Children’s Mental Health Week            1^st -7^th February 2021

Our children’s good mental health and well-being is even more important than ever before. Both in school and via remote learning we shall be supporting the children with their mental health and well-being. Each day will have a focus, see below:

Please see our the inclusion page for suggestions and useful web-sites to support you with looking after your own and your child’s well-being and mental health during the pandemic.

We are currently unable to make or receive external calls and do not yet have any indication when this is likely to be rectified. Please email the school office should you need to contact us:

office@castle.hants.sch.uk

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

Good evening,

We have just found out via the PM's announcement that all schools are to shut from tomorrow. We now have a short period of time to turnaround plans for tomorrow. Please be advised that we will provide an update in due course. However, we can say that breakfast and after school club will not be running tomorrow.

Dear Parents,

We are currently planning to reopen for all pupils from 4 January. This is because, whilst keeping many primary schools in London and surrounding areas closed, the government has decided that primary schools in Hampshire will remain open. However, please be aware that the situation is ever evolving and is subject to change at very short notice.