Mrs Elspeth Lewis has informed the governing body of King Henry VIII School, Abergavenny that she will be retiring from the teaching profession on 31 August 2022, the end of this academic year.

Mrs Lewis joined KHS as Headteacher in September 2014, and quickly established her strategy to lead the school in improving the overall quality of the education provided there. This focus on the core purpose of teaching and learning, alongside a commitment to excellent wellbeing provision for all students, has allowed the school to grow and flourish. Most recently, examinations results at KHS have been outstanding, and the school has seen a real growth in its leadership capacity, with staff contributing to improvements not only at KHS but also in their work with other schools across the region and nationally.

Since March 2020, Mrs Lewis has been the Executive Headteacher for both KHS and Croesyceiliog School, Cwmbran and her excellent leadership skills recently resulted in recently resulted in a very positive outcome for Croesyceiliog following an Estyn revisit.

Mrs Lewis’s retirement will mark the end of the formal partnership with Croesyceiliog, but, in enthusiastically agreeing to continue the partnership for the 2021/22 academic year, the KHS governing body recognised the considerable benefits that the partnership had also brought to KHS, where the collaborative working between the two schools had led to the whole being very much greater than the sum of its parts. This was particularly the case for the arrangements necessary to deal with Covid-19, where the sharing of tasks and challenges led to both schools being able to ensure that students continued to learn, whether in school or at home, regardless of the barriers that had to be overcome.

In the letter to parents announcing her retirement, Mrs Lewis had asked that they be assured that there would be no diminution in her commitment to KHS in her remaining two terms and that she was very much looking forward to continuing to work with parents, guardians and the rest of the Abergavenny school community during that time.

Mrs Sian Phillips, the Chair of the KHS governing body, has said that Mrs Lewis’s leadership will be an extremely difficult act to follow, but she has emphasised that governors will be working hard to ensure that appropriate planning and action takes place, in good time, to appoint another excellent headteacher to take the school forward. She added that this will be particularly important at present because, if the establishment of the new 3-19 school on the KHS site receives final local authority approval this month, the headteacher appointment process, undertaken in conjunction with Deri View Primary School and Monmouthshire County Council, will be crucial to the success of the new school.