Community

Notley High is proud to serve its community. We recognise and value the benefit the community brings to our school, and believe that we have much to offer local residents, partner schools and local businesses.

Notley has a tradition of supporting and working alongside our partner primary schools. The excellent relationship that we enjoy with them is due to mutual respect, borne out of many years of cooperation and discussion. As a Specialist School we are committed to listening to the needs of our Primaries, and finding ways to offer substantial and sustained support. For many years staff from Notley have had timetabled lessons in specific Primary schools, usually bringing in subject expertise not available to the smaller schools. Notley has developed resource based initiatives that support the teaching of Technology and Science, supplying laptops, training and materials to each of our partner schools.

In recent years our key specialist subjects – Maths, Technology, and Science have run ‘hub meetings’, in the process building relations and knowledge of the KS2 curriculum. From these meetings a whole range of activities have been developed with the purpose of raising achievement, building cooperation and sharing expertise. In 2007 we have extended this programme to include French and Art.

Braintree is fortunate that it’s three high schools, Tabor, Alec Hunter and Notley, work so closely together. Added to this are the schools from Witham, Rickstones and John Bramston. More able initiatives, masterclasses, staff development days, and ultimately the Braintree Sixth Form have all arisen out of collaborative working practices between the schools.

In recent years we have run evening classes for local residents, with languages, ICT and technology being particularly successful. This is something that we are keen to reinvigorate, so watch this space. A number of organisations use our facilities during out of school hours and this is an aspect of school life that we are keen to develop. Stagecoach are our latest partners – they use our drama facilities every Saturday morning.

Our sponsor page shows the large amount of local businesses who supported our original bid to become a Specialist School. A number of local businesses have either hired in our staff or used our facilities to help deliver staff training, in particular Tamdown and Townrow. Through the Trident Work Experience programme Notley has a long established partnership with a whole raft of local companies. Fostering more links and building upon our enviable reputation are key targets for the school, particularly as we move towards developing post 16 education on the site.