Dear Parents of Year 7 pupils,
As you may already know, we are experiencing extremely high levels of staff sickness absence at present, which has increased of late as Covid rates are rising again. Demand for supply teachers across the educational sector have also made it difficult to acquire the number of staff that are needed to cover colleagues who are absent. We anticipate that we could have as many as a third of our staff absent tomorrow and that this may be the situation for a number of days.
High levels of staff absence require us to assess whether we are able to maintain appropriate levels of supervision for pupils on site and whether we can effectively cover classes. We will have to continue to review the situation daily and look at our timetabling arrangements for the rest of this week. We have to ensure that we will have enough staff to provide safe face to face learning for the children in the classes of absent staff as well as looking at general supervision levels across our site across the school day.
Unfortunately, as we currently need to prioritise examination year groups, Year 7 are the year group timetabled for most lessons with the absent staff tomorrow and so reluctantly we have had to make the decision to move Year 7 to remote learning for tomorrow (Thursday 31st March) in the first instance. We apologise for the late notice, but you may appreciate that this was not an easy decision to make and one which was made in consultation with the Local Authority. We are hopeful that staffing levels may improve in the coming days but we cannot guarantee that at this stage.
Reported Covid cases amongst our pupils remain low and we will continue to assess the staffing situation on a daily basis throughout the coming days and weeks and keep you informed of our plans accordingly. There is a distinct possibility that other year groups may have to move to remote learning in the coming days so please try to ensure that your child is able to access Google Classroom, where the online work will be based.
We will try our best to keep disruption to learning to a minimum but please be aware that some ongoing disruption is likely and has happened today, we apologise that we may not be able to avoid making such a decision with less than a day’s notice.
Please accept our sincere apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you in anticipation of your understanding.
Yours sincerely,
Mrs S Evans
Headteacher