20/01 Newsletter

Friday, 20 January 2023

Dear Parents/Carers,

Attendance

Our overall attendance for this week is 88.45%

Punctuality

We had 5 hours 45 minutes of lates this week, meaning vital learning is still being missed by some children.

Please ensure that your child is in school before the gates closes at 8.50am each day.

Please remember that by law, your child has to attend school. Holidays or trips abroad during term time will not be authorised and will result in your child missing valuable learning time and the parents receiving a financial penalty.

Events this week

It has been a very strange week in school, with the snow and then the lack of water on

Thursday afternoon.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Whenever we have adverse weather, we will always do whatever we can to keep the school open.

Opening later on Thursday gave staff a little bit longer to get into work, reducing the number of staff that could drive in safely, and also meant that the roads were a little bit clearer before parents/carers came to school.

This may be a procedure that we use again, if we have snow, but just depends on the conditions that we have on the day.

Non-uniform day today – thank you for all the donations that you sent in today, for us to buy new toys for our Reception class.

Future Events

Author Luke Temple is visiting our school next week. All of the children will get the chance to work with him and there will be an opportunity for the children to buy a book and have it signed.  Children will bring home order forms and instructions for payment on Thursday 26^th January, which need to be returned on Friday 27^th January, when Luke will be returning to school to sign the children’s books.

Parking

I have received a complaint from a local resident, stating that drivers are parking on Ainsdale Avenue and Hawthorne Avenue whilst collecting or dropping off pupils. This is a private road and only local residents are allowed to use it. As always, I ask that all drivers are made aware of need to park safely and legally. The complaint related to a driver who abandoned her car, blocking the road, whilst collecting children. The police have again been made aware of this, and a number of other instances where the law is being broken by drivers and they are due to pay a visit to school to help address the issue. Please ensure that all drivers are aware not to park on these roads, and to abide by the signs on this road, along with all other road markings and safety signs.

Online Safety

Online safety sessions for parents took place both in school and online on Tuesday.

Thank you to all those parents/carers who attended.

There were lots of useful pieces of information within the session.

There are lots of useful links on the school website, including one from ‘Internet Matters’ with how to set parental controls for social media, gaming consoles, entertainment and broadband. If you follow the link on our website and scroll down the page, you will see that you can select which device you want to set controls for, and you can download a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

Rob also recommended that children use a child-safe search engine such as Kiddle instead of Google, so that they are seeing age-appropriate content.

Let’s hope for a normal week next week, with no disruptions or surprises!

Have a lovely weekend.

Thank you for your support,

Mrs Sarah Bell

Headteacher

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