Dear school staff,
We have now reached the end of another academic year. How time flies in education! Before you disappear into the summer holiday for a well deserved break, I wanted to offer my deepest and most sincere thanks for the amazing job that you and your staff have done throughout 2022-23.
This year, we slowly but surely entered a more ‘normal’ school year than anything since 2020. However, this does not mean that it has been any easier. Recruitment and retention, attendance, mental health, behaviour and enormous pressure on budgets. It seems that crises are like buses – you wait ages for one to come along, then all of a sudden 4 or 5 appear at once! So my sincerest thanks for making the effort to connect with us and your colleagues across our region despite everything you have faced in your schools.
Whatever surprises next year may have in store for us, we know well in advance what the response will be from North East schools: Outstanding (in the proper sense of that word) across the board. Everyone involved in education, from children, parents, the media, to the Secretary of State, should be enormously proud of the amazing people that are the heart of our region’s schools.
As I mentioned in October at our annual Summit, there’s an old saying: “You really can change the world, as long as you don’t want either credit or thanks.” And anyone familiar with the work of you and your staff knows that you do change the world, you most certainly deserve the credit, and Thank You is the least that you are owed for your efforts. I want to express, once again, how proud the Schools North East team is to have witnessed that at first hand.
2022-23 has been another incredibly successful year for Schools North East. This has been thanks to the support from our members and Schools North East Partner Schools who are the heart and soul of what we do and what we are about.
I hope that you can relax and recuperate as you deserve this summer and I look forward to seeing you again in September.
With best wishes,
Your sincerely
Chris Zarraga
Director, Schools North East
