It has been quite a crazy first week of 2021 (is it really only a week since New Year’s Day?)! Thank you to you all for your commitment to keeping the whole community safe by staying at home with your families as much as you can – by keeping the numbers in school as low as possible, we are all helping to stop the spread of this horrendous disease. If you need childcare for only part of the week, then do consider forming a “childcare support bubble” which is allowed by the government and will avoid us having to make our groups in school too big.
For those of you at home, I hope you have had a successful first week of remote learning: the staff have certainly risen to the challenge and have worked hard to get to grips with our new Teams sessions on top of the SeeSaw work platform. Over the next week or so, we will be doing more sessions on Teams for the children to take part in.
A few guidelines for when the children are on Teams live sessions:
· When you join the meeting, you will wait in the “lobby” until the teacher is ready to “admit” you.
· Children should wear appropriate clothing (day clothes please, not pyjamas!) and be in a shared space (ideally not a bedroom). If they do not have an appropriate space, they should blur their background or use a virtual background or switch to audio-only.
· All live sessions will either have 2 adults in the session and/ or be recorded for safeguarding purposes; these recordings are stored securely within the Microsoft 365 school environment and will also be accessible only to the staff leading the session and if necessary to the Headteacher or safeguarding team
· If parents do not wish their child to be recorded, they can choose not to join the session or to join with audio only
· Live sessions will be kept to a reasonable length of time, so that the streaming does not prevent the family ‘getting on' with their day
Fr Ross will be leading a liturgy for us this week – we will post the link in your Teams channels as I know some of you had trouble accessing it last week. He will be taking as his theme this Sunday’s feast of the Baptism of the Lord, where Jesus was baptised in the River Jordan, not to be washed of his sins, but as a sign that his ministry was starting. You will find links to various live-streamed Masses here:
Thank you for you continued support at this difficult time and have a lovely weekend.
Best wishes,
Michael Lobo