One of our Parent, Teacher and Friends (PTFA) members is £140 better off having won the latest PTFA Lottery draw! The PTFA Lottery costs just £20 per year to enter. Half of the takings are paid out in cash prizes (currently a first prize of £140; two second prizes each of £70 and two third prizes each of £35), with the other half benefitting students at Lady Manners School. The more members we have, the greater the prize amounts in our twice yearly draws – and the greater the benefit to the school. The PTFA Lottery is open to all parents, teachers and friends of the school, who are over the age of 16. Full details and application forms are available at www.ladymanners.net/lottery Congratulations to the lucky winner!

Just before the half term, our Year 7 German students were learning about Karneval. Karneval is an important festival in Germany, marked by parties and parades. One of the traditions associated with Karneval is for masks to be worn to make the wearer look frightening to help drive out Winter. Our students have got creative and made masks scary enough to meet the challenge. This selection of terrifying creations are certainly up to the job! Well done Year 7.

This week has been National Apprenticeship Week and there has been lots going on - virtually - to give students more information about this vocational pathway. There are apprenticeships available in a huge range of careers from accountancy to engineering, and from construction to software development. They are increasingly popular with students who are making their post-16 and post-18 choices. The online events that have been available this week have been run by a host of organisations and employers and have sought to provide valuable information to our students about apprenticeships and the advantages that they can offer.

Our students have been working hard this term, learning in a very different way to normal, inevitably involving increased levels of screen time. Therefore, in an initiative to encourage participation in different activities, we enjoyed 'Wellbeing Wednesday' yesterday at Lady Manners School. During the afternoon, students were encouraged to move away from their devices and do something different. To give a few ideas for activities, we set some challenges for students in Years 7, 8 and 9. These ranged from designing a poster to taking photographs whilst on a walk and from completing at least 5000 steps to having a bake off competition. As a result, our students took the opportunity to bake, explore, walk, dance, exercise and create. Here are some examples of how students spent their afternoon – with not a screen in sight!

Our Year 9 Geographers have been learning about how glaciation has shaped our landscape. Students learned of the subject remotely, via a mixture of online live lessons and resources available on the school's learning platform. They were then challenged to make paper hats with a suitably mountainous shape to demonstrate the different glacial erosion landforms: pyramidal peaks, arêtes and corries. Here you can see an example of one student's work, beautifully demonstrated by her canine models. Well done Tillie and Year 9!

Lady Manners School's Rutland Studio is a multi-functional space that is normally widely used by many departments for a host of different activities. The Rutland Studio's flexibility is now being demonstrated in its current role as our COVID-19 testing facility. During the Christmas holidays, the room was transformed by our Premises Team. From the beginning of January, it has contained eight bays all equipped for the self-administered tests to be performed. The lateral flow tests are conducted on a regular basis and our trained team of volunteer parents, carers and staff have processed more than 350 tests for staff and students so far. We are confident that this facility has been fully tried and tested, ready for any future requirements for us to operate a mass testing programme. We'd like to thank the more than 50 volunteers who offered to assist with this programme, and those who helped us to make this possible so quickly.