Easter Revision

Whilst the school is closed for the fortnight Easter holday, there are virtual revision lessons going on over the break for our year 11 students. You can find the meet links here. Good luck!

Sixth formers shine at Chemistry Olympiad

Congratulations to our sixth form chemists who put in an amazing performance during this year’s ‘lockdown’ chemistry olympiad.

Special congratulations go to our year 12 students, who have only just finished the AS level content, where many of the questions required knowledge of work to be done in year 13. All these students showed how much they are up for a challenge, and we hope to achieve even more highly next year.

Thank you to Mr Langford and Mr Groves for organising, and to Mr Groves for hand-delivering the papers to every student during the school closure.

Pictured here alongside their teachers are Sam Parsons, Lucas Ryan, Nadia Usman, Lucy Kolter, Luke Waddell, Hannah Plumb, Isobel Carrick and Sophie Taylor.

Watch out Gary Lineker – here comes Lewis!

Congratulations to year 8 student Lewis Cottam, who earned the chance to interview Brighton manager Graham Potter last month.

Lewis, an ardent Seagull, won the right to talk to one of his idols by describing his favourite Brighton game in 250 words. You can see his interview here. 

Lewis’ next job is to write a match report for the programme. Well done Lewis – we look forward to seeing you on Match of the Day in a few years.

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.