Welcome

Last Year at SHS

Academic Achievement
According to The Daily Telegraph’s results league tables, Sheffield High School is now in the top 50 schools in the country and was the top school in the whole of Yorkshire and the North Midlands in 2009. At both A-level and GCSE, last year’s Year 13 and Year 11 girls broke all records. At A-level we equalled our best ever results with 83% of all passes being at grades A and B and almost half of the year group achieving straight A grades. At GCSE, 82% of all the passes were at grades A*/A, a record which will really take some beating in the future.

For all our Year 11 and Year 13 girls, their achievements have been the result of an enormous amount of hard work, determination and perseverance from the girls themselves and from their teachers, combined with support and encouragement from parents and friends.

As in recent years, we had several girls who achieved “early” passes at GCSE and A-level. Passes were achieved in Modern Greek, Italian, Arabic, Chinese and French and all were at A* grade. Emily Hogg added to her achievement last year of A* in GCSE Japanese at the age of 10 with a grade A in AS Japanese at the age of 11.

Once again, over 90% of our students achieved a place at their first choice university. We have our first student this year, Annabel Gledden, who is going off to study in America on a full scholarship to the University of Santa Barbara in California. Other students who have been awarded university scholarships this year are Verity Hill with a music scholarship at Reading and Hannah and Heidi Parker who both have sports scholarships at Newcastle University.

Extra-Curricular Activities
The opportunities that we give our students through our extra-curricular programme, taking on positions of responsibility in school and through leading clubs and activities, or the charity and voluntary work they do in the community and through international visits and working with our partner schools abroad ensure that they are as prepared as they can be for the challenges they will face in the future.

Over three quarters of our Year 13 leavers, as a year group, have carried out regular voluntary work within the local community and every single one of them has played their part doing regular break or lunch duties or assisting at school events. Over 80% have been involved in extra-curricular sport, a similar number in music or drama and the vast majority have taken on a leadership role and every one of them has been put in a position where they have had to present to an audience or class during their time at school.

International Activities
One of our major achievements this year has been linked to our international activities. In February we were runners up in the prestigious Yorkshire and Humberside Business Awards where our extensive curricular and partnership work with China was recognized. The School has also been awarded the full International School Award following our Intermediate Award last year. The award recognizes excellence in all international links – our links with partner schools in France, Germany, Spain, Bangladesh, the USA, China and Egypt as well as curriculum work raising global awareness and our programme of international visits which expands every year. Last year alone our girls had the opportunity to visit France, Spain, Holland, Iceland, Florida, California, New York, Barbados, Costa Rica, Cuba and the Isle of Wight.

Departmental Review
Last year we made some changes to our modern languages curriculum, offering French, German and Spanish in the Junior School and a choice of these languages in Year 7, along with Mandarin Chinese for anyone who wants to try a new language. A very popular visit this year for Year 7 and Year 8 girls was a language and sport trip to Murcia in Spain.

The past year has been a very successful one for all our subject departments. In Maths, as well as hitting the national press for our excellent A-level results in Maths and Further Maths, we have had very high numbers of girls achieving gold awards in the Maths Challenge competitions. Natalia Mole and Natalie Chan-Lam achieved exceptionally high scores in the national maths Olympiad and our team of Year 11 mathematicians reached the finals of the Texas Instruments National Maths Team Challenge. In Business and Enterprise, our Year 10 girls were joint winners of the Coca-Cola Enterprise Challenge and the Sixth Form Young Enterprise group swept the board, scooping 8 of the 12 awards available in the Regional Competition. In public speaking, Henrietta Hill reached the final of the prestigious Chrystal Prize in London where she narrowly missed out on the top award, speaking passionately about whether pupils have too many examinations nowadays.

In music, we have been entertained by some excellent concerts once again throughout the year and our chamber choir are regularly invited to sing at events out of school. The joint Sixth Form choir with Birkdale goes from strength to strength and its members combined singing skills with acting to join our school production of Pirates of Penzance in March – a performance which was declared by many to being as good as a professional production.

