| Good morning and thank you for coming here today. |
| I'd like to bring you up to date with changes in the school that will affect your children. |
| As you know, the school buildings date from various times: |
| some from the 1970s, some from the last five years, |
| and of course Dartfield House is over a century old. |
| It was commissioned by a businessman. |
| Neville Richards, and intended as his family home, |
| but he died before it was completed. |
| His heir chose to sell it to the local council, who turned it into offices. |
| A later plan to convert it into a tourist information centre didn't come about, through lack of money, |
| and instead it formed the nucleus of this school when it opened 40 years ago. |
| The school has grown as the local population has increased, |
| and I can now give you some news about the lower school site, |
| which is separated from the main site by a road. |
| Planning permission has been granted for development of both sites. |
| The lower school will move to new buildings that will be constructed on the main site. |
| Developers will construct houses on the existing lower school site. |
| Work on the new school buildings should start within the next few months. |
| A more imminent change concerns the catering facilities and the canteen. |
| The canteen is always very busy throughout the lunch period - |
| in fact it's often full to capacity, |
| because a lot of our pupils like the food that's on offer there. |
| But there's only one serving point, |
| so most pupils have to wait a considerable time to be served. |
| This is obviously unsatisfactory, |
| as they may have hardly finished their lunch before afternoon lessons start. |
| So we've had a new Food Hall built, |
| and this will come into use next week. |
| It'll have several serving areas, |
| and I'll give you more details about those in a minute, |
| but one thing we ask you to do, to help in the smooth running of the Food Hall, |
| is to discuss with your children each morning which type of food they want to eat that day, |
| so they can go straight to the relevant serving point. |
| There won't be any junk food - everything on offer will be healthy - |
| and there's no change to the current system of paying for lunches by topping up your child's electronic payment card online. |
| You may be wondering what will happen to the old canteen. |
| We'll still have tables and chairs in there, |
| and pupils can eat food from the Food Hall or lunch they've brought from home. |
| Eventually we may use part of the canteen for storage, |
| but first we'll see how many pupils go in there at lunchtime. |
| OK, back to the serving points in the Food Hall, |
| which will all have side dishes, desserts and drinks on sale, |
| as well as main courses. |
| One serving point we call World Adventures. |
| This will serve a different country's cuisine each day, |
| maybe Chinese one day and Lebanese the next. |
| The menus will be planned for a week at a time, |
| so pupils will know what's going to be available the whole of that week. |
| Street Life is also international, with food from three particular cultures. |
| We'll ask pupils to make suggestions, |
| so perhaps sometimes there'll be food from Thailand, Ethiopia and Mexico, |
| and then one of them will be replaced by Jamaican food for a week or two. |
| The Speedy Italian serving point will cater particularly for the many pupils who don't eat meat or fish: |
| they can be sure that all the food served there is suitable for them. |
| There'll be plenty of variety, so they shouldn't get bored with the food. |
| OK, that's all on the new Food Hall. |
| Now after-school lessons. |
| These are very popular with pupils, particularly swimming - |
| in fact there's a waiting list for lessons. |
| Cycling is another favourite, |
| and I'm delighted that dozens of pupils make use of the chance to learn to ride in off-road conditions. |
| It means that more and more cycle to and from school every day. |
| As you know, we have a well-equipped performance centre, |
| and we're going to start drama classes in there, too. |
| Pupils will be able to join in just for fun or work up to taking part in a play - |
| we hope to put on at least one a year. |
| We already teach a number of pupils to use the sound and lighting systems in the centre. |
| And a former pupil has given a magnificent grand piano to the school, |
| so a few pupils will be able to learn at the school |
| instead of going to the local college, as many of them do at the moment. |