School Return Update

The Health and Safety site visits for both schools took place on Friday and we are currently working to adapt the sites for re-opening on June 29th in the light of recommendations that were made.

Your child’s teacher will be contacting you by phone in the next few days to find out your current thoughts about your child(ren) returning to school.

Initial plans have been made but we are still waiting for the publication of the Welsh Government guidance on re-opening for schools in order to check our plans for compliance. Each school’s response to this will be different depending on the demands of varied sites and staff availability and are made in order to provide the safest possible solution to this challenge. We are having to consider factors such as the need to provide two isolation rooms, social distancing of the children and staff, the management of access to the site such as holding areas and one-way systems, restrictions on resources that must not be shared, cleaning requirements, staggered break and lunch times building through-flow, toileting arrangements as well as the need for each group of children to be in a ‘bubble’ in order to minimise and hopefully remove any contact with other ‘bubbles’.

I must stress that any plans we put in place will purely be for the pre-summer period and will be designed to meet the Welsh Government’s requirement for the access to schools to be for the purposes of ‘checking in, catching up and preparing for summer’. We will be preparing a completely different response for September in order to meet a different set of needs. Indeed, the organisation of the first week (29th June) could very well be different to the subsequent three weeks as our response will have to be dynamic and regularly reviewed. At all times the safety and wellbeing of all stakeholders is the driving force.

I will update you further when we have received the expected guidance.

This is a frustrating, uncertain and challenging time for everyone so I thank you in anticipation of your patience and support.

Mr R Cook