Dear Parents and Carers

Whilst I very much hope we do not have to go into a further lockdown, we know that there is a possibility that this might be the case at some point in this academic year. I want to share our contingency plans with you so that you and your children know exactly what to expect.

If we are informed of a positive case during a school day, our first action would be to contact our Public Health England Local Health Protection Team. We would take their advice about any required actions.

• We know from other schools that the advice has sometimes been to send a year group home for 14 days. If this were necessary, we would send a text message to all affected parents and put a notice on the website.
• On the text message, we would indicate the time of dismissal for that year group.
• If your child cannot safely make their way home at that time, it is your responsibility to contact the school and we will then plan to supervise the remaining students until the end of the day.
• It is important that you ensure that you have access to your telephone and that we have up to date contact information.
• In the circumstance described, the text message would be sent to all contacts listed for your child. Please do ensure that if you have changed your telephone number, that you inform school immediately.

If your child is in the year group that had to be sent home, they would revert to online learning, similar to that which they participated in before the summer. This would be done quickly to ensure there was no loss to learning. Staff are also busy working on expanding our use of Microsoft Teams to allow a greater number of live on-line lessons to take place should the need arise. We are confident that all lessons will be delivered through Microsoft Teams, which has now been set up to mimic the school timetable. As such, students will be taught by their normal teacher in their normal class groupings for their normal number of lessons. In addition to online lessons, all subjects will use Microsoft Teams to share resources, engage in subject dialogue and respond to queries. Following the live lesson, students will be given an independent task to complete. This will have a deadline that the students must submit the work by, and we would appreciate parental support with this.