As you will be aware the Prime Minister announced the new Living with Covid Plan.
The plan can be found here:
The plan effects how we work in schools and the mitigations we are expected to have in place. No guidance has been published for schools since the announcement and when and if this is published we will share it with you.
There are still a comparatively high numbers of positive cases in the school community and we need to continue to be vigilant about this.
We will continue to minimise movement around the school, continuing to have remote assemblies, for example, for the next two weeks. We will review this in the middle of March.
We will also need to continue to ensure that there is good hygiene. We will continue with the regular cleaning of the school premises and we will need to continue to emphasize regular hand washing and catch it, kill it, bin it. We will also need to continue to ventilate the classrooms.
We will also continue to limit the number of visitors for the next two weeks, we will review this in the middle of March also.
The most important mitigation and safety measure remains preventing the pathogen entering the building, the best way of doing this is to be vigilant about symptoms, a high temperature, a new persistent cough and being unable to taste or smell. If your child reports any of these symptoms to you then you should not bring the children in to school and you should try to access a test, if you can.
We will encourage you to follow the current guidance for your children about bringing your children to school. That is that they can return to school if they have two negative tests by day 6, 24 hours apart, and on day 11 if there are not 2 negative test before then, unless they continue to have a high temperature. Test and trace will not need to be informed and this service will be stopped. We will all need to be vigilant and thoughtful about others, if your children are not well you should consider if they should be in school, for the good of everyone in our community.
The government have also updated us on the vaccination programme for primary agreed children, please refer to this advice if you have any questions about this.
It can be found here;
The legal requirement to self-isolate after a positive test will be withdrawn on Thursday 24th February but we would encourage all members of the school community to be responsible for themselves and everyone else and to self-isolate, and certainly not attend school, if they are positive or have symptoms. All through the pandemic our school community has taken personal responsibility for themselves and for others and this needs to continue to ensure that we all remain safe.
If we continue to do what we have been doing and be as supportive and thoughtful and kind to each other I am sure that we can continue to be safe and help the children learn, be happy and be safe.