Head Teacher Blog: Friday 15th January 2021

Date: 15th Jan 2021 @ 11:01am

In amongst all the madness that was last week, I didn’t tell you about some lovely news from the office over the Christmas holiday. As you all know, Miss Oxley became Mrs Rutherford, but she wasn’t the only one that got married - Mrs James sprang a surprise wedding on everyone and became Mrs McFarland just before Christmas! Some of you will have been receiving e mails from Mrs McFarland and wondering who it was: well now you know! As always, I’m sure that you will all join with me in wishing Mrs McFarland and her husband all our best wishes as they begin their married life together.

Things have been a lot calmer in school this week as everyone adjusts to the new bubbles and the different pattern of working. Teachers have been busy planning remote learning, doing the daily live contact, providing feedback daily and responding to any e mail queries on their class e mail address during the day whilst the Teaching Assistants are busy leading the learning in school in the same way that you are at home. Staff have been very impressed with everyone’s engagement with Home Learning and regularly sharing with me pieces of work that they have received and how well everyone is doing, whether at home or in school. We have now been trained in how to do recorded teaching so you will see that popping up in the Home Learning explanations over the next week. This should hopefully make it easier for you to either let the children listen and learn whilst you are also working from home or perhaps guide you too whilst you do the home learning with them, at whatever point during the day you are able.

Today, you will have also seen a new addition to your Home Learning – Collective Worship. Usually we do whole school Collective Worship with me on a Tuesday and Friday, which we do via Teams. We are not able to do this at the moment because of the way live contact is scheduled throughout the day as there is no ‘free time’ when all classes are available. Even if there was, as I said last week, our broadband wouldn’t cope with me connecting to all the external families at once as well! So I am now recording Collective Worship – usually around 10 minutes long – for you to watch at home and for the children to watch in school. I’m not keen on the way I sound and haven’t been brave enough to put my face on video yet, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it!

Free School Meals

There has been a lot of talk in the media this week about the quality of free school meals parcels and free school meals vouchers from 18^th January. Government guidance is that the ‘steps schools take during this national lockdown period will depend on local circumstances.’ (Read the guidance here) Our local circumstances are that our catering company, Edsential, are able to provide weekly food parcels to cover 5 lunches with each parcel for one child.

Here is some information from Edsential with regards to their food parcels:

Our parcels have been carefully compiled to enable parents to cook hot, tasty meals for children at home that are simple to prepare and adhere to all school food standards. These meals have been designed to offer a lunch time meal for the child and are not expected to cover other daily meals or family members.
We are trying to balance a parcel that is suitable for as many families as possible, using favourites from the school menu. Whilst we know that many parents would welcome additional items such as meat and fish, we have avoided including any perishable items that would be dangerous to children if not stored or transported at the correct temperatures.
All parcels include handy, inspirational recipe sheets (see link for example) with simple, easy to follow instructions for parents and children in the hope that this will encourage child participation and food education at home. We appreciate that for some families, these recipes may be too simple and for others too difficult, but we will keep working to get the balance right.
We are working tirelessly on new ingredients, recipes and video tutorials and hope to rotate our menus on a fortnightly basis. Every school in the country is pulling on suppliers for similar ingredients at the moment, and it is taking suppliers a little time to find alternatives and bolster stock levels nationally, but please be assured that we take any feedback seriously and are working hard to try and improve.

This week, we have provided feedback to Edsential that we gathered from the families who have received food parcels so far and already some changes have been made from next week, which I know that our parents requested. We will continue to work on behalf of yourselves to ensure that the best meal options are provided in the parcel.

The office will send a text weekly to those in receipt of FSM, who aren’t in school, to see if you would like a food parcel for the following week with a response deadline – Edsential need to know in advance of how many food parcels to cater for and the amount of ingredients to order. If you would like one every week without having to respond every week, please do let us know that too.

#WakeUpWednesday

We’ve all seen an extreme recent example of the possible consequences when fake news is allowed to go unchecked. Whether for political purposes or just for devilment, the phenomenon is continuing to spread into all corners of the internet.

But what forms can fake news take? What is it being used for? How can we spot it? What can we do about it? As part of National Online Safety’s ‘Online Information’ series, this #WakeUpWednesday they’re bringing you a completely genuine guide to fake news.

Please see below for details.

Please remember that your child’s class teachers are only at the end of an e mail all day. We would prefer that you contact them via this method so that, for safety reasons, they leave their bubble environment as little as possible and avoid sharing the phone in the area that Mrs Rutherford is working.

 

I hope that you all have some lovely family time this weekend and a well-earned rest from working or home schooling.

 

Take care,

Mrs E Snowdon

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