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Category: Heathlands Primary

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St Mary’s Update – 20th June 2017

St Mary’s Update – 20th June 2017

St Mary’s Church update for 20th June provides listings of services, bible readings and other events and news such as Senior Citizen’s lunch, Contemporary Worship & IGNITE! service.

Don’t forget, the church is now open on weekdays if you would like a quiet space to reflect or say a prayer for someone.

Contemporary Worship

You can Google this and find many meanings, so why not pop along to the Methodist Church in West Bergholt on 25th June at 6:30pm and find out what the Colchester Methodist Circuit Continue reading “St Mary’s Update – 20th June 2017”

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20’s Plenty Near Heathlands

A typical public event with Murray Harlow towering over the others
New Church Road
L-R Rachel Hopkins (teacher – Heathlands), Jeremy Hallam (headteacher – Heathlands), Aaron Monks (winner – age 9), Cllr Anne Brown (Essex County Councillor), John Gili-Ross (Parish Council – Chair of Environment), Mrs Monks (Aaron’s Mum), Murray Harlow (Parish Council – Communications), Harry Stone (Parish Council – Vice Chair & Transport Rep), Chris Stevenson (Chairman Parish Council)
At School Lane

20’s Plenty Near Heathlands

Improving traffic safety in our villages and schools can take some time but West Bergholt Parish Council has shown it is worth the effort.  Over a three-year period the village produced and introduced a Traffic Safety Plan.  It did this working in partnership with Essex County Council, Heathlands primary school and village residents.

A series of road safety measures were agreed and Continue reading “20’s Plenty Near Heathlands”

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New primary school places?

New primary school places?

You have until 31st January to share your views online about proposals to create 1,085 new primary school places across five existing Colchester schools from September 2018. All five projects would involve new teaching blocks, enhanced external areas for outdoor PE and play spaces, and increased car parking.

West Bergholt falls into the Colchester north and rural northeast zone where the following is forecast: Continue reading “New primary school places?”

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5 Es to Address Traffic Safety

5 Es to Address Traffic Safety

trygve-picture-report
Illegally Parked Vehicle

Responding to concerns about traffic related safety issues in the village, the Parish Council has helped to form a group whose brief is to explore ways of addressing these concerns.  This group consists of Parish Councillors, Borough Councillors and residents who want to help bring about improvements; since September it has met three times.

As a starting point, the Village Safety Plan of 2012, which led to changes in New Church Road, has been revisited.  As then, no single measure will solve all our problems, and so an approach, which is termed the 5 Es, is being followed.

  1. Engage the community
  2. Encourage good driving and parking
  3. Educate all sections of the community
  4. Enforce the regulations
  5. Engineer revised road layouts

All need careful thought and cooperation to achieve, with 4E and 5E being most difficult and needing most time; however we have made a start.

On 25th February in the Orpen Hall a safety promotional event is being planned and will be advertised fully in the New Year, so please look out for details and make every effort to attend.

Reporting bad & illegal practices on Trygve
Reporting bad & illegal practices on Trygve

Trygve

Following increased activity on Facebook about 30 residents have already downloaded an App called Trygve.  This gives you the chance to report incidents, with photographs if appropriate, and will:

  • give the authorities the means to identify persistent safety abusers, and
  • enable the group to collect evidence to support action at the most dangerous hotspots.

That being so, if you feel able, please sign up to join those already giving their support using this link.

Communications

The team are also establishing good communications with the School, hence parents, and there are plans to engage other key players such as the Coop.

If you have ideas to help, or would like more information, please contact the group through the Parish Clerk, Laura Walkinshaw, on 240772 or [email protected].

Harry Stone
(Vice Chair of Parish Council)

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Concert Band’s Busy Autumn

Concert Band’s Busy Autumn

The band have already been very busy around the village this autumn, holding an open rehearsal at Heathlands in September and a primary school workshop (again at Heathlands) in October.  Coming up as well we have a concert in the Church of St Mary in November, and of course we’ll be playing for the village Remembrance Service.

Workshop

concert-band-workshopSurprisingly the workshop was the first one we’ve held at Heathlands, as historically the school musicians were encouraged to join the band by its founder Sid Cooper who taught music there. These days our approach to maintaining a wide range of ages in the band is to hold regular primary school workshops, which have proven to be an incredibly popular and fun way for us to encourage tomorrow’s musicians. We were delighted to see so many players from Heathlands join us for the workshop and perform a wonderful  “mini concert” at the end of it, and to see such enthusiasm for music at the school. The final word goes to somebody at the workshop…

The band made everyone feel very welcome indeed – what a fun afternoon!

Concerts & Charities

At the time of writing this, we’re looking forward to performing our “1966 And All That” concert in the village.  This will be our first concert on home turf for a couple of years. This time we’ll be raising money for Children In Need to add to the £35,000 that we’ve raised for local & national charities since we started recording the amounts a dozen years ago. That amount includes:

  • almost £10,000 for St Helena Hospice, not including the amounts we raised for them before our records began,
  • £4000 we’ve raised over the years for the village Church and its charities, including at 2004’s impromptu “Last Night Of The Proms In A Barn” when the heavens opened unexpectedly.

Christmas

As always we’ll end the year with a concert featuring the wonderful music of Christmas.  This year we are  at the beautiful St Peter ad Vincula Church in Coggeshall again on Saturday 10th December at 7:30pm. The concert will include music from Vaughan-Williams, Irving Berlin, Leroy Anderson (Sleigh Ride), The Beach Boys (Little Saint Nick) and many others. We’ll also be performing a selection of carols, some to sing to, and some beautiful arrangements that are perfect for listening to. We hope you’ll join us for a lovely evening of festive music in a lovely setting.

As always, details on all of our events are available on the band website www.wbcb.org.  New players of any age are always welcome to come along on Friday evenings at Heathlands School, or our next Open Rehearsal on 20th January.  We look forward to seeing you at our Christmas Concert, and we wish you a Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year.