WLD Update for Parents & Carers Tuesday 14th April 2020

13 April 2020

Good morning,

I hope that you and your family have managed to have something of a break over this Easter weekend despite these strange and unsettling times. We have been open across the Easter holiday for children of key workers who cannot safely be at home - we have had between 5 and 14 children supervised in school each day. Many thanks to all the staff who have been coming in to open up the school and run our key worker supervision - catering staff, site team, admin team, teachers and TAs.

There are a number of updates from the last 10 days:

Vocational qualifications: There has been some guidance from Ofqual about the way in which grades will be awarded for vocational subjects this year (Sport, Health and Social Care, Performance, Enterprise and ICT (known as DIT)). As with the guidance on GCSE grades we will study it carefully and write again once we have decided on our course of action.

Setting work from next week: We have been carefully reviewing the way in which we set work over the first 2 weeks of school closure. Our main priorities were to ensure that we had contact with everyone and that everyone had work to do at home. We have found, however, that the daily setting of work was too inflexible for many families so we are going to set work for each week in each subject to allow students and families more flexibility in planning their time. This will be sent out by email and posted on the website on a Friday for the following week. Teachers will then be able to answer questions and assist via email or "Teams" in the way that they have been doing. We are looking at how work can be provided on paper for those who do not have internet access, but this is going to be difficult to do for more than a very small number of students and will be much less focused so I would encourage everyone who can to access the work online. I will be in touch on Friday with further details and the work for next week.

Free school meal vouchers: Following the announcement from the government that vouchers would be available over the Easter holidays we promptly sent the required information to the relevant government website. The government voucher system has had significant problems, however, and Mrs Eckersley has been working hard to sort out individual issues, but the government site has been completely unavailable for large periods of time. There is an information sheet from the government at the end of this update which answers frequent questions.

Wellbeing and mental health helpline: This is now open 24/7 to help people deal with the implications of the coronavirus pandemic on their mental health. If you need mental health support call 0800 915 4640 or text 'Hello' to 07862 022846 there is more information at www.lscft.nhs.uk/news/814

On Friday I will send out information that has come out about online resources for home schooling, online assemblies and more online safety advice along with the study work for next week. If you haven't seen our "WLD claps for the NHS" video or tried our Easter challenges, please have a look.

Meanwhile, I hope and trust that you and your family continue to stay safe.

Regards