If you’ve been reading our previous website posts, you’ll know that schools receive a daily update from the Department for Education about coronavirus. In today’s, we have this reminder:
- staff, young people and children should stay at home if they are unwell with a new, continuous cough or a high temperature to avoid spreading infection to others. Otherwise they should attend education or work as normal
- if staff, young people or children become unwell on site with a new, continuous cough or a high temperature they should be sent home
Please note that we’re not able to advise you on anything more than this. I appreciate that keeping a child off school is a big decision, but we encourage you to base your decision on what is said here.
The updates continue to stress the importance of handwashing:
The most important thing individuals can do to protect themselves is to wash their hands more often, for at least 20 seconds, with soap and water. Public Health England recommends that in addition to handwashing before eating, and after coughing and sneezing, everyone should also wash hands after using toilets and travelling on public transport.
We’d like to update you on other aspects of school life and how coronavirus might impact this.
Hand cream
We’re allowing children to bring hand cream to school if their hands are dry because of all the handwashing.
Year 6 residentials
Current guidance from the government does not indicate that residentials should be cancelled. At the moment at least, we plan to go ahead with these as normal. However, do be aware that there is a possibility that the Year 6 residential is cancelled, not by us but by the company we use – this would be beyond our control.
Other trips and sporting events planned
The message here is the same as for the Y6 residential – at this stage, these are going ahead. A few local events have so far been cancelled by the people running them. It’s important to know the cancellation is due to higher than normal levels of absences as people self-isolate as a precautionary measure rather than concerns about mass-gatherings or confirmed cases of the virus.
Swimming
Similarly, we plan to continue taking children swimming. There’s no guidance from the government to say to do otherwise – we’ve checked and double-checked this. This article from The Guardian backs up our decision. However, we’ll respect your decision if you tell us you’d prefer your child not to go swimming for the moment.
Training day – 15 May 2020
We’ve a training day scheduled for Friday 15 May. If schools have closed and re-open by this stage, we would look to cancel this training day so your child is back at school for as much of the remainder of the school year as possible. This is not confirmed and we realise if might affect some families who may have booked time away. However, you’ll understand that our priority is to minimise the impact of any school closures.