As you know, following the Prime Minister’s announcement on Monday 4th January 2021, the whole country moved into a Tier 5, with the closure of schools again for most children during this full national lockdown.  Some children will still be able to access face to face learning in school for lots of different reasons, including if they are children of critical workers according to Government criteria.

As a school, we did not have any advanced warning of this decision and so we have been working extremely hard over the last few days, to ensure that we are able to provide both face to face learning and access to remote learning for those children who remain at home.

We are saddened that this decision has been made, but we recognise the importance of reducing the flow of infection and this can only be done by reducing the numbers of people within our school environment.  We have been in contact with you all via our parent texting service and through individual phone calls home and hopefully you are now all aware of the provision we are able to offer your child.  Ideally, we would like to offer all of our children the opportunity of coming into school, but we can only offer this to children who meet the stringent government criteria.

As in the last lockdown, we are committed to supporting a number of our families with food hampers and more information regarding this will be sent out to you in due course.  We will also be contacting all of our children regularly through Google Classroom and through individual phone calls to make sure they are doing okay and to support them with any issues that may arise.

It is so important for our children to continue their learning, either at home or in school, so please try and encourage your child to engage with their work.  There has been so much disruption during the last 12 months and so we need to make sure now more than ever, that we work together to help them progress.  We will be continuing to assess the work they are completing and will be using this to support end of year assessments, which will also be used to help predict GSCE outcomes for our year 11 learners.

If you need any help whatsoever, please contact me or one of the team and we will do our best to support you.  Please stay safe, look after yourselves and look after each other.

Wendy Casson

Headteacher

wendy.casson@eddiversity.blackpool.sch.uk