School finishes at 1.15pm on Friday 20 December 2019 (following afternoon registration in tutor bases), although there will be supervision for students in school up until 3.00pm if needed.

The 360 Harpurs Bus service will be departing early that day at 1.15pm.

Students who wish to catch the Sixes service which leaves at 1.10pm, will need to come to Student Reception before the last day of term so that a note of their name can be made.  Rather than going to registration at 1.00pm, these students should come to reception.  Once they have received their mark, they will be permitted to leave.

Students return to school on Monday 6 January 2020 which will be timetable week 2.

We are very pleased to announce that Belper School and Sixth Form Centre has been nominated for the Diabetes UK Good Diabetes Care in School Award.  The award celebrates and showcases schools that deliver good care and support to children and teenagers with Type 1 diabetes.  As part of the nomination. Diabetes UK is inviting parents and carers to complete a brief online parent survey at https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/school-nomination.

Please follow the link to the survey if you would like to show your support or to oppose this nomination.  The survey should take no more than two minutes to complete.  You can answer this survey anonymously if you want to.

Please be advised that you have until Monday 9 December 2019 to respond to this parent survey.  Responses to this parent survey will be used by Diabetes UK to assess our school’s nomination for the award.  You can find out more about the Good Diabetes Care in School Award at www.diabetes.org.uk/school-award.

Thank you to everyone who attended our recent sixth form open evening despite the heavy rain. We really enjoyed meeting you all and hope that we answered any questions you may have had.

If you couldn’t make it, please contact the school and we can arrange a visit to tell you more about our sixth form provision and our exciting new plans for the future.

Nick Goforth, Head of Belper

Following feedback from the Department of Education, we can now confirm that our 2019 GCSE results are officially Belper School’s best ever… to date. On results day we were delighted with the outcomes, and the smiles on the faces of our students said it all. We already knew that the 2019 results were a big improvement on our 2018 outcomes, which had broken all previous records, but waited patiently for this to be confirmed by the DfE.

Our provisional progress or ‘Progress 8’ score is +0.11 for 2019. This is way above the national average (-0.02 in 2018) and the average for Derbyshire schools, confirming that Belper School students make considerably better progress than most of their counterparts both locally and nationally. Our ‘Attainment 8’ score of 50 points also sets a new record being someway above the national average (46.5 in 2018). Furthermore, 50% of students achieved a ‘strong’ grade 5+ in both English and Maths and the number of students achieving the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) soared.

Needless to say, we are extremely pleased with these results and hope to build on them still further in 2020. We would like to thank parents and carers for their support and congratulate students on these fantastic results.