Dear Parents

I hope you all had a great restful holiday and Happy New Year to everyone!

Mrs Rigby, unfortunately, is unwell this week, but we hope she will be well enough to be back with us next week.   

As I am sure you are aware, the level of Covid infection has increased and, at school, we have about 10 confirmed or unconfirmed cases in the school community.  We have not had any, known in school, transmission or have any hotspots at present.  The wearing of face coverings on transport and in school, both in corridors and in classrooms, is being encouraged.  We are also encouraging the use of hand sanitiser, washing hands and clearing down work areas between groups of pupils as part of our ongoing efforts to keep the school pupils and staff safe.  

Lateral Flow Testing is key to helping us to keep our school community safe.  We are due a delivery of tests into school today so hope to get these circulated as quickly as possible.  If you have not been doing regular testing, but now wish to, please let us know, and we speak to you about this.  Whether vaccinated or not please do not send your child into school if they are unwell especially if they have a temperature, cough, cold, sore throat, headache or other cold like symptoms as these are more common with the Omicron variant of Covid.  

If at any time your child has to self-isolate, but is feeling well we will be providing some offsite learning.  For most pupils this will be via Google Classroom, but pupils in Pathway 1 have a more personalised approach better suited to their needs. If your child is self-isolating you will be sent an email about this with further information. 

We have arranged for the vaccination team to come back into school on the 17th of January to give vaccinations to anyone eligible who wants to be vaccinated.  Please look out for the forms.  Only pupils with the forms fully filled in and signed can be vaccinated.  If you need help with the forms, please let us know, and we will do our best to support you.  

Whilst our new building is fantastic in many ways, we are experiencing several teething issues, not least the heating in the new building is not functioning properly, and the building is chilly.  If your child is someone who feels the cold, please encourage them to wear an extra layer such as a jumper and a fleece.  If you do not have these in school colours please stick with dark colours and no hoodies please.  We are working hard to resolve this issue, but as the system is fully automated we are not able to adjust the temperature or control the ventilation system.  Engineers are due on site on today, so we hope they will be able to resolve the situation quickly. 

We have had some exciting developments in relation to the new part of the build project this week with the confirmation that the asbestos removal is now complete, and the old building is starting to be demolished.  I have attached a couple of photos from Wednesday this week.  Once this building is removed the build team will start to build the new Sports Halls.

I hope everyone has a great weekend

Ms C Caddell
Deputy Headteacher