Our first week back
Dear parents and carers,
I just wanted to catch up with you at the end of our first week back, to let you know how things have gone.
It has been wonderful to have all of our children back! They have settled in straight away across school and it has been a real pleasure to have our school community back together again!
As I’m sure you can imagine, thinking through, planning and preparing to reopen the whole school has been an immense job. But I am incredibly proud of the whole staff team and your children, for making the first few days go as well as they have.
As with anything COVID related, there isn’t a blueprint for how to open a school with all of the COVID restrictions. We have done our very best and we will continue to do so. But as we expected and anticipated even before we came back, we have made some tweaks and changes as the week has gone on, which we will continue to do. It is when things are put into action that beneficial tweaks will come to light.
Thank you for being patient with us. We have made some amendments to how and where some children are coming into school. Families have done a good job as the week has gone on, of coming into school across the 15 minutes in the morning. Year 6 have been on time at 8.45am. If this continues, then we may be able to avoid a staggered start in the morning as we hoped, as it would be a huge inconvenience for families with siblings. It would be much appreciated if parents also used the other side of the road to wait until they see their child come out, or if you want to catch up with friends. Thank you to those of you who have. This will help ease any remaining congestion.
The biggest challenge has been lunchtimes, as we anticipated. We have 8 year groups of children to have their lunch, in separate bubbles. So it is not possible to use the main dining hall for everyone, or it would take around 3 hours. The school kitchen staff and lunch staff team have been working hard to find a way to make lunch times manageable. We are using 3 hall spaces and classrooms in UKS2. We are doing this in a range of ‘sittings’ so that we have enough lunch staff to care for our children while teaching and support staff have their lunch break. But it is an enormous challenge as you can imagine. It is important to us that lunchtimes are a happy and relaxed part of the day for our children. Lunchtimes will no doubt become even slicker and smoother as the days go on and we are watching carefully to make sure our children have enough time to eat. Our children have been at home for many months and able to eat at a pace of their choosing. So asking them to get back in a routine of a fixed lunch break, will no doubt take some a little bit of time to get used to.
Like anything when there is significant change, like the enormous changes forced upon us all in school by COVID, we are continually reviewing what is working and what might need to be tweaked. So thank you for bearing with us over the first few days and coming weeks, while we do this.
I’m sure your children are all more than ready for their weekend, as for many, it has been quite some time since they were last here physically in school.
Take care,
Kate Byrne
Head teacher
