4 June 2020

Dear Parents,

Hope you are well. Pity the lovely weather has disappeared!

I just wanted to update you on a few things.

We continue to open to children of Key worker families and vulnerable children. If you remember I sent an email before half term explaining this, and that, as per government guidance these still remain the priority groups. The government wanted to open this further to children from Reception, Y1 and Y6 if this was possible to do so in individual schools. Sefton LA took the decision that Sefton schools would not open to those year groups until 15 June, but to remain until then with the Key worker and vulnerable children.

We have a number of children therefore who are eligible to be in school. We have conducted a risk assessment with a health and safety consultancy company, which many of the schools use locally, to support the decisions to be made, to ensure we do whatever possible to make sure we are keeping all children and staff as safe as possible. This is obviously dependent on room sizes, ratios, numbers of staff available etc.

We therefore have a limited number of places available still to key worker families. If these are not taken, we can then offer again to children from Reception, Y1 and Y6. Please let finance.strobertbellarmine@schools.sefton.gov.uk know by 12 o’clock tomorrow (Friday 5 June).

We previously, before half term, had a very small number of requests from parents of children from Reception, Y1 and Y6 who have asked to have a place, if possible, after 15 June when we surveyed this before half term. These have been added to the list already.

We are doing out very best to safely accommodate as many children as possible.

We will continue to set Home learning in exactly the same way we have been doing. Teachers will continue to be in touch with you by email and please keep these communications going, as for many of you, this is your only contact with school. We really do appreciate how difficult it is to keep on helping your children to learn but please do not give up! Just keep trying to do a bit each day, and don’t forget their reading.

Until we receive further information from the government we will continue in this way. We actually only have the same information that you do, we don’t get it in advance.

If you are struggling and need to talk to someone in school please contact me or email your teacher and we will try to help you.

Continue to look at the website because there is a lot of useful information on there.

For Parents of children who may be starting in either Nursery or Reception - the class teachers will soon be in touch with you regarding plans for transition and information packs. We obviously hope things are back to normal come September, but again we will only be able to work with government guidance.

Take care everyone,

Kind regards,

Mairead Dowell