Dear Parents and Carers
We are now halfway through this half term and it has flown by! As I type, we are looking forward to the production of Annie starting this week, and the Spring Concert on Tuesday 29th March, as well as hearing of many different sporting achievements including the Midlands football tournament. It is strange to think that nearly exactly 2 years to the day these experiences were so abruptly removed from us.
Your child may well have spoken to you about the impact of Covid on staff absence in school – certainly, I’ve never known the rates to be so high and, put bluntly, every day we are reviewing whether we can stay open or not. We are determined to make sure that school closure, or partial closure, is absolutely a last resort but I am also aware of how destabilising having lots of different cover teachers can be for pupils. Fortunately, colleagues have been wonderful in covering lessons and supporting children and for the most part pupils are very understanding, but the reality is that (at my time of sending this today) we have 20 teachers and 5 support staff colleagues off; that’s a huge number, and most with Covid. Some are symptomatic too, so we can’t just move to online learning. As I say, we will only ever close as a last resort but it’s as well to remind yourself of our processes should this happen: https://qes.org.uk/enforced-school-closure/
In other developments, we are close to launching our new Behaviour for Learning Policy after a lengthy period of consultation and review with pupils, trustees and staff this year. I will be in touch before Easter with a summary of the main approaches and we are preparing assemblies (Years 7-10) to start next week with this focus.
For some time we have known that the toilets for KS3 children in particular are not as good as they should be and we are planning a refurbishment of these as soon as we can. It is likely this will be the summer holidays.
I’ll be in touch next week with some details about staffing changes and other developments.
Thank you for your ongoing support, especially when we are facing the impact of Covid on our school community once again.
With best wishes
Cathy O’Neill
Executive Headteacher
