On 23rd November, the uniformed protective services students completed a day out trek to Ivinghoe Beacon to practice our expedition skills where teamwork, leadership, communication and cooking were also demonstrated. We started out having to split into groups (two teams) and practice the phonetic alphabet. We would use the radios and write down what we […]

Public Services we have had a plethora of guest speakers visit this term. This month we also had a visit from a dog handler. The dog is trained to search for explosives. The students loved watching the dog work for a tennis ball.  She had to search and find the hidden tennis ball. Students had […]

  A calm and mild morning was what greeted students when first arriving at Vandyke at 3am on the day the trip left. After an unfortunate delay we got on the road and headed to Gatwick airport for an early flight. This all proceeded smoothly and we arrived to a fresh and bright day in […]

“No such thing as bad weather – just the wrong clothing”  Never has this statement been more apt on a geography trip. Torrential rain and high winds might have stopped the fun but not for our awesome geographers! Over the 4th – 7th November, 34 students and 5 staff braved the elements for a  weekend […]

Vandyke Sixth Form came together on Friday 14th October to show their support for world mental health day. The senior student team organised for every student to come in wearing at least one item of yellow clothing. The main motive was to raise money for the charity ‘Young Minds’ and also create more awareness around [...]

The start of October brought a busy weekend for our newest Duke of Edinburgh participants; 92 students from Year 10 took part in two days of activities. On Saturday, teams were introduced to key campcraft and expedition skills as they made their way around an 8-station training carousel within school. The training sessions included putting [...]

160 Year 11s and 28 Year 13 Geography students descended on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park over 3 days to investigate regeneration successes within London. The park is now one of the most researched locations in Europe and was extremely popular with other schools there during our visit. This has meant we have adapted our [...]

On Tuesday 4th October, Mrs Lord, Mr Hogan and I, accompanied fifty students from Years 12 and 13 to a creative arts event hosted by UCAS at the ExCel centre, London. The exhibition provided students with the opportunity to explore apprenticeship and degree options for their future, through discussions at each stall. Our students were [...]

The Army Outreach team came into school to educate students about the careers in the Army and to allow students the opportunity to take part in team building tasks. Students worked well together and managed to accomplish the tasks in a timely manner. The outreach team fed back and said “all the students were fantastic, [...]

A delayed Geography trip from the summer finally took place in the second week of term. Thankfully a little bit of rain over the weekend meant we had some water in the brook to measure; although this was considerably lower than previous years. As part of their GCSE, students must complete 2 days of fieldwork, [...]