Dear Parents/Carers,

Welcome back and I hope you had an enjoyable half term. 

This is going to be a very disruptive and busy half term as our roof works are due to start very soon (we had a number of meetings in half term). We need the works done urgently and the Local Authority have worked wonders to make it happen, if we wait until the summer holidays we may not be able to use some classrooms as winter sets in.

This week we will know exactly what is happening and the impact of the works to entrances/exits, classroom spaces and everything else ! It will be a tough half term without anything else that may happen ! We can then organise parents' evenings and send out invitations. 

This half term I will be focussing more on leading the school and less on direct teaching. Every class will still have forest school every week (it is a vital part of our school) but it may be on-site (our aim is for one week at school, one week off site). 

1. Values

'Happiness and compassion' are our values for November.

2. Weekly attendance updates

Hopefully you find the updates useful as it gives an honest picture of numbers (Covid and sickness as we had a range of bugs around)  in school and helps parental awareness. Updates should not have initials on them and it was my mistake not to take them off on the one before the half term, my sincere apologies. Updates will now come to me without any initials on them. 

3. Covid updates 

Attached is a letter from the Local Authority that came too late to go before the holidays so we are sending it now ! It reinforces the need to be very aware of Covid and other illnesses. We have some children who are now on their second positive result ! It is not a very nice situation but, thankfully, our children seem to have mild symptoms but it is the adults who seem to suffer more. We ask you to be very sensible, careful and thoughtful as it would not take many school adults to be ill for us to have to close. 

Kind regards

Mr Batstone