Rosie’s photos recognised by Vogue Italy

She may only have left school last year, but Rosie Baird‘s photos are already getting noticed.

Some of her work featured on the website of Italian Vogue this month – a major scoop.

Well done Rosie. We will be checking fashion shoots in the near future for your work!

Sackville wins Virtual Sussex School Games

You can’t keep a good team down … 

We are all missing after school fixtures; their return will be a big sign of the return to normality!

In the meantime the virtual efforts of our sportspeople have meant that Sackville has been crowned winner of the Sussex Secondary Virtual School Games.

That looks like a healthy points advantage to us!

Amber T becomes Yamaha Music London’s youngest ever ambassador for International Women’s Day

Congratulations to year 12 student Amber Titchener who has been made an Ambassador for Yamaha Music, one of five women chosen to be part of their International Women’s Day celebrations on March 8th. She is the youngest ambassador they have ever had.

Amber has been asked to record an acoustic version of her next single, ‘Get Me’, as well as talk to camera about what Women’s Day means to her.

Amber is now eagerly awaiting a delivery of Yamaha instruments to play – and hopefully keep! You can read two press releases from Yamaha here and here.

Sackville suffers ransomware attack

We are sorry to say that in the early hours of the morning of Wednesday 24th February, the Sackville IT network was attacked by the Sodinokibi ransomware. This is despite having enterprise level anti-malware software installed and a full-strength firewall. All of the files on our servers were encrypted. Over the course of the following two days it has become clear that our database of students, staff and contacts has also been attacked and encrypted. Access to this database requires a second authentication. Whilst there is no reason to think that any data has been extracted, the workings of this particular piece of malware mean it is not possible to be certain of what it undertook before we were able to clean it from the system.

Following our responsibilities under the Data Protection Act, we have reported the attack to the Information Commissioner’s Office, together with a description of the data held on students, contacts and staff.

The encryption of the files means we are unable at present to use our central email system to contact all of our data subjects. For only a small minority do we have contact details outside this system.

As we work through and restitute the system we will update this post.

Return of students to school, March 2021

We are greatly looking forward to the return of students for face-to-face teaching in March. You can read our detailed plan for their return here.

More detail is also included on the February 26th edition of Sackville News.

With the support of parents, carers and school staff, our students’ engagement in remote learning during lockdown 3 has been exemplary. They will return to face-to-face teaching at the same place in our schemes of work they would normally be, and equipped with a lot of new skills learned during remote education.

Year 11 BTEC Music: Performance through the Pandemic

Our year 11 BTEC musicians have managed to rehearse and perform in a safe and socially distanced way. 

They have used our largest music room and made sure they were in the block alone in order to show us, and their assessors, the quality of their work. You can hear the finished project below.

Well done Seren Foulds, Joe Boyle and Ollie Tomkinson.

You can see them perform at our last EGGSFest in 2019 (how long ago that now seems) here. 

The arts remain alive and well at Sackville. We are looking forward to the return of our Wednesday concerts when the lockdown comes to an end.

Shaken … Amber records with Galaxy Thief

Amber Titchener’s latest track is released this week. Shaken, co-written by Amber, is a collaboration with Galaxy Thief. 

You can pre-save the track to your chosen streaming service here.

No video as yet – the lockdown has got in the way, with Galaxy Thief being based over 100 miles away. However, the artwork is as stunning as the song, and we think Sir Elton John will love this track too!

Your photos of home schooling

We know it is not ideal, but it’s here for a few more weeks. Why not share with us your favourite images of lockdown learning? To get us started, here is the Vermeer family during the last week in January. Lauren and James are hard at work at their live lessons. The laptop in the middle is loaded up with mum’s Open University course – and the happiest member of the family is just visible curled up in the window!

Do you have a photo to share? Please email it to us!

Sarah’s wicked make-up skills

We all know how challenging home schooling can be, but with practical subjects the difficulties are particularly pressing.

Georgia Cotterell, class of 2019, is now at college studying Level 3: Advanced Technical Diploma in Theatrical Special Effects and Media Make-up Artistry at the London College of Beauty Therapy (though remotely now of course). It’s hard to practise and social distance though, so the only alternative is to use your younger sister as a model.

Take a look at how Georgia transformed younger sister Sarah, year 10. It’s wicked!