Parent Update

Dear Parents / Carers

                I hope you and your families remain safe and well. I apologise for another message from school and I am very conscious of bombarding you with information but these are unusual times. I would like to raise a couple of key points with you;

Day to day school provision for vulnerable children and the children of key workers

We are delighted that so many of the families we contacted have taken up our offer of a school place and are sending your children in to school. We feel this is the best place for them and we are so pleased you agree. However, we have been overwhelmed with requests directly from families contacting the school wanting an on-site place for their child as a ‘Key Worker’.  We will of course do all we can to meet those requests, however we are now quarter full as a school and at full capacity in several bubbles. The government advice remains “the single most important action we can all take is to stay at home to protect the NHS and save lives.” It is in the national interest that if we want to get through this pandemic as quickly as possible, that we must restrict leaving home and mingling with other people as much as possible. Reducing human contact is the best way to keep everyone safe. For this reason, I would urge all parents / carers who are ‘Key Workers’ to please only request a place for your child / children here at school if you have absolutely no alternative and only use this provision on the days that you are unable to keep them at home. If you currently have a place for your child as a ‘Key Worker’, can you please re-consider if you need the place here at school? I fully understand that every family situation is different but if requests for places continue to come in from ‘Key Workers’, we will not be able to accommodate all requests and will have to make the very difficult decision of prioritising certain professions (eg. NHS workers).

Zoom / Live daily tutorials starting week beginning 11/1/21

As I mentioned in my communication to you on Tuesday 5^th January, next week all class teachers will begin making daily contact with your son / daughter via Zoom in the form a short tutorial (details will come out tomorrow). Since then, several parents have been in contact with me and asked why all lessons or remote learning cannot through Zoom or Microsoft Teams. We are working towards offering more ‘live’ remote learning in the coming weeks, however, parents / carers must also be aware that as we have around a quarter of our children in school each day (as vulnerable or children of key workers), staff are supervising them during the day on a rota. This means that class teachers will not always be available during the day to deliver live / remote lessons, as they are supervising children here in school (we do not have the capacity in terms of staff here at Highfields, that we have for example at Alsager School). I hope you understand the limitations that our blended approach (remote learning and day to day supervision) creates for staff when it comes to live remote learning.

Finally, please remember that we want to celebrate any achievements of our children during this lockdown period. We are calling this, ‘Highfields Stars from Afar’. If you would like to send in a photo of your child’s work or any achievements they are proud of while working remotely, please do so by sending a message on our Facebook page. We will upload this to be shared on our social media feeds and on our website. This will be closely monitored by our communications team.

Many thanks for your continued support

Best wishes

Richard Middlebrook