Dear Parents and Carers

Welcome back to the summer term! Just a short letter from me this week to welcome everyone back to school and what we hope will be an increasingly normal summer term. The internal assessments for years 11 and 13 are now underway, and all other year groups continue with their studies in their zones as they did before the Easter break.

In my letter to you before Easter, I wrote about that need to revive all of our high expectations and we hope to continue doing that both ambitiously and compassionately. One of our concerns remains around attendance, which has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, despite the extremely low prevalence of the virus in our school community.

In that regard, we hope that the home testing continues each Wednesday and Sunday, with more kits distributed to students this week. We were relieved that there were no reported cases of COVID-19 across our school community over the Easter break, which means we have been fortunate since schools reopened on 8 March. This is such good news and particularly so for our year 11s and 13s, whose success depends so much on there being as much continuity and stability as possible.

Regarding leaving dates, the official leaving date across all English and Welsh schools remains 25 June 2021. Nevertheless, in common with all schools locally, we anticipate that students in years 11 and 13 will not be returning to normal classes after the Whitsun half term. The precise ‘final day’ is not yet known but we shall share that once agreed in the coming days and set out our plans for year 11 bridging courses in the coming  weeks – enabling students to make an incredibly strong start to their A level studies before they officially begin!

I would also like to advise all families that, after discussion with the governing body, we have agreed to ask all students to remain at home on Friday 9 July 2021 and participate in a full day of remote learning. This will enable us to deep clean the school on Thursday 8 July and invite all of our new year 7s from their primary schools to have the school ‘to themselves’ so that they might enjoy something resembling the normal transition experience that we missed so much last year. 

Do have a lovely weekend when it arrives.

Yours faithfully

Mr Doherty

Headteacher