Head teacher blog 18th September 2020

It has, in some ways, been a difficult week as many families have had to self-isolate as one member of a household has displayed some possible symptoms of COVID and as a result, all the family have had to go home. Some people have managed to get prompt tests and results and others haven’t.  Attendance has plummeted to just 85%, over 10% less than normal. We are not alone in this, and this pattern reflects Scotland’s experience when they re-opened schools in August. At time of writing, no Farfield children have had a positive COVID test result this term, but a few parents have.  It is hard to see keeping children and siblings at home for what appears to be a common cold being sustainable; it affects our staff too, half a dozen of whom have been away from school in those circumstances this week. I had hoped that all our handwashing and sanitizing, and keeping further apart, might reduce the annual spread of minor illness at the start of the year, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

A big challenge is looking at how we can support those children who are self-isolating to have some sort of education whilst they are off school. We haven’t cracked this yet, as it is unreasonable to expect the full ‘lockdown’ provision of April/May whilst the teachers are in class full time and having even less breaks than usual due to Covid-affected rotas.  We are trying to work through what we can offer, and this should be improved by the end of next week.

Having said all that, it is still wonderful to have an almost full school again and to see proper teaching and learning going on. Teachers aren’t happy with how they have to organise their classrooms at the moment, but at least we are closer to normality. The vast majority of children have come back to school very positively and have settled well.