Headmaster's message Friday 15th September

By

 Dear Parents and Guardians,


Now that we have settled into term, I thought it would be worthwhile to share with you some of the things that we will be working on this year as part of our school improvement plan. Our plan is based on 3 themes: culture, curriculum and community.

Under the theme of culture, we have launched the DBS Code which guides the actions that we take relating to student behaviour. You will also have noticed as part of this that we are focusing on school uniform. Some parents have asked us why we have reverted back to black leather school shoes. Last year, in response to parental feedback we allowed students to wear trainers but we were finding that this led to slipping standards of uniform and that this was impacting on student behaviour and attitudes to learning. By improving the consistency of dress, it makes it much easier to focus on high standards.

We are working on several areas of our curriculum and are also developing new materials for our parents to understand the curriculum in each school section and also looking vertically in each subject area. As an independent school, we are able to draw on best practice from many areas and find the best of what works. As such, in some areas we will be augmenting the Cambridge Curriculum that we have been using where we feel a different approach may be more robust and add more depth to what we study.

The final area is one which we have been giving a lot of thought to. We love the community feel that we have at DBS and we want to make sure that we do not lose this going forward. For those of you who have been with us for some time, you will notice how the changing size of the school can affect this. Just two years ago, it was possible to stop and have a chat with other parents and teachers at drop off but now this is very difficult due to traffic. We will be looking at ways that we can formally bring the community together to make sure that we maintain the sense of community as we grow.

This week we had our first set of fixtures with a series of friendlies against Bangkok Pattana. We had a mixture of strong wins along with some crushing defeats but regardless of the outcome, it was good to see our students back on the field and playing together.

Have a nice weekend!


Jonny Liddell

Headmaster