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Dear Colleagues, 

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Weekly Whistle. As we head into the final stretch of the summer term, it’s been fantastic to see so many of you continuing to engage in high-quality professional development, collaborative planning, and forward-thinking preparation for the academic year ahead. The energy across our Trust is tangible, and it reflects your deep commitment to doing the very best for the children, families, and communities we serve.

From science leadership and premises compliance to leadership development through the NPQs, this week has truly showcased the strength and dedication that runs throughout the WeST community.

I am delighted to share some important leadership developments that will take effect from September 2025 and impact the leadership structure at Hele’s School.

Mrs Justine Mason, in her capacity as Executive Headteacher, has been appointed to lead and develop our Cornwall Cluster of schools for a 12-month period. This is a significant and strategic leadership opportunity that reflects both Mrs Mason’s considerable expertise and her track record of impact across the Trust. It’s also a clear signal of our commitment to strengthening cross-school collaboration and sustainable improvement across our entire family of schools.

While Mrs Mason undertakes this important work, I am very pleased to confirm that Ms Emma Clapham has been appointed as Acting Principal of Hele’s School from 1st September 2025 to 31st August 2026. Ms Clapham brings a wealth of experience, having served as a valued member of the senior leadership team at Hele’s for nearly a decade. She is well-positioned to provide continuity, strategic leadership, and a clear vision for the school during this transitional period.

I’m sure you will join me in congratulating both Mrs Mason and Ms Clapham on their appointments and in wishing them every success in the next phase of their leadership journeys.

The WeST Training Institute team is excited to announce that expressions of interest are now open for the next National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) cohort. These programmes are a fantastic way for colleagues to develop their leadership capabilities and deepen their expertise in key areas.

The upcoming offer includes:

  • NPQ for Early Years Leadership (NPQEYL)
  • NPQ for Headship (NPQH)
  • NPQ in Leading Teaching (NPQLT)
  • NPQ for SENDCos (NPQSENDCo)

We strongly encourage colleagues who are interested in joining one of these programmes to express their interest via the linked form. For any questions or support with the process, please contact: adminwti@westst.org.uk.

On Tuesday, the WeST Science Network met under the expert guidance of Linzi Bell. The session focused on enhancing science teaching across the Trust using the WeST Knowledge Document, Working Scientifically progression, and TAPS assessments. Key updates included the arrival of new STEM-funded data loggers and the launch of associated CPD opportunities.

There was also rich discussion around balancing explicit instruction with enquiry-based learning—a vital consideration in building not just knowledge but also pupils’ scientific identity and curiosity.

I had the privilege of joining an inspiring session for our new WeST Primary Leaders on Tuesday. The group shared thoughtful reflections on their leadership journeys, successes, and challenges. Their insights were both motivating and humbling—a powerful reminder of the impact that strong, reflective leadership has on pupils, staff, and communities.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to such a thoughtful and uplifting session.

Our central HR team delivered a highly informative HR Matters session this week, providing important updates and guidance on key priorities across the Trust. These sessions are crucial in supporting leaders to stay informed and confident in navigating complex staffing matters, while fostering positive, inclusive, and supportive working environments. A big thank you to our HR colleagues and everyone who attended and engaged in this vital work.

On Friday, Mark Bullard led an excellent session with our premises teams, focusing on compliance, health and safety, and CDM (Construction, Design and Management) awareness. Colleagues were reminded of the importance of maintaining accurate records in Parago, ensuring safe site practices, and preparing for upcoming inspections.

As ever, our estates teams continue to play a critical role in ensuring that our school environments are safe, compliant, and welcoming. Thank you for your diligence, professionalism, and tireless efforts.

This week, I had the honour of attending the CST’s Annual Reception at the House of Lords. It was a truly inspiring evening that brought together leaders and colleagues from across the sector to celebrate our collective achievements and look to the future.

It was a privilege to represent WeST at such a prestigious event, and to be reminded once again of the strength, purpose, and unity that defines our work in education.

As always, thank you for everything you do. The collaboration, compassion, and commitment across our Trust continues to shine through, even as we approach the final busy weeks of term.

Wishing you all a restful and enjoyable weekend.

Best wishes, 

Rob Haring

CEO

Word Of The Week!

This week's word is "unity".

Definition: Unity means coming together with others, standing side by side, and working as one - for a shared purpose or vision.

We’ve chosen unity because it reflects who we are when we bring our strengths together. Whether it’s a class collaborating on a project, friends supporting one another, or schools standing in solidarity—unity reminds us that we’re stronger when we choose connection. Unity helps us build trust, grow together, and move forward with hope.

ECF 25 Launch Conference

Earlier this week, some members of our WeST Training Institute team attended the Ambition Institute Deliver Partner ECT 25 Launch Conference in Birmingham. This was a fantastic opportunity for our team to meet our partners from Ambition, Steplab and fellow Delivery Partners and find out more about the new programme. It was an insightful session with topics around; Evidence-based research on teacher development, Implementing instructional coaching with fidelity, The Impact of the Early Career Framework so far, and how we move forward between the current ECF Legacy Programme and the new Early Career Teacher Programme (ECTP) 2025. We are very excited for the next academic year! If you have any queries for the WTI team, please email them; adminWTI@westst.org.uk. 

