*School photographer Thursday 13 November 2025*

Welcome to Autumn 2!

We are delighted to share how positively our residential Ofsted inspection went at the end of last term. Thank you to everyone involved and especially to the residential team who made this a great experience for the inspectors who saw some really positive progress in our residential and extended day offer for our children and young people. Watch this space for the report to be published.

This week is OT Week
This week we celebrated OT week with the theme ‘Big Win, Big Impact’. Throughout the week students have been taking part in fun and meaningful activities during tutor time and within OT sessions.

Students have explored mindfulness practices through breathing exercises to help build emotional regulation. They have also enjoyed fine motor challenges including creative tasks and dexterity games. The games have focused upon promoting coordination, concentration and problem solving skills.

At home you can continue the celebrations by:

Carrying out breathing exercises before bedtime and/or before transitions.

Enjoying fine motor activities as a family through cooking, puzzles, gardening or even starting to string some baubles ready for Christmas!

OT week has been a great reminder that every small success counts!

Student achievements

‘Student represented England at the World Kickboxing Association’

Alfie in KS3 had a great half term break ..  he represented England at the World Kickboxing Association’s world championships. On day one he won the SILVER MEDAL in the individual Karate Kata, and on day 2 he won Bronze in the team event!

!!!This is an amazing achievement!!!

Next year’s tournament is in America 🇺🇸, but Alfie says he determined to go and try for gold

https://www.dawnhouseschool.org.uk/

Schools Advisory Board- Pupil Leadership Group (PLG) representation

Our SAB (a bit like Governors in other schools) met this week to share what’s going well at Dawn House and areas that we are working on. Louie from our Junior class joined us at the beginning to share what he hopes to achieve by being part of the Pupil Leadership Group. He’d like more lessons and more staff as he knows how well they help the children here. He is very excited to have this voice to represent his class at school and was so very confident in talking to a big group of adults, some of whom he hadn’t met before. Well done Louie! He was awarded a few extra merits for that!

On Parents Day one of our parent SAB members will be available for any questions you may have and if you are interested in possibly joining the SAB, you will be able to sign up to show interest or please feel free to contact me directly. This is a great opportunity to be more involved in the life of the school and really supports us, so please do consider this.

Upcoming events

House event- 14th November

Parents Day and Christmas Fair- Saturday 29th November- PARENTS WELCOME- if any parent is interested in having a stall on the day, do let us know, we can help with covering this while you have your parent meetings. Please contact me directly.

School closed for pupils and child facing staff- Monday 1st December

Wednesday 10th December- Christmas lunch

Thursday 18th December- Christmas performances- PARENTS WELCOME

And, some of our staff are involved in the PANTO- Oh yes they are! We are delighted to help promote…

Rapunzel – Mansfield Hospitals Theatre Troupe (January/ February- Mansfield Palace theatre)

(details attached)

Further ahead, but for all new parents out there, our Family Fun Day was rescheduled due to the weather and is now on Saturday 16th May- a day of inflatable fun for all the family to bring a picnic, take part in a penalty shoot-out, stalls, food and drinks…… a great day out for all the family, with sunshine this time!

Next week several groups are off out to the cinema- we hope they all have a good time and maybe they can review the films for us in a future newsletter!

Have a lovely weekend,

Jenny

If your child leaves home in the morning a little unsettled and you want to quickly tell us, so we know to expect a tricky start to the day, a quick email (that we can follow up later) to the tutor and/or core team with ‘Handle with Care’ in the email title will ensure that we are aware.