Community Update 9 January 2025

Happy New Year!

We hope you all had a lovely break and enjoyed time with friends and family. We have come back from holiday refreshed and ready to continue with the preparation for our school merger.

Staff update 
Following the recruitment of the new Senior School Leadership Team, we have now commenced the next phase: recruiting our Academic and Wellbeing Middle Leaders for the new ESM Senior School. We are very aware that this is a difficult process, and we are doing everything to ensure that staff are supported.

We welcomed Sian Jones to the School this week. Sian is a valuable member of the Merger Steering Committee and has been supporting schools across the UK with their mergers for over a decade. Sian spoke with staff, offering tools to help them navigate the upcoming changes, and sharing feedback from other schools that have come through similar journeys and are now seeing the benefits. Sian also spent time with our Senior Leaders to answer questions and provide sage advice on navigating a major school restructure.

Website  
Our new school website, www.erskinestewartmelville.com, has launched today and reflects the future co-educational structure of the School. Our previous website reached the end of its lifespan in January, so the creation of a new website was essential to protect the School from any security risks.

While our preference would have been to delay the launch of a new website until the opening of our new co-educational school in August 2026, the security of our school and its community and our commitment to minimising costs are our priorities. As such, we have taken the decision to use our new name and co-educational structure to avoid the significant cost of creating two separate websites in quick succession. We hope you enjoy looking at the new site and share it with friends and family.

Buildings Update 
We have now had several meetings with the architects to review the needs of the soon-to-be-remodelled Science, Innovation, & Technology building. The architects enjoyed spending some time with our Product Design Heads of Department from MES and SMC this week, to walk through the building and discuss ideas on how to best use the existing space to create a phenomenal learning space for the merged Senior School. The feedback from Product Design along with feedback from our Heads of Science Departments at both Senior Schools has allowed the architects to progress quickly with their designs. We hope to be able to provide a more detailed update soon.

Catering 
The future of lunch provision has generated many ideas on how we can enhance our catering services when we move to co-ed and merge the Junior School onto one site. Our contracted caterer, Chartwell’s, will be doing a full review of our Queensferry Road and Ravelston sites this month to make recommendations on how we can best use our existing space. We will follow their visit by engaging with our school families on the future of lunch services.

Uniform 
I am aware that the school community is keen to have an update on uniform. While there is nothing concrete to share at the moment, we are working closely with our potential uniform providers to ensure that the school community is able to engage in the design process when the time comes, and the transition to the new uniform is simple and cost-effective.