Headteacher blog 21st January 2022

It has been a really strange week: for me, personally, and for the school. I have been stuck at home with COVID and have been well for almost all the time (though continuing to test positive). School has suffered probably the worst attendance in its history: down as low as 70%, with 60+ children (and half a dozen or so staff) off with COVID and others ill or isolating due to family COVID infections. Some staff are having to take some leave of absence to care for their own children with COVID or whose classes have been closed elsewhere – it’s not just our school. It is frustrating for everyone to have this level of disruption and really difficult to support children both in school and at home – it’s not possible for teachers to be in two places at once. Younger children, especially, will find remote teaching and learning difficult to do independently. Thank you to everyone for their efforts with this.

We have had to re-impose some restrictions at school to try to stop children and adults mixing so much – especially in the juniors where most of the positive cases have been this time. Some of the things we enjoy and enrich us most – swimming and other sports events that require minibuses, mixed after-school clubs, music lessons – have had to be postponed for a couple of weeks at least. Some staff training and parent workshops have been postponed or moved back online, and a PTA event has been rescheduled to the spring.

The good news is that almost all the children that have had COVID appear to have had only very mild illness at most (although some adults have had a more significant bout of illness). Whisper it quietly, but the rate of infections in school appears to have slowed down over the past couple of days and we hope to see lots of children back on Monday including almost all of 5K whose class was closed a week ago. The fact that almost all of 5K have been attending remote live lessons this week shows that the illness hasn’t been too serious for them. It was definitely an unwelcome case of deja-vu seeing them all online this week.

This term is usually so important for sustained teaching and learning: not having the settling in and Christmas distractions of term 1, and not including test weeks, residentials and summer events such as Sports Day and performances that we have in term 3.  For years, schools have been targeting attendance of 96%+ and attendance even a couple of percentage points below that would be deemed a ‘failure’ with significant repercussions for the school, its headteacher and its children. This school year was supposed to be back to normal and include lots of ‘catch-up’ and the filling of gaps, but sadly it does appear to be two steps forward, and one step back.