Year 11

Contacting the Team

If you have any questions or concerns about your child, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the Year 11 team by leaving a message with Reception or by emailing our enquiry address with, for example, ‘FAO Ms Thomas’ as the subject.

We aim to respond to phone calls & emails as quickly as possible, & certainly within 48 hours. Please bear in mind that members of staff may have a day of teaching & may not be able to respond to non-urgent matters until the end of the Academy day or the following Academy day.

          By telephone:      0121-464 2737 (main school switchboard)

          By email:              enquiry@harborneacademy.co.uk

Vision

Year 11 is a very stressful and busy time! Students start our rollercoaster journey as soon as they step through the door on their first day back in September. Their adventure begins with a revision day delivered by an external company. This entails a variety of ways on how to revise and organise themselves to help reduce those stress levels.

We then invite parents/guardian and students to our expectations evening where you discover all the support put in place by the Academy to ensure that every student is successful during their final year. This is an informal evening allowing parents and student to discuss their subjects and future plans with our team. It also allows parents to discuss any worries they may have as well.

Our first set of Mock exams are the end of December and this allows us to see where every student is at that point, it provides the students, teachers, parents and the academy with powerful and motivational data. We celebrate the end of the mock exams by having a results day, students pick up their results together in assembly and support each other and enjoy this time together.

At this point it is essential that we consider students futures as this is the time where college open days are up and running. We advertise and encourage our students to attend at least three colleges. They have meetings with our careers advisor and we use PSHE day to ensure that students have all the information they need and that they are confident when attending interviews. This allows us to continue to have a very high success rate with further studies.

Our second set of mock exams arrives very quickly after February half term and we are expecting even better results than previous mock exams despite how good they may have been! These mocks really help students with their focus and the realisation really begins to kick in that they only have a few months before the real exams. We use these mock not only for the data but as a run for the real exams to help try and reduce stress levels. Students are provided with a breakfast and all meet in the library to revise together and continue their fantastic support for each other. To celebrate our students’ success we again do our results day but we also promote our prom so that the students can see the small light at the end of the tunnel and have something to look forward to!

Once we return from our Easter break we collapse our normal year 11 timetable and provide revision seminars for each subject, this runs right through the exams and allows the students to get that last mark they may need to push their grade to the next level. This has so far proved very successful and is really appreciated by our students.

The end of the ride is when we have our final exam! We all celebrate this in our leavers’ assembly where we hear messages from staff, share our fond memories and share a lot of photographs taken during their 5 year journey.

As progress leader of year 11 I feel privileged to work with these students and guide them. It is lovely to watch them grow in confidence and start to believe that they can achieve in life. I try to make year 11 as fun as it possibly can be yet keeping the students focused on the big picture.  We have a great team in year 11 and our ethos is to work together to be the best we can all be.

Ms Thomas

Year 11 Inspirational Quotes

• “Nothing will work unless you do.” Maya Angelou

• “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill

• “Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Steve Jobs

 “Success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives” Michelle Obama

Attendance & Punctuality

At Harborne Academy we expect students to be present in school every day. They should only be off school if they are very ill. A cough or cold is not a reason to not attend school. 

Pastoral Student Voice Results (Summer Term 2019)

Student Council Representatives

The Student Council meets with Senior Leaders of the School on a weekly basis to share suggestions, questions & concerns with them. Students are encouraged to share their ideas with the representatives for their year group.

The Year 11 Prefects are: Adnan, Ali, Alina, Chantel, Erick, Fatima, Hannibal, Ikram, Jalessa, Jenascia, Mohammed I, Nasir, Sarah, Tyrece

 

Events/Important Year 11 Dates for this Year

Each event includes Simon Armitage. He is one of Britain’s best poets, with a superb ear for language.

Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke give an exhilarating joint reading. Their session is one of the most illuminating parts of the day for students.

John Agard gives one of the most exciting performances in contemporary poetry, not only in the way he delivers his poems, but also in how he talks about them, combining historical awareness, cultural insight and extraordinary humour.

Including amazing poetry reading from Imtiaz Dharker, Daljit Nagra and Owen Sheers. There was also chance for the students to get supportive suggestions on their English literature exam for May 2020.

PSHE Day

On Thursday 23^rd January Year 11, had PSHE day based on relationships. Students had workshops that covered marriage, Human Rights, healthy relationships, sexual Harassment and teenage pregnancy delivered by Ms Thomas the Progress Leader for Year11.

Feedback from students included:

“It was very interesting and I learnt new things about marriage that I never knew before”  - Alex 11B

 

“It was interesting. I myself, didn’t know about teenage pregnancy” - Ali 11C

“I wanted to learn about Human Rights, it was very interesting and educational”- Adnan 11B