1st June 2020

Dear Parents /Carers,

I hope you and your families are well and remain well. At Quality First Education our first priority is that your children, your families and our staff are safe. The Prime Minister announced on 28th May that the government would allow schools to commence wider opening from at least 1st June. We have decided we will start to open our schools “more widely” from 8th June. The details of the process will be sent to you by your school’s head teacher. The logic across the trust is that the first children to be invited to attend will be those in Year 6. Our plan is that this will be extended to Year 1 children on either Wednesday or Thursday 10th and 11th of June respectively, this depends upon which school your child attends. This will extend to reception children on Monday 15th June.  We are currently reviewing the question of what can be provided for nursery aged children.

We have today extended our offer to the children of key workers and other specific groups of children with the opening of the provision at the Alton. We are currently reviewing how the key worker provision across the three Belleville sites will be organised from the 8th June.  If you want to use one of these provisions and believe you are entitled to do so under the government schemes, please contact the appropriate head teacher.

As in all walks of life we have members of staff who because of medical advice cannot return to school at this time.  As with your own families who are required to stay at home and / or shield, I know you will be supportive of them and respect their privacy.  I also know that they will make a very important contribution to developing the home learning material that will continue to impact on your children’s education. 

While we will be widening the offer of in school places we will also continue our home learning offer based upon the logic of ‘we share, we talk and you share.’ This will continue throughout the summer term. As many of our staff team come back into school, the home learning will continue to be written by a smaller team. One great advantage of the trust is that we have a central capacity and people across all of our schools who contribute to our work. 

With more staff in schools there will be some adjustment to our phone calls and responses to seesaw. We will continue to phone every child every week; however, if you do not answer, staff may not make repeat calls. If you have missed a call and would like to talk with the teacher, please leave a message on your child’s seesaw account. Similarly with seesaw, teachers will have less time and opportunity to respond. Our staff will continue to respond on seesaw but this may be less often than has been the case.  To support the home learning strategy, we will be making the maths workbooks and accompanying textbook materials available for you to collect so these can be used at home. Your school will inform you of the time and arrangements for you to collect books and materials.

I will keep you up to date with the trust policies and procedures and head teachers will contact you about issues specific to your schools.

Please keep yourselves safe, thank you for your continued support.

Yours,

John Grove (Executive Head)