Every day begins with registration and a tutor time (or assembly) of 20 minutes. This is then followed with five lessons, each of 60 minutes, interspersed by a morning break of 20 minutes and a lunch break of 40 minutes.
At OSA almost every lesson/subject will be taught be one or more ‘subject specialist’ teachers; this means that students have a number of different teachers, for different subjects, across the week. Using a 3-character coding system, all members of staff are represented on timetables by 3 letters which generally correspond to the first letter of their forename and the first two letters of their surname; for example Mrs Betty Smith will usually be BSM; where this would mean that the code for two members of staff would be the same (e.g. if a Mr Bob Smythe were to join the staff), a slight variation is chosen (in this example, probably BSE.) You will find full lists of teachers’ names, along with email contact links, on the ‘Staff’ page of our website here.
The Academy operates a two-weekly timetable, with lessons alternating between ‘Week 1’ and ‘Week 2’ throughout the year; week numbers are printed into the Student Planner in order that students don’t forget which week’s lessons they need to be prepared for and a handy checklist of these week numbers may also be found here .