17th March 2020
Dear parents and carers,
I have received several emails today from worried families, some with symptoms and some choosing to self-isolate due for their own reasons.
If you are worried – keep your child at home. Parents should make their own decision and many of you have; our numbers are very low today and we have also had to send several children home during the day. Whatever decision you make will have my full support. Under these exceptional circumstances it will not affect their register mark. I would rather a child miss school for a short period of time than lose a relative for life. I have a duty of care to protect children and in a wider sense their families.
I also have a duty of care to protect the staff workforce. Many of these have their own children, older parents or underlying health conditions themselves.
Although the government are advising the working population to work from home and against mass gatherings, I feel that the education workforce has been overlooked and placed in a vulnerable and unacceptable position where they too could be being exposed to transmission of the virus on a daily basis, coming into contact with children and families. Again I would rather staff miss school for a short period than take the virus home and infect vulnerable family members.
The staff have been working hard on preparing work to be provided on the school website and the school is prepared for closure. This work is optional and of course it will depend on your family circumstances. If your child is ill, they should not try to complete school work. Our teachers will be available to you via Class Dojo during school hours to answer questions about the work, but please appreciate that if we close, many will have their own children to look after and could potentially be ill themselves. In these cases, I would not expect them to be able to correspond with parents.
Current Government advice is that if one person in any household has a persistent cough or fever, everyone living there must stay at home for 14 days. Please follow this advice.
With kind regards,
Mrs C. Williams
Executive Headteacher