We’ve had a great first day back in school ?. It’s been lovely to see children playing together at break and lunchtime, and to hear the chatter in the dining hall as they eat their lunch. We’ll continue to monitor the arrangements in school and let you know if we need to make any changes. Thank you to everyone who has given us positive feedback about the start of the school year – we appreciate your support, as we always have, through the changes that have been made. We’ve all spent some time today talking to children about our core values; we will be sharing this with you also in the coming weeks. Our core values are Happiness, Respect, Trust and Compassion and we want all of our school community to share these values too. By respecting, trusting and being compassionate with each other we will all (hopefully!) become happy in our time at school (and beyond). We will always try to show these values with our children and with our parents and we ask that you also do the same.

A couple of parents have contacted us about the drop-off arrangements in a morning. Because we had to make changes over the past 18 months, we had to approach certain times of the day differently. What we found in a morning, by allowing children to come straight into class, was that they were calmer, more relaxed and ready to start the day so much better than the system we had in place previously. For this reason, we wanted to keep the arrangements as close to this as possible.

I appreciate that today, being the first day back, had extra issues that won’t be there after a few days when everything has settled down. The idea in a morning is that you come to the gate with your child, drop them off and then leave straight away. Children will know where they are going and will go straight into class ready for their day. Obviously, this morning was different as it was their first day in their new class, with their new teacher, and they weren’t all sure where they should be going. And, obviously, many of you wanted to hang around that little bit longer to say ‘goodbye’ on their first day back after the break.

After the first few days the procedures will go much more smoothly and there will be less of a bottleneck outside of the gates.

We also want to try to minimise belongings that are brought into school, hence why we are asking children not to come with bags. Again, during the past 18 months, we have been able to utilise cloakrooms better and use them as learning spaces, rather than storage spaces for bags, coats and PE kits. We would like to keep this going as it has made a real difference to where staff can take small groups to work – it’s much better than sitting on the floor in a corridor! However, we are looking at the option for Year 6 to bring a small bag as they do have a lot more homework/revision books etc to bring to and from school.

As always, if we feel that the new procedures can be improved upon we will continue to monitor and make any changes necessary, letting you know before we do.

Thank you again for your support.

Take Care & Stay Safe

Mr Dunn