The Art Department has had an exceptional year which culminated in an exhibition in July of all our GCSE and A-level students’ exam work. We were delighted to hear in June that the Art Department had been awarded the Good Schools Guide award for the best A-level Art results in the Country over the past 3 years.

‘Public Benefit’
Along with all other independent schools, we now have to meet stringent requirements laid down by the Charity Commission to demonstrate public benefit. This has not been a problem for us at Sheffield High School as, in addition to our bursary scheme funded by the Girls’ Day School Trust, we are also involved in a wide range of partnerships with a number of local schools, the universities, Sheffield’s two league football clubs and local charities. I was invited in November last year to speak to politicians and other educational leaders at a forum at Westminster on some of our partnership projects which have been funded through the Government’s Independent/State School Partnership Scheme. The latest of these projects has been one in which we have worked alongside Sheffield University’s Science faculty to stimulate interest in Science in the 14-19 age group. This project culminated in a competition called Reactiv8 in which teams from schools across South Yorkshire took part.

Cookery Classes at SHS!
Towards the end of the last school year we established a link with Sheffield College to enable all our Year 9 girls to be able to use the College’s brand new state of the art catering facilities as part of our Technology curriculum. One of the recurring requests from the girls at School Council and from parents at our parent forum meetings is for us to teach the girls how to cook! We don’t have room for a cookery room in school at the moment so we have had to look for alternative ways to meet these requests. Our catering manager now offers stage 1 or 2 cookery courses during the Easter and summer holidays and the course at Sheffield College enabled all our Year 9s to experience cooking a 3-course meal.

Charitable Activities
Several of our partnerships involve local and global charities and are linked to our fund-raising activities in school. Despite the recession, the girls managed to raise over £18,000 last year for charities which include South Yorkshire Eating Disorders Association, Bluebell Wood Hospice, Cancer Research and the Jhum Para School in Bangladesh, which is one our ongoing projects.

Continuing Success in Sport
Sheffield High School has an incredible reputation for sport, not only locally but also nationally – and internationally. Our senior hockey and netball teams went on tour to Barbados last Easter where they performed exceptionally well against national standard players. We have seen our Under-15 trampolining team become national champions, our gymnasts very close runners up in the national championship, our badminton team reaching the national finals, our ski team winning medals in the English and British Championships and our athletics team winning the national GDST Trust rally. At individual level, the girls have also recorded some fantastic achievements. In netball, Lauren Potter was selected to captain the Under-17 England team and went on to win the European Netball Championship with the team in Gibraltar. Lauren, still only 16, is now training with the Under-19 squad. Nicola Chan-Lam is national Under-18 badminton champion, while her younger sister Natalie is Under-13 national singles and doubles champion as well as being the European badminton champion.

Developments for the Future
This year saw the launch of the school’s new 3-year development plan. It’s an ambitious plan which aims to put Sheffield High School well and truly on the map as a leading school, not just locally, but nationally in all aspects of school life. Part of this plan is to ensure that our facilities continue to be of the highest quality and meet the ever-changing needs of our students and we are very grateful to the Girls’ Day School Trust for the investment they continue to make in the school. We are currently in the middle of a major building programme to extend our Sixth Form facilities so that we can provide for the high numbers we now have in our sixth form. This year, numbers have exceeded 200 which is the largest sixth form we have ever had. Planning permission for this development was finally granted in June after lengthy negotiations with the planners and the Conservation Advisory Group because of our Sixth Form Centre being a listed building and situated in a conservation area. However, the work is now under way and our sixth formers are already benefitting from a brand new hall, fully-fitted kitchen and coffee bar. The new extension, due to be completed in the summer term of 2010, will house new tutorial rooms, an independent learning centre and an outdoor seating area. You can read more about this exciting development.

Valerie Dunsford
Headmistress

September 2009