Welcome to the Academic Year 2025-2026!
We are delighted to warmly welcome our new Year 7 and GB6th students to the Q3 Academy Great Barr community this week in addition to welcoming back returning students. Students are looking commendably smart in our refreshed uniform, and we encourage them to maintain this excellence in appearance. As a reminder, jewellery including piercings (other than one plain stud in the earlobe) is not permitted, and will be confiscated. We know that better attendance means better attainment, so we ask parents/carers to support their child in attending every day and ensuring that they are punctual; students must be on site no later than 8:45am each day.
We continue to embrace feedback from students and parents/carers and have made some changes over the summer to improve day-to-day operations as we, like our students, strive to be the best in all that we do.
One of these changes is to provide a more spacious queuing system in Quisine, this has caused some initial delays in service. Therefore, we have temporarily extended lunch times for students affected whilst we work to get this right and are confident that this will be a much more efficient system once ID cards have been issued; we thank students for their patience and respect. As a result of these tweaks, students were served really promptly today.
A further change is allowing students in Years 10 and 11 to wear their Q3 Academy Great Barr Sports Kit in place of their uniform on Thursdays. They are welcome to wear additional layers to keep warm on their journey to and from school in colder weather which can then be removed on arrival.
We trialled a series of Celebration Events towards the end of the summer term which were a huge success with glowing feedback from the families involved. So, this year we’re being ambitious and going bigger and better than ever before – save the date of Wednesday 15th October. If your child is lucky enough to be nominated for an award, you’ll be invited to a really special evening event – all of Year 7 will be invited along to cheer on their peers.
Last summer, we refurbished a set of boys’ toilets to a new design which has drastically improved our facilities and has been popular with students. We’re keen to press ahead with rolling out this new model in refurbishing student toilet facilities across the site, so this is currently out for tender, and we hope to share plans for the rollout of these improvements with you next month.
Finally, we introduced the Parent/Carer Helpdesk ticketing system towards the end of the last academic year and were pleased to receive positive feedback to support our drive to better communication with families. Therefore, we encourage any contact that you wish to make with us, to be directed by email here which ensures a ticket is raised for your query which will be directed to the most appropriate member of staff to resolve promptly. This system is now live for all students including our new Year 7 and 12 students.
Mr C Bury
Headteacher
