COVID 19 Update 3: Plans for some limited school opening in the summer term
Dear Parents and Carers
Firstly, thank you for all your support over the last 6 weeks to keep our community safe. Our thoughts and love go out to those that have experienced illness and loss. We remain a strong learning community of care, relationship and commitment to each other and we look forward to a time when we can be together again in school.
You may have heard that the government has very recently announced an ‘ambition’ to open schools to some key year groups from 1st June 2020. This is dependent on a continued decrease in the number of COVID19 infections. Secondary schools and sixth form colleges are being asked ‘t o offer some face-to-face support to supplement their remote education of year 10 and year 12 students... alongside the full time provision they are offering to priority groups’.
Whilst providing this face to face support, we have also been asked to minimise any pinch points where groups of students would come into contact such as arrival / departure times and corridor spaces. Therefore we are putting plans together to provide for some onsite small group meetings, ensuring safe rules and systems including appropriate ‘social distancing’ and arrangements for daily and weekly deep cleans.
I will write to you again soon with details about some onsite meetings where students will be able to connect face to face with their teachers. However first, I want to emphasise that we are in a fortunate position because our school is technologically well resourced and our staff are innovative and creative and therefore, we have been able to provide an excellent ‘virtual school’ offer, which already consists of face to face support online through video conferencing. With your brilliant support, over 85% of our students are engaging weekly online with their teachers. This will of course continue so students can make further progress with support from Google ‘hangouts’ and the materials assigned to the Google classroom.
We are really looking forward to opening the school up a bit more (desperate even - we really miss our students) but we will only do this safely and in a phased way to small groups of students at a time while we continue to see infections decreasing. Please rest assured that we are taking all necessary measures to make the school as safe as possible and I will outline these measures and our rules for students on site in more detail in due course.
Thank you again for your support at this difficult time. We are already open every day to children of key workers and any vulnerable children, and have been since lock down began. If you are a key worker and you need your child to return to school or if you feel that your child is vulnerable, please get in touch with us and we will make arrangements to provide for your child on site. In all other cases, please continue to keep your child home and we will let you know what days we plan to open for specific groups of students shortly.
In the meantime - keep on keeping on, supporting your children to attend the Elstree ON AIR virtual sessions and we will see them online.
Be safe and well.
Chris Mitchell
Principal