Snowy Days

A Review of two months of snowy and icy conditions at The Billericay School

The temperatures dropped in December and January, and snow and ice forced the closure of many schools around the country including ours. Despite all efforts to clear the school site of snow and ice, it remained treacherous and unsafe for the students for several days.

We did however try to ensure that you had the opportunity to continue your education with private study should you access the range of learning resources via the school portal and suggested that you did the following:

Years 12 & 13:
· Preparation for forthcoming AS & A2 examinations
· Private study

Year 10 & 11:
· Revision for forthcoming maths and science module exams using either “My Maths” or “Sam Learning” or course textbooks
· Continue with any GCSE coursework or homework that has been set

Year 9:
· Complete any homework that has been set
· Revise any topics covered in recent lessons, using your class notes and textbooks or the BBC Bitesize KS3 site at http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks3bitesize/

Years 7 & 8:
· Complete any homework that has been set, class notes and textbooks or the BBC Bitesize KS3 site at http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks3bitesize/
· Spend half an hour reading using your “Accelerated Reader” or any other book you are enjoying.
· Revise any topics covered in recent lessons.

We also remind the Sixth Form and Year 11 that the A Level and GCSE exams scheduled for the week commencing 11th January will take place even if the school is closed. We are unable to re-schedule these as they are public exams and will ensure that provision is made for students to sit them. You are asked to ensure that you leave sufficient time to get to school for the scheduled start time and report to the venue on your exam timetable. Any changes to venue will be posted at the main school office.

As for the Sports Centre, we aimed to keep it open as usual, but we did ask you to exercise extreme care when arriving and departing as the school site remained very icy in places. There were however a few understandable cancellations : 1. The Billericay Dance School and 2. Basketball did not run on Saturday January 9th. Stratus Swimming School however continued to run at both Billericay and Quilters Schools.

Unfortunately although we all came back to school on Friday January 8th, we experienced difficulties with the heating system which meant we were unable to heat the school sufficiently well for students and staff to remain on site, so at 12.10pm the school was closed and the students headed home again for another snowy weekend!

We returned to school on Monday 11th January, ready for the restart to a new term, and hoping for better weather.

We have tried to keep you updated about the current situation via this website as soon as possible, and will continue to do so. We hope you have found this information useful. Meanwhile we thought you might be interested to know some statistics about how YOU are using the website to find out information:

Normally the 'hits' (the number of times people access the site) are in between 300,000 - 400,000 per month, but for 8 days during the bad weather the hits were around a massive 905,000.

On average the number of unique users are around 200 per day, but for the last few days during January the number of users using the site are around 2300, especially over the Wednesday and Thursday 6th and 7th of January.

We think this is a fantastic testament to the success of the school website and wish to thank you for using it so successfully and hope you continue to do so.

We hope also you enjoy the photographs of our school in the wintry weather (taken on Friday January 8th) - remember to keep an eye on the website as always for information.