21st May 2020
Dear parents and carers
Update on wider opening of schools
Since the government announcement around the wider opening of schools, we have been working tirelessly to create a plan to make sure we can safely welcome your children back into school. Thank you for your patience while we carried out this work.
As you will be aware, the priority groups announced for returning to school first are nursery, reception, Year 1 and Year 6. The government announcement said that this would be from the 1st June at the earliest and provided that the five key tests set by the government justify this wider opening at that time. This includes that the rate of infection is decreasing.
Schools will also continue to make provision for the children of key workers in other year groups.
Depending on the situation leading up to 1st June, we are planning to begin to bring year groups into school on a staggered basis. This is so that we can monitor how well our strategies are working and to ensure that all parents and children are fully aware of our new ways of working.
Provisional plan
| Monday 1st June |
Only key workers’ children will be in school. All staff will be in school to make final preparations for the return of children. |
| Tuesday 2nd June |
Reception children |
| Wednesday 3rd June |
Reception and Year 1 |
| Thursday 4th June |
Reception, Year 1 and Nursery |
| Friday 5th June |
Reception, Year 1, Nursery and Year 6 |
We understand that there will be many concerns about safety, hygiene and social distancing. We have made plans aimed at ensuring we follow the government and health and safety guidance.
Specific precautions we will take include:
- Limiting group sizes and allocating 2 adults per group
- Staggered starts and ends to the day
- Named entrances for different groups to enter by
- Staggered playtimes with defined areas for children to play in
- Sandwiches for lunch as opposed to hot dinners so that children are able to eat them easily and hygienically. These will be eaten in their classroom so that cross contagion can be minimised.
- Cleaning of surfaces throughout the day
- Keeping pupils and staff with coronavirus symptoms at home
- All children to stay in their allocated group at all times.
- Social distancing followed in classrooms wherever possible
- All toys and resources, which cannot be easily cleaned, cleared from classrooms
- Frequent hand washing
- Pupils will have their own writing equipment so that they do not need to share
- Once placed in a group, your child will stay in that group and with the teacher allocated to the group until further guidance is issued. This will limit social contact. Children will remain in these groups at all times including playtime and lunchtime.
Because we have had to create many more groups in order to achieve small group sizes, your child may have a different teacher to their usual teacher and may be in a different classroom.
While we will do our best to ensure that children stay 2m apart, the government have stated: “We know that, unlike older children and adults, early years and primary age children cannot be expected to remain 2m apart from each other and staff – we are taking this into account”
Please note that if your child is clinically extremely vulnerable, or living with someone who is in this group, they should not come back to school and should continue home learning.
If your child is clinically vulnerable (but not clinically extremely vulnerable), you should follow medical advice to decide if they should come back to school. Please refer to www.gov.uk/coronavirus for further details of these groups.
We will provide further information as soon as possible, clarifying start and end times and the entrances to be used by and some of the information in this letter may change. Equally, government guidance may change and, again, we will need to adapt our plans to comply with this guidance.
We will also keep you updated once we know more about when the school will be able to reopen for other year groups. For pupils at home, we will continue to support you and your child with home learning, and free meal support for those eligible.
Stay safe and take care
A Dickson
Headteacher
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