27 November 2025
27th November 2025
Dear Parents, Guardians and Students/Annwyl Rieni, Gwarchodwyr a Myfyrwyr
Meet the newest member of our Wellbeing team!
This is Koda! Last week, Koda successfully passed his assessment and supported his owner, Mr Hurford, in the process! Over the coming months, we’ll share more about Koda’s role and responsibilities in the school. We are very grateful for the support of the Dog Mentor programme to ensure that our school community is ready for Koda too!
We are delighted to announce that Koda will supporting us to go through the Dog Mentor Programme. The Dog Mentor programme has built upon the benefits of the human-animal bond by providing children with positive experiences with dogs that can help them educationally, developmentally, emotionally and socially.
Over the last 10 years The Dog Mentor programme has been proven to have a positive impact on children in many areas including self-esteem, behaviour, peer relationships and better engagement skills. These improvements then result in improved academic achievement.
Mr Hurford will be bringing Koda into school on a regular basis. We are very excited to see the positive influence that Koda will have on our school environment as a whole as well as with individual students.
Full training will be given to both Koda and our staff that will work with Koda in order to ensure that the welfare of everyone involved is maintained as a top priority.
Please feel free to visit The Dog Mentor’s website and Facebook page for more details and to see some of the schools that have introduced their dogs into school:
We hope that you share our excitement but please feel free to contact Mr Hurford with any questions you may have.
Koda’s assessment was very kindly paid for in full by our wonderful PTA which allows me to make a seamless link to the next item in today’s blog, a big shout out to thank and promote our small but amazing PTA.
An update from our amazing PTA
Many thanks to all the Year 9 parents who attended the Year 9 evening last week, especially if you purchased a snack from the PTA! They raised approximately £100 during the evening to support a range of school activities. Here’s an update in their own words.
“The PTA continues to play a vital role in supporting school life, and as a small team of volunteers we warmly welcome any support or new ideas from parents and carers.
We host regular fundraising events, with preparations already underway for the Year 9 Parents’ Evening and our Christmas activities.
Please come along, enjoy some refreshments, and have a chat with the team. You can email us at pta@llanishen.cardiff.sch.uk.
Recently, the PTA has been delighted to fund several meaningful initiatives across the school, including:
- Support to help students attend school trips and events
- Funding for the Anxiety Based School Avoidance provision, which supports students attending school remotely
- Breakfasts for the Buddy Reading Programme, linking Year 7 and Year 12 students
- The assessment of a prospective school therapy dog
- New equipment for the School Radio Station
- Additional support for the Pokémon Club
With Christmas approaching, we would be extremely grateful if you could support us by signing up to Easy Fundraising:
www.easyfundraising.org.uk/causes/llanishen-high-school-pta.
A small percentage of your online purchases is donated to the school at no extra cost to you, helping us continue to provide valuable support to pupils and staff.”
The Cosy Café is open for business
On 21st November our enterprising Sixth Form ASD students launched their warm and welcoming Cosy Café! Based in the school meeting room, this will be a regular coffee shop and pop-up shop. Students will be serving freshly ground coffee and other hot and cold drinks such as smoothies and milkshakes, and also baked good. As well as this, they will be making gifts such as bath salts and Christmas gifts.
November 21st was a very successful ‘soft launch,’ serving base students and staff (and a few other enquiring staff who followed the smell of the freshly baked lemon drizzle! I can’t say who they were but the crumbs on my keyboard are ever so awkward to brush away). From Friday 5th of December they will start to expand their trade. They will be open initially from break until the end of lunch and will gradually build up a staff and Sixth Form student customer base. Here they are in action.
It’s cash only at the current time which means that the students were reliant on their excellent numeracy and mental arithmetic skills. They worked with accuracy and achieved very high levels of customer satisfaction! They even provided loyalty cards. Seven more Americano’s and I’ll be claiming a free hot drink! Here is the mouth-watering menu for reference!
Congratulations to our Rotary Young Leaders
Last Monday evening some of our amazing Sixth Form students attended the Rotary club weekly meal and meeting to present to them on their time at Storey Arms in the summer holidays.
Each year, the Rotary club fund a number of our students to participate in the Rotary Youth Leadership Award where they spend a week at Storey Arms leading others in a variety of activities including canoeing, gorge walking and caving. They all find this immensely rewarding. The skills developed and the new friends made is something the students take with them for life. We are very grateful to the Rotary club for their continued offer of this opportunity.
The power of an individual
Next today, we are delighted to celebrate and congratulate a student who has continually demonstrated the impact that one individual can make.
Jack Herald in Year 13 was the brain child behind our first ‘Soak a Sixth Former/SLT’ last year. He lead the way.
He’s only just dried off from this years’ soaking and he’s been busier still.
Throughout the month of November, Jack has been running and raising money for Movember. He’s run over 42 mile/68km and has raised £265 so far.
We’re delighted to share the link to his fundraising page to give our school community the opportunity to make any last donations in the remaining days of Movember.
Here’s the link to his fundraiser: https://movember.com/m/15236216?mc=60
Literacy galore!
One of our key school improvement priorities for 2025-26 is the development of literacy across the school. So here is a round-up of some of the activities that have been taking place recently to encourage reading and imagination.
The library Halloween writing competition winners!
Last week, Mrs Hazeltine-Rees and our Sixth Form senior librarians announced the winners of the Halloween story writing competition. Below are the talented winners of some truly terrifying stories. Well done everyone! We can’t wait to see what the budding writers produce next. Keep an eye out for the next Library writing competition, which will be announced in our Christmas Library newsletter.
The winners were:
Year 7
- Hossein Hossini 7G 1st
- Emily Rapps 7D 2nd
- Georgie Jones 7F 3rd
Year 8
- Dina Hussainy 8D 1st
- Dylan Maxey 8B 2nd
- Owain Creed 8C 3rd
Year 9
- Malika Ali 9E 1st
- Sajal Zaid 9G 2nd
Special mention and some sweets to Freddie Garrett and Sonny Parry 8C for their highly imaginative story. Here are some of the winners with their amazingly creepy stories!
Buddy Reading
Last week our ‘Buddy Reading programme began in the sixth form PSA. Our fabulous year 12 students will be reading twice a week in registration with year 7 pupils to help develop their reading. Last week was a ‘meet your buddy’ breakfast and this week the reading started in earnest. We are very grateful to the PTA for funding breakfast for our students over the next 10 weeks.
A Level Language and Linguistics Enrichment.
Last week the year 12 and 13 A-Level Language and Linguistics students had a visit from Dr Sean Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Cardiff University. He told us all about his fascinating research study investigating gender and gaming – which fits brilliantly into the year 13 topic of language and gender. The students enjoyed it greatly and found it very useful.
He also introduced Y11 students who are interested in English at A-Level to what is studied in English Language and Linguistics. He gave a fascinating introduction to the topics studied including: where languages and words come from; how AI uses linguistic knowledge; how forensic linguistics is used to catch criminals, how children learn to speak and how gaming uses gendered language.
If anyone is interested in taking A-Level Language and Linguistics at LHS, please talk to Mrs Hazeltine-Rees, Mrs Davies or Mrs Card in the English department.
Staff Seren yr wythnos
This week, our student Criw Cymraeg group have nominated Mrs Sweet-Jones for her use of the Welsh language. Staff can be nominated for their effort or their accuracy and pronunciation! Well done Miss! Da iawn!
Thank you for reading/Diolch am ddarllen,
Mrs Sarah Parry, Headteacher