Welcome back! We hope everyone has enjoyed the Easter break and time spent with friends and family. Wishing everyone good health, peace, hope and happiness.   Today we start the summer term, and the last term of this academic year. Time flies by and we have achieved so many great things this year across our Trust family of schools. As well as welcoming in the new term, we welcome two new schools to our Trust family. Purlwell Infant and Nursery School and Hyrstmount Junior School have now joined our Trust. We welcome staff and learners to our team and families to our Trust community. We now employ over 750 adults across our schools, and serve over 4,500 children. From 2 year olds who join our nursery provision and start their educational journey with us, to the 18 and 19 year olds in our sixth form, as well as the adults who train to teach with us in our Yorkshire Rose Teaching Partnership.   In addition, we have our two community centres each called 'The Fields' - one based at Manorfield Infant School, and one based at Field Lane School. These community centres are where we offer classes, activities, training and support to families and individuals all across our community. We are a major employer in Batley, focused on improving the life chances of young people in our local area by delivering a great education.    Batley is filled with brilliance and we cannot wait to share more of that with you in these weekly blogs throughout the term ahead. The fantastic work in our schools has been recognised nationally. At Batley Girls' High School we have the CDI UK Careers Leader of the year 2024. Careers is the golden thread of the curriculum in all our schools and great careers education permeates every area of our work. Upper Batley High School was recently awarded Modeshift STARS Secondary School of the Year for their superb work on road safety and environmental sustainability. They received their award at a prestigious event in London and we congratulate the whole community on their hard work and huge success. Congratulations also goes to Field Lane who recently became a Neurodiversity Champion School. It is inspiring to see both colleagues and parents/carers embracing the journey and working together to learn more about neurodiversity - it truly reflects the spirit of unity and progress.    It is going to be a fantastic term ahead, filled with many successes and achievements for all.

This week we have much to celebrate across our Trust family of schools. Firstly, to everyone celebrating Eid this week, we wish you all; Eid Mubarak. Good health, peace, prosperity and happiness to everyone in our community.    We are also celebrating the success of Upper Batley High School who visited London last week for the finals of the Modeshift STARS awards. We are absolutely delighted to announce that they won and are now the National Secondary School of the Year 2024/25! Well done to Miss Woods and the UBHS team. The learners were absolutely superb and a real credit to their school, and our community. Keeping everyone safe is a number one priority and their work is superb.    Finally, we are also celebrating two new schools joining our Trust family from Tuesday 1 April. Purlwell, a Batley infant school, and Hyrstmount, a Batley junior school join us. We are delighted to welcome them to our Trust family and to Team Batley, which continues to go from strength-to-strength in providing a high-quality education for all our young people, and a great place for staff to work.