The summer term ended with an assembly to say goodbye to our caretaker Nigel Sorensen. Nigel worked at St James for three years and he made a huge difference to the school. As well as keeping our school clean, he built many things from benching in the ICT suite and an outside covered area for our younger children to erecting the adventure playground equipment and our polytunnel. He organised our very successful Midsummer Ball in June and kept some of our parents fit and calm with his tai chi classes. In short, he was more than a caretaker and we were very sad to see him go. However, we are very pleased for him that he has moved on to a much larger school in Hertfordshire where he can continue to put his many talents to good use. We were joined this September by Mrs Ann Lowry who was previously a caretaker in a Guildford primary school. She has only been with us a few days but already it feels as though she has been here for ages. We hope she will enjoy working with us.

This term we started with 180 children on roll and seven classes. We have been working towards this for the last few years so we could have one class for each year group and it is very gratifying to have achieved it at last. Teacher Miss Lesley Green returned from her year long trip round the world to take Year 5 and she has many wonderful stories to tell. She started her trip in India, going to Tibet and Nepal then to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam; down through Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, ending her journey through Peru, Bolivia and Brazil.

This year is an exciting one for us with our building project due to start in early November. This will give us two new classrooms, a music room and improved staff and office accommodation. We still have much work to do in raising the money to complete the project. We are almost half way towards our £50,000 target and we have more events in the pipeline over the next few months. We have been touched by the generosity of so many individuals in sending in donations and also by children and parents undertaking their own fundraising events for the school. For example, five year old Jamie gave rides on his toy tractor at his sister's birthday party and raised £2. By the time you read this we will have had our Football Tournament and our next event will be the Car Boot and Table Top Sale. It seems many people have much to sell so I hope you will come to find a bargain!

Reading both the national and local press it is not possible to notice that the National Health Service is in difficulty with its budget.

It seems to me that when the service was set up starting in 1948 the costs of medial care were vaguely manageable within terms of the National Budget.

Today with vastly increased medicines and equipment, many health care processes are available, but it all of these are to be made available to all members of the community costs will escalate beyond those which taxpayers and industry can support.

I think that a National Debate needs to be started on how to restrict on the more "exotic" health care which is becoming available thus ensuring the ongoing health of the NHS.