Coronavirus (Covid-19) Update: Monday 16th March

16th March 20

Dear Parents

I do hope this email finds you well. Since my last correspondence of 13th March, I wanted to update you on our status since the weekend.

Thank you for supporting us in the extra precautions that we are taking, particularly in relation to hygiene. We continue to encourage children to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds and more often than usual with soap and water or hand sanitiser and catch coughs and sneezes in tissues.

With the clear instruction on Friday that anyone with a new persistent cough or a high temperature (over 37.8) should self-isolate for seven days we have inevitably had a few families and members of staff who have rightly elected to self-isolate, albeit I would emphasise this is entirely as a precaution and in line with good practice and we have no confirmed cases of Coronavirus to date. All staff will otherwise be in attendance at school as normal. As a routine follow-up, however, we have since undertaken a deep clean of appropriate areas that go well beyond PHE advice as we continue our focus on protecting the health and wellbeing of our community. We continue to clean and disinfect regularly touched objects and surfaces more often than usual – quite simply, Prince’s Mead has never looked so clean!

Unfortunately, our Music Festival Concert this week has been postponed and we are no longer extending our previous invitation to parents and friends for our Drama Festival. As a further precaution, we have also halted our third-party facility hire and minibus loans that routinely take place out of hours.

We continue to prepare for whole school home learning and this is our key education focus at this point in time. To that end, if a child is off sick with any ailment we do not expect them to be working but recovering so individual pieces of work for those children are less likely to be sent home to ensure we can prioritise the greater good of all the children in our care. Clearly, when the dust settles, we will pick this up again but thank you for your understanding of individual teachers in this regard as we work hard behind the scenes for any potential switch to home learning. Whilst we continue with our contingency planning, various resources will be coming home this week for certain year groups in preparation for home learning.  For the moment children do not need to do anything with these books other than store them somewhere safe until further instructions are communicated.

Finally, a number of parents have been asking how they can communicate the current health emergency to pupils. In School, we are offering the normality that young people need at this point in time. Many will naturally be anxious but we are also having open conversations with those children that ask, ensuring that we are reassuring them in these conversations at the same time. The attached file will hopefully be of assistance with any conversations at home you might be having on the subject.

Yours sincerely

Peter Thacker

 

Child Friendly Explanation Of Coronavirus.pdf