Once again our children have astounded us with how well they have returned to school after the half term break. They are so positive and sensible it makes school a wonderful place to be. As we enter a second, quite different, Lockdown we will remain here for our children and for you, our families. Please be assured that we are here to support you in any way that we can.

Short progress reports

Hopefully you have all received a short report letting you know how your child has settled into the new school year. Nothing can obviously replace a face to face meeting with your child’s teacher, this is something that the current situation has reinforced with us, however we hope that you now have a clearer idea of how things are going. If you haven’t received a report via email (don’t forget to check your junk/ spam folder first) please contact us as a matter of urgency.

Small changes to new routines

Only a few things will change at the moment given that our systems seem to be working very well. Government guidance is very clear that we should restrict additional visitors to school to a bare minimum with only essential meetings taking place on site, so we can say for sure that our usual Christmas Fayre and performances are definitely not happening. We are working on a replacement to this…more of this soon.

The arrival and departure system seems to be working very well indeed, please remember to continue to practice social distancing outside school during this time. We would like to ask you to arrive at or within ten minutes of the allocated start of your 15 minute window now. At the same time can we ask that you don’t arrive until your arrival ‘window’ begins?

Links with the community

One thing that is really important to us as a school is our links with the wider community and those more vulnerable than ourselves. Your support for our homeless clothing collection and foodbank Fridays has been amazing.

We would like to really focus on our links with care home settings over the coming months. Christmas for them is going to be so difficult and we would like to create ‘gift parcels’ with the children to be sent to a number of care homes that we built close ties with at the height of the first lockdown in March and April. At the same time Children in Need is a really important annual event in our school calendar and we want to carry on fundraising for the vital work that they do.

Non Uniform Day for Children in Need and Care Home Gift Packs – Friday 13th November 2020

With both of these things in mind we would like to hold a simple ‘non uniform day’ where children wear what they want – we would particularly like them to wear as many rainbow colours as they can.

For Children in Need we would like each child to donate £1 – more if they can (perhaps they could do some jobs around the home to earn this). We’ll sanitise the cash and then bank it for Children in Need.

At the same time we would like all children to bring a donation of one item that can go into our ‘gift packs’ for care homes. This might include:

• Christmas food –e.g. small individual Christmas cake or pudding, small box of chocolates, Christmas biscuits
• Christmas Gifts – e.g. notebooks, notelets, hand cream, handkerchiefs, ladies scarf, chutneys or jams, nice teas, pen set, Christmas decoration

We will also be making Christmas cards with some of our children and writing individual letters to go into the packs too.

Thank you so much for all of your support in advance.