Covid Safety Update Nov 2020

Dear parents/carers

RE Covid Safety Update

We are all sending best wishes to you in these challenging times. I am writing to remind and update you on arrangements for families on site before and after school. After many successful weeks of implementing our Covid safety arrangements, it’s inevitable that some complacency develops. With the country now in national lockdown, it’s more important than ever that we all pull together as a school community to ensure we take individual and personal responsibility for making sure everyone feels as safe as possible on our school site. We respectfully ask that you strictly observe the following key points to enable us to maintain our current arrangements without having to impose further restrictions:

• Parents/carers have raised that they have noticed some adults bringing additional adults on site to drop off and/or collect children. A number of families with siblings are coming on site with more than one adult to ‘divide and conquer’ dropping off or collecting siblings at different areas of school. We understand that this is convenient for you, however we have a strict one adult only per family rule that we must insist you follow as our site is becoming too congested.

• Parents and carers are beginning to get too close to staff and to each other and are inadvertently putting others at risk in doing so. Please be respectful in recognising that our staff have differing medical needs and individual risk assessments that are confidential to them. It’s very important that you stay outside of the marked ‘green zone’ at door entry points to school please. In addition, please ensure you keep a safe social distance (2m) from staff and other adults and children who are on the yard.

• Please do not allow your children to play and socialise while you chat to other adults. We ask you not to congregate on site or by the gates and that you quickly vacate the site as soon as you have dropped off or collected your child/children. Children are not allowed to play on the yard before or after school.

We appreciate that these rules can be frustrating and cause inconvenience. They also sadly don’t sound very friendly and welcoming; we understand that for many people dropping off and collecting children this might be the only social contact they have with others across the day and it feels good to have a chat. We do hope you understand though that we must, by law, have strict rules in place to ensure our site is Covid secure. We rely on every individual doing the right thing and must work together in our determination to keep the risk as low as we can for everyone in our Western Family.

May I take this opportunity to thank you all again for your support, understanding and cooperation.

Many thanks

Katherine Hill

Head Teacher