St Luke’s CE Primary School Newsletter

11.6.2020

Dear Parents,

I know you will have been disappointed to hear that whilst the Government’s hope is that more primary school children can come back to school before the summer holiday they are no longer expecting all schools to be able to do this. It is a real challenge to schools to get all the children in whilst following the guidelines. The children need to be in pods of no more than 15 children and be 2m apart. This means each class needs to be split into 2 and have a large enough space to work in. In order to make this happen schools would need to have twice as much space as normal. We are lucky that we have some spare capacity but not enough to accommodate the whole school. We know how important it is to your children to get back into school emotionally as well as academically and we will do everything we can to help make this happen. In order to help us plan for what might be possible it would be really helpful if the parents of children in Y2,3,4 & 5 could indicate on a text survey if you might be interested if we were able to offer a place for at least part of the time. This does not mean they would be offered a place or that they would have to take up any offer just an indication to help with planning. Please reply to the text by 1pm on Friday.

I promised you an update on how things are going in school for the children who have come back so here it is. I have been really pleased, all the planning the staff did before the children came in has paid off. The points when there are more people on site, drop off and pick up times, are going really smoothly thanks to the parents who are sticking to the new rules even when they feel a little daft because they appear to be the only person other than me there. We all would have liked it to be a bit drier but you can’t have everything! In the class pods the children are enjoying their learning. They are trying really hard to stay 2m apart, the older they are the easier they are finding this but they are all doing well at it. Lunchtime is taking longer it is spread over 2 hours, each child has an hour but because we are staggering it more time is needed. As the number of children we have changes we are making adjustments to timings to ensure the children can stay 2m apart but the system seems to be working. The parents of the children who are in are reporting that they are coming home happy but tired – sounds like a win to me. We are constantly reviewing what we are doing in the light of what is happening outside school and within school. We get information from the DFE, from Derbyshire County Council and from health and use this information to inform our decisions. I had a conversation with our school’s senior advisor yesterday who felt confident we were doing the right thing for our children, which may of course not be the right thing for other children at schools.

We have been asked about school reports. We are in the process of writing reports on your children but they will be brief this year as we have not seen most of the children for 3 months. It is not possible for us to have face to face meetings about the reports but staff will continue to be available for telephone conversations should you need them.

Please can you check your dinner money account on School Money as some of you still owe money from before the lockdown.

Stay happy and healthy

Alice Littlehailes