WLD Update for Parents & Carers Tuesday 9th June 2020

Good afternoon,

A slightly longer note from me this afternoon - apologies...

Learning from home: I have had a couple of email conversations with parents of Year 10 students over the last 24 hours which have prompted me to update everyone on what is going on at school to support our students' learning.  I hope that this is useful to parents/carers of all year groups:

As you know, our highest priority has been the wellbeing of our students, families and staff over the period of the lockdown. Pastoral phonecalls on a weekly or fortnightly basis have checked on wellbeing and access to the learning resources. We know that learning from home is difficult for many students and we know that trying to get young people to engage is tricky, particularly where households are busy and life is out of its usual pattern.  We have therefore been providing structured work each week alongside individual support from teachers - for example, if a student has an issue with work on quadratic sequences he or she has been able to email their Maths teacher for direct assistance via email or Teams.  We have given feedback on work that has been submitted and celebrated many achievements. Students have submitted some outstanding work!

As this remote learning situation continues we are obviously concerned about gaps in learning developing.  The work that is being set is carefully planned and mapped - we know that if students complete it, seeking individual support as required, we will know where they are up to when we next see them and we can make progress from there.  That is why I have been stressing the importance of students contacting teachers over the last few weeks in these updates.  The key to this is contact between student and teacher. The issue, as many of us will know, is engagement - our students need independence and self-motivation.  These are useful characteristics to develop for later life, but challenging for many young people in these circumstances.  As you know, we are considering recorded or livestreamed lessons (we already use recorded lessons from Oak Academy) and they may add something to our provision, but we are not convinced that students who aren't engaging with the learning will engage with a livestreamed lesson - our pilot with a team of staff will show us whether it helps.  We will also be contacting you with some outline information about whether work is being completed - starting with Year 10 and then rolling out to other year groups.  We have to be careful not to heap pressure on situations at home that may be fragile, but we just want to give you the information to have the conversation with your son or daughter. We can then see if there are further ways in which we can help individual students and families. In some cases there is a tension between prioritising wellbeing and mental health and expecting engagement with learning.  We need to balance these things carefully over the coming weeks. 

I will write more about these developments and others in the coming days - we are very much looking forward to seeing our students again, but at the current time we need to work together to ensure that as much learning as possible is happening remotely.

Notice from Mrs Long: Reading Matters! Remember that your youngster can borrow books and digital magazines for free using Lancashire BorrowBox.  All you have to do is have a library membership.  If your youngster doesn’t yet have a membership, click on the link that follows to join from home.   Click on the link: https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/libraries-and-archives/libraries/library-services/?page=2
This will open the direct page for joining the library within the lancasire.gov website
Scroll down until you see the below green button, click on this and it will take you to the form to complete to join the library

You will need to provide the following information:

·         Name

·         Local library - if you do not know which is your local library click on this link which gives you a list of all  Lancashire library .

·         Date of birth

·         Address

·         email address (not a school one - so we can email your library number to you and contact you about reservations)

 

Best wishes

 

James Harris

Headteacher