School Day and Lunchtimes

We believe the structure of our school day is an important part of ensuring students achieve highly. We have five 1 hour lessons per day, with optional Enrichment after school too. From September, all students should have arrived for 8.20am, with the new Tutor Period starting at 8.25am. Due to Covid-19, there are slightly staggered arrival times onto the school grounds, where students will go into the building via their year group entrance straight into tutor rooms to be seated, and chat whilst receiving a breakfast snack of a bagel or similar.

These are as follows: 8.00am Year 7; 8.05am Year 8, 8.10am Year 9. 8.15am Year 10, 8.20am Year 11

Assemblies also occur in this tutor period, usual in Year groups but occasionally in our ‘House’ Continents system.

There will be more information about VMG tutor groups on our website shortly.

Lunchtime Arrangements

Lunchtime is for 30 minutes, but split across Period 4 so students have lunches at different times. This ensures students have only a short time to queue, and can sit and eat at tables for the whole session. This system also allows Year 7 to have lunch together, without other year groups, something they find very helpful particularly in the early months of joining the school. Our non-teaching Year Learning Managers are always on duty when their group are having lunch, as well as during the day when they visit lessons to check on the progress of students, including those targeted for support and intervention.
Due to Covid-19, where we would usually have two year groups sharing the dining area at 12-12.30pm and 1-1.30pm, instead from September 2020 we will have two separate dining spaces, one in the auditorium, and one in the usual dining area. to ensure year groups do not mix

Enrichment 2.30 – 3.30pm

Whilst the school day finishes at 2.30pm, learning does not, and students can attend optional Enrichment activities from 2.30-3.30pm, and in some cases beyond. We believe students should have the opportunity to try new sports and interests, or work on catching up in subjects, at a time when there are still fresh. There are usually around 50 activities to choose from each week. On Tuesdays staff have two hours of training time from 2.30 – 4.30pm so there are less Enrichment activities on that evening. Due to Covid-19, in September 2020 the structure of Enrichment will change as it cannot involve students of different year groups mixing. We will not be running Enrichment for this reason at the very start of term, whilst our new way of working becomes established.

There will be more information about Enrichment starting in September on our website soon.