Coronavirus: Update

Hello Everyone,

The government has now given schools more detail about the planned reopening of schools across England. As promised, I can now share more information with you about this.

From 1st June 2020, the government has asked children in nursery, reception, year one and year six to return to school, alongside the priority groups currently in our childcare. We have started to plan how we can make sure that everyone in school stays safe.

We will maintain the following key priorities for keeping everyone safe:

• Ensuring that everyone avoids contact with anyone with symptoms.
• Frequent hand cleaning and good respiratory hygiene practices
• Enhanced, regular cleaning of the school

In addition, the government advice is to reduce contact between people as much as possible to reduce the transmission risk. In school we have been asked to do this by ensuring children and staff only mix in a small, consistent group and that we keep that small group away from other people and groups.

In order to be able to do this, our plan is as follows:

• Split each nursery, reception, year one and year six class in half, with no more than 15 pupils per small group.
• Put each small group in a separate classroom.
• Ensure that each small group has a maximum of two designated teaching staff (teacher and teaching assistant)
• Ensure that there is no contact between each small group in school.
• Clear and reorganise the classrooms to maintain as much space between children as possible
• Allocate each year group their own drop-off and collection times (to be confirmed). This is to ensure that parents and children can arrive and leave school as safely as possible.
• Only one adult will be allowed to bring their nursery, reception or year one child onto the school site.
• No adults will be allowed to accompany year six pupils onto the school site. Year six should come onto the school site alone (without an adult).
• Stagger break and lunch times so that no small group has contact with any other.
• Allocate specific resources to each child and stored in a plastic wallet on the child’s table. Resources will not be shared by children in school.
• Children should wear their own clothes to school. This is to enable parents to wash their children’s clothes as frequently as possible in order to reduce risk of cross infection.
• No adults or visitors will be allowed onto the school site other than to drop/pick up their nursery, reception or year one child(ren).
• All adults should adhere to social distancing guidelines when dropping off or collecting their nursery, reception or year one child(ren) from class.
• We will continue to provide online work for those children who do not return to school.
• Nursery children will be allocated to either a morning or afternoon class. There will not be any full-time nursery places until further notice.
• All club provision is cancelled until further notice (including after school and breakfast clubs).
• All trips, assemblies, performances, parents’ evenings and sporting events are cancelled until further notice.
• The climbing frames and adventure playground equipment will be closed off and must not be used until further notice.
• We will continue to offer childcare to vulnerable children and children of key workers only, in years two, three, four and five. This will be offered in line with the capacity of staff and space available in school.

The government has advised that you do not use public transport on the way to or from school see their advice here.

The government have stated their ambition to bring all primary year groups back to school before the summer holidays, for a month if feasible, though they are keeping this under review. As soon as we have any further information on this we will let you know.

Here is a link to the government advice in full.

If you have any worries or concerns about your child returning to school, please email the school office office@heaversfarm.croydon.sch.uk and one of the leadership team will get back to you as soon as possible.

Take care everyone,

Susan