art work of our families. We even managed to find a little bit of time for some construction!

Brilliant start to the year Class 5 – well done

From The Ground Up: LISTEN NOW!

Check out one of our students’ latest beautiful Expedition products, featuring powerful folk songs created by Year 7 at XP Gateshead, inspired by the rich mining heritage of North-East England. From performing mining-related songs to studying historical events and visiting Beamish Museum, our students have captured the essence of the miners’ stories.

Dive into the history and heart of mining communities with us and listen along in all your favourite places here!

Every child is an artist…

Over the past two weeks the children across Norton Campus have been creating a piece of artwork that represents an olympic sport. The children have well and truly showcased their talents and artistic flair and have produced some beautiful artwork. Today we got chance to see the work they have created and we went on a Norton Campus gallery walk. Here’s what we saw…

The children took great pleasure in walking around both sites looking at the beautiful artwork that was on display…

The children across Norton Campus also wrote some beautiful postcards to one another which were warmly received and made everyone smile 🙂

Thank you to all those involved in this. It was a great success!

Gallery Walk

Class 2 had a wonderful morning looking at all the beautiful Olympic Games themed artwork that all our children had produced across both schools. The children were especially excited to walk around the Junior School and the experience gave them a great opportunity to talk about the amazing artwork together.

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!