This communication was sent to parents last evening - we have this morning been made aware of a serious system crash affecting users of this service (no doubt due to system overload due to so many schools needing to contact parents) which has meant that the email was not delivered to a number of parents. We apologise, but unfortunately we were not aware of this issue until this morning.

Dear parents/carers,

I apologise for the lateness of this email but hope you appreciate the reasons why! You will no doubt be reeling from the Prime Minister’s announcement this evening to close all schools except to vulnerable pupils and the children of critical workers. We are now in the process of putting provision in place to meet the varying needs of both children that will need to access remote learning from home and those that meet the criteria to attend school. 

Education Provision

Pupils will have access to remote learning via Seesaw from tomorrow. Year R will access via Tapestry.

Critical workers and vulnerable children

We have already had a very large number of applications for spaces under the critical worker criteria and a number of vulnerable children eligible for spaces. In order to maintain small consistent groups and given the extreme short notice and the absence of any guidance we are going to be offering only a very limited special provision tomorrow. These will be for the children of critical workers whose role is one of the following and there is no-one else at home to care for the child or the child cannot benefit from the use of a support bubble (this was was not a facility available to you last spring). Https://www.gov.uk/guidance/making-a-childcare-bubble-with-another-household In order to access this provision both parents (where both parents live in the same home) need to fall into the categories below and must both be working tomorrow:

Emergency services

NHS workers

Care home workers

Education staff

We will contact those parents who meet the above criteria as early as possible tomorrow morning to confirm a place. 

We are sorry that this has come at such short notice, but stress it is only for the short term so that we can use tomorrow to finalise offers for special provision for the fuller list of critical workers so that this can be opened fully and safely from Wednesday 6 January.

In order to enable us to make appropriate arrangements we will have a delayed start to the school day - the school day will begin at 10:00am and will finish at 3:30pm. We will send further information as early as possible tomorrow for those families meeting the criteria to attend tomorrow and further communications during the day to establish how we can work together as a community to make this half term as positive as possible in these very challenging times. 

Take care,

Justin Bartlett