WeST Primary Schools Shine at Buckland Abbey at their Dance Festival

A total of 172 children from six WeST primary schools took part in a vibrant and energetic Dance Celebration Festival, held in the stunning grounds of Buckland Abbey and organised by the Arena Schools & Dartmoor School Sport Partnership. The challenge for the day? Learn an entire dance and perform it—all in just one day. And what a performance it was!

The dance, fittingly titled ‘Sunshine’, consisted of four dynamic sections: a motif, a pairs section, a creative pairs photo section, and a group section where pupils choreographed their own ideas. Throughout the day, the children worked with their Dance leaders to learn and rehearse each section and then came together to share.

Despite the soaring temperatures, the enthusiasm never wavered. Pupils danced, collaborated, and cheered each other on, culminating in a fantastic  performance to the delight of their parents and staff. Ermington Primary School added an extra spark by sharing their own dance, ‘Firework’, choreographed during their after-school club—a performance that was met with huge applause from everyone.

A HUGE thank you goes to the incredible Year 9 Dance Leaders from South Dartmoor Community College. Their encouragement, leadership, and support played a vital role in the day’s success, helping to inspire creativity and confidence in every young dancer.

It was a day full of sunshine, smiles, and spectacular dancing—one the children will never forget!

On Monday, Richard Penhale (ICT Systems Manager) from South Dartmoor Community College had the privilege of attending the Octopus Energy Tech Summit in London, the flagship event kicking off London Climate Action Week. The lineup of speakers was almost as A-list as they come! The event was slightly delayed as we had to wait for Octopus CEO Greg Jackson to have a haircut backstage. Our compère was Natasha Kaplinsky, who I’m sure needs no introduction, with the opening keynote from Colonel Chris Hadfield, talking about how a young boy growing up on a farm in Ontario became one of our most successful astronauts. He was followed by Dr Brian Cox talking about how, had he listened to his school careers advisor, he wouldn’t have been where he is today! Maxim Timchenko, a leader in Ukraine’s energy sector, recently spoke about how his team is rebuilding the country’s power grid to be more resilient. By redesigning their energy systems to be more flexible and distributed, they’ve made it much harder for disruptions to affect the electricity supply—even during extremely challenging circumstances. Sir Stephen Fry had a great fireside chat with Yuval Noah Harari (author of the international bestseller ‘Sapiens’) about AI. Yuval suggested the biggest threat to AI is our lack of trust in each other and how this must be fixed as, without doing this, AI would be no better than Humans. Sir Stephen suggested Chief Financial Officers are the jobs most at threat as AI improves, but left us with the message that AI is both thrilling and chilling. Damon Hill made an appearance and shared how he believed he was the first person in Britain to get a speeding ticket in an electric vehicle. We were addressed by Al Gore and Idris Elba (sadly, via video, not in person). Dr Hannah Fry gave a talk on scientific research and how AI is working to help us talk to animals, how pigeons have been trained to recognise tumours and how an Austrian scientist is carrying out pioneering research to reverse aging. The head of Greenpeace UK spoke about how we are likely reaching a tipping point in the battle to prevent further, and begin to reverse, climate change, and how aggressively the fossil fuel industry has ramped up its protectionism. The event closed with a talk by Rory Sutherland, vice chair of Ogilvy UK, on how behavioural science can be used to change the way we look at things, such as range anxiety in electric vehicles. A truly inspiring day!

WeST HQ Entrance

The path next to the carpark is now open. Meaning the entrance directly in front of the carpark is no longer in use. Once you are in the car park with the building in front of you, follow the path to the left, behind the wooden fencing and around the side of the building.  The WeST main entrance door is at the end of the building.

Florence Royston (Y4 Glen Park Primary) and Esme Coulton (Y5 Woodford Pirmary) have both earned coveted places in the Team England Squad for the upcoming Dance World Cup Finals in Burgos, Spain, commencing next week, 3rd July 2025. 

This achievement is particularly notable, considering the competition involves over 140,000 participants from 66 countries, making it one of the most fiercely competitive events in the world of dance. This year, more than 12,500 dancers from around the world will participate in the final event.

Both girls train with Linzi Bell at Glen Park Primary and will travel to Burgos as part of Moon Dance Studios Team England Squad. The girls will compete in 7 group dances across the Mini (u10s) and Children’s (u12s) age divisions in genres ranging from Jazz and acrobatics to lyrical and ballet.

The girls have also already secured places in the All England Dance Finals held in Cheltenham in May 2026 with several solos, duets and trios.

Important Data Protection information - Action needed by all staff

From January 2026, no email will be stored in Microsoft Outlook for longer than 2 years. This means that:

  • All emails of 2 years old or more will be automatically deleted from Outlook on 06 January 2026.

  • From then onwards, all emails will be automatically deleted from Outlook 2 years after you receive them. 

