Dear Parents,

I hope that you continue to be safe and well.  It has been great to welcome back more children to school and to see the continued excellent response to learning at home.  I thought it might be useful to update you on the current situation at school and our proposals for the rest of this term.

On Monday morning we welcomed another group of children back into the school building.  More than a third of our children are now back with us physically whilst the overwhelming majority of children have accessed learning facilitated by our teachers and teaching assistants and of course, the fantastic support from you.  Thank you for continuing to work with us to support our children.

Since schools were ordered to close to the vast majority of children, Everton Primary has been closed for just one day, other than weekends.  I’m so grateful to staff who have worked during holiday times to ensure that we could do our part in ensuring that key workers who needed us could continue to work.  Our phased opening to more children has focussed on ensuring that parents who cannot work at home are able to go to work; this week has seen the return of some of the year groups identified in the government’s plan.  I recognise that for some of you, this is not enough and that for some people, returning to school still feels too soon.

We are trying to carefully balance the need to shield staff, the social distancing requirements and our desire to go back to welcoming all children back to school and being able to support families in the best ways possible, with a small building which does not lend itself well to distancing measures.  With around a third of our children now back in the building, we are close to capacity until the requirements for small group sizes are relaxed.  We will communicate our plans for the next stage as soon as we can and when government guidance is available about the requirements for September, we will confirm our plans as soon as possible.

The INSET day which was scheduled to take place on Friday 26^th June will NOT now be an INSET day; school will be open as it is now on that day.  Instead, the INSET day will move to Wednesday 22^nd July so school will NOT be open to children on that day.  Please also note that as we are restricted on staffing levels in each pod, we are unable to properly provide teachers with the planning, preparation and assessment time that they should have contractually.  Rather than close for half a day each week, as many schools are doing, we will instead end our current in-school provision on Friday 17^th July and open on Monday 20^th and Tuesday 21^st July only for keyworker children of parents who need us for childcare on those days.  That means that the provision for most children will end on Friday 17^th July. If you do need the care on 20^th and 21^st July, you must notify the school office by Friday 3^rd July.  I hope that you will understand our reasons for needing to do this.

Thank you for your continued support. 

With best wishes,

Paul Higginbottom

Head Teacher