The school is a popular one and at present over-subscribed. There are
970 pupils in the school, of which 340 are sixth formers. For the 1995/96
entry there were 250 applications for 209 places. Enquiries about entry
below Sixth Form level (Years 9-11) should be directed in the first instance
to the Local Education Authority (Oxford City Division, Macclesfield House,
New Road, Oxford OX1 1NA); and about entry to the Sixth Form (Years 12
and 13) to the Head Teacher, Martin
Roberts.
A new Humanities building was opened in November 1997 (replacing several ageing temporary classrooms). It has a Network room connected via fibre optic cable with outlets in all the new classrooms.
IT in the Curriculum
The National Curriculum requires that all students experience the appropriate
use of Information Technology in all subject areas. At Cherwell we are
well advanced towards this goaL
All students in Year 9
have two lessons per fortnight of Information Technology. In these lessons
pupils are taught how to use the network facilities including word processors,
data handling, spreadsheets, graphics, CAD, control, desk top publishing,
CD Rom, e-mail and the Internet. Through departmental IT agreements, pupils
will also use IT to enhance their learning in other subject areas.
Years 10 and 11: IT lessons continue to be taught discretely
and further opportunities to use IT skills are being developed across the
curriculum. The delivery of IT in Years 10 and 11 is under review and will
in future lead to an appropriate form of certification.
Computer Science at 'A' Level is currently available through the City
Consortium.
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We began in General Studies lessons in Year 11, with the help of Alison Norris from the Oxford Development Education Council. More about work done in General Studies can be found on our General Studies pages One snag we encountered when using Netscape with a whole class was that Netscape took about 20 - 25 minutes to start up with 20 users! Altering the RM-supplied MTSL so that Netscape runs from p: instead of being first copied into each user's home directory seems to have solved the problem. Has anyone else encountered it?
Internet sites are filtered by our ISP but the staff do need to monitor the children during their lunchtime sessions as new "unsuitable" sites can appear and be available before the filtering processes can block them. Most pupils are sensible in their use of the Internet.
Our aim is to produce a site which is valuable for our own curriculum
use as well as an interesting site for others to visit. Each subject area
is being encouraged to produce its own page of useful links relevant to
their curriculum at KS3, KS4 or A'level. Students can then be directed
to these sources of information either as part of a structured lesson or
for individual research. Student teachers placed at Cherwell from Oxford
University Department of Educational Studies and Oxford
Brookes University have played a key role working with departments
to find relevant sites.
The main structure of this site, the front page, links page and the
HTML for this page were put together by Ben
Werdmuller (then in Year 12), while everything else was created by
a cast of thousands. Check out the different pages to find out about the
creative and resourceful students who created them