(For now, Callington and Chaddlewood staff using Google Mail rather than Microsoft are exempt, to help keep guidance as simple as possible. If you use Google Email the following does not apply for now. However, all staff should avoid using email as a long-term storage area, so this is a good opportunity to get a head start!)

All staff using Microsoft email need to back up any essential email and/or attachments that are needed long-term to an appropriate storage area. The deadline to complete this before the Christmas holiday is therefore 18 December 2025. Any emails not backed-up outside of Outlook by then will be lost permanently.

Please click here for the Guidance Document.

Please start thinking and acting on this as soon as possible. Numerous support sessions will be arranged to help any staff with issues, across a variety of dates and times between now and Christmas, but the sooner you start, the sooner you finish! Support sessions will start with limited target audiences to help gauge levels of support and attendance. Dates and times will be sent out separately. 

WeST Trustee, Zoe Briant-Evans, had the fantastic opportunity to visit Ashburton Primary School as an assessor for the Torbay and Devon Civic Awards. Five pupils from the school undertook their assessments for the award last Friday, and I am delighted to say they all passed! The award, which has been running for 21 years now, was created to nurture character-building and values education. It empowers children to take charge of completing sub-sections, including: taking up hobbies, undertaking fund-raising, becoming active citizens within their school and their local community, as well as making a commitment to caring for the planet. The commitment and resilience shown was a credit to their hard work over the last school year. Zoe said ‘I was hugely impressed by the activities undertaken by the children, how much they had given back to their communities and the funds they raised for many different charities’. We are very proud of them and look forward to seeing pictures from the official ceremony and presentation evening in a few weeks' time. 

If you might be interested in launching the award at your school, you can find more information about it at https://www.torbayanddevoncivicaward.co.uk/, or you can contact karen@torbayanddevoncivicaward.co.uk 

Registrations for the next NPQ cohort are OPEN, and we are exploring the following programmes:

NPQ Early Years Leadership (NPQEYL)

NPQ Headship (NPQH)

NPQ Leading Teaching (NPQLT)

NPQ for SENDCos (NPQSENDCo)

Click here to register your interest and a member of the WTI Team will be in touch! 

If you have any queries, please email: adminWTI@westst.org.uk

No Purchase Order (PO), no pay policy

From 1st September 2025, the Trust will be implementing a strict 'No PO no pay' policy whereby all invoices must quote a valid Trust purchase order number to be eligible for processing. It is therefore extremely important that ALL staff are aware of this change and if your role involves any form of ordering, please make sure that you are familiar with the purchase ordering system. We are in the process of communicating this to suppliers. Finance teams will be circulating the letter that is going out to suppliers in the next few weeks which will provide more details. 

Thank you!

Submit an Article!

Do you have an achievement to celebrate, a job opportunity to promote, a charitable initiative to support, or an important update to share? The Weekly Whistle is your platform to keep our community informed and engaged.

How to Submit:
Send in your article by 2 PM every Thursday by emailing admin@westst.org.uk, and we’ll consider it for publication in the following Friday edition. Submissions should be clear, engaging, and relevant to our audience.

Joyful June

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Recruitment update:

We are delighted to inform you of the following exciting career opportunities within our Trust:

Hele’s School are seeking to appoint a Food Technician. The successful candidate will support the Food department to provide teachers with a range of technical support to deliver the Design & Technology curriculum to students, including raising health & safety issues/concerns. For more information on this vacancy, please click here. Closing date: 1 July 2025.

Plymstock school are seeking to appoint the following vacancies: 

Learning Mentor - The successful candidate will have excellent interpersonal skills, have a calming and understanding nature and a range of experience working with SEN children and their specific needs. The role involves developing 1:1 mentoring relationships with students who require academic or emotional support, in accordance with their learning plans or one page profiles. Closing date: 4 July 2025.

Mayflower Lead (Internal Alternate Provision) - The successful candidate will work closely with the Inclusion Team to support young people working within the AP Base, including students who may have challenging behaviour and complex needs. The Mayflower Lead will work closing with the SENDCo to support pupils' progress and achievement and link with external professionals and agencies as appropriate. Closing date: 30 June 2025.

Finance Assistant - The successful candidate will assist the Senior Finance Office in a range of activities to ensure the smooth running of the school's financial processes. This is a permanent, full-time, term-time-only role.  37 hours x 39 weeks per annum. There is some flexibility with hours worked to suit the right candidate. Closing date: 30 June 2025.

Teaching Assistant (Maternity Cover) - the successful candidate will provide general support to staff and pupils. This is a part-time post covering a period of maternity leave – 27 hours per week x 39 weeks per annum. Closing date: 30 June 2025.

Receptionist/Administrator/ First Aid - The successful candidate will support across the team as required dependent on workload. We are looking for: good ICT skills, including spreadsheet and word processing skills, flexibility and adaptability, good communication and interpersonal skills and someone who is able to work on their own initiative and in a team. Closing date: 30 June 2025.

For more information on these vacancies please click here.

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