'Our greatest strength lies with our students' (From Gazette & Herald)

'Our greatest strength lies with our students'

A FORWARD-LOOKING school with a sense of tradition linking back to the Elizabethan age - that's the vision of Lady Lumley's School head teacher John Tomsett.

Since his arrival nearly two years ago, the school, in Pickering, has won specialist status as a sports college, as well as securing extra funding to revamp and rebuild.

And part of the plans for the school - which is named after a local Elizabethan landowner who left her fortune to the Lady Lumley's Educational Foundation - will be better links with the community, Mr Tomsett says.

His latest move is to cut back on the number of students going into town at lunchtime, and focus their attentions on healthy lunches and a range of activities on site.

"We have 500 people going to town at lunchtime aged 15 to 19 - that's big influx of people - and I actually think they behave remarkably well," he said. However, he said, he is very sensitive to the livelihoods of the shopkeepers in the town.

"There are some issues about litter and we are working with shopkeepers and the police to help some of the groups of our students and other people who congregate out of school to move them out of town. We really want to keep as many of our students as we can on site."

It was often the case, Mr Tomsett said, that young people seen gathered in the town were not pupils at Lady Lumley's. However, the school's students were wrongly labelled as being part of these groups.

"We're investing around £80,000 in extending the dining hall and, as part of the extended schools programme, we're putting on a range of lunchtime activities. We're getting increasingly good at school dinners and that is linked to our sports college status and the big drive to improve fitness," he said. 'No Chip Days' have also just been launched.

From the next academic year, the year 10s - all 150 of them - would be kept in school over the lunch period, with a view to applying the same rule to year 12s at a later stage. This would mean that only sixth-form students would venture into town for lunch.

He said the move matched the aims of the new Children's Act - to keep children safe and healthy, to benefit the wider community and to make learning accessible and engaging.

These measures, and a range of other projects developed through the sports status, will also help to reach out to disengaged young people in the wider community and strengthen the fight against drugs.

"I think there is an issue which is common to many isolated market towns where there's little to do and young people find recreation in any way they can. We work very closely with the police and other agencies to try and educate people and put in preventative measures to avoid people falling into a recreational drug trap," said Mr Tomsett.

"You're not going to stop it by saying it's wrong; it is by education and preventative measures," he added.

Part of the sports college status will mean a key role at the centre of the community - promoting health, fitness and sporting involvement right across the spectrum.

"The whole issue about sport in the community is to help a variety of different sections of the community," he said.

With a strong academic record, the school has also been strengthening its vocational curriculum and broadening the more work-based training courses on offer.

Mr Tomsett said there was also a strong sense of teamwork between the district's four secondary schools. "It's great that Ryedale and Malton Schools and Norton College are doing so well, because that means children are doing well - it's not about competition," he said.

"We've done so much in a short time and our greatest strength is our students. Our greatest challenge is to make sure every single one of them makes the most of their abilities. Young people are capable of much more than even they themselves realise - the limitless belief in the abilities of children is really important.

"This is a modern-looking school but it also has a great sense of tradition about it. That tradition is inherent in the detail of the school and we don't want to lose that, but it is complemented by a forward-looking focus."

Updated: 11:02 Wednesday, June 01, 2005