19th March 2020
Dear Parents,
You may be aware of the announcement that the children of essential Key Workers will be allowed to attend school whilst the school will be closed to all other children.
We fully support the work done by these key workers and understand that this work is essential at this time.
At this point it is a little unclear from government exactly the extent of the category Key Worker, but we believe those to be:
Whilst I appreciate that some parents will find it difficult to provide the childcare and education required at home I would like to stress that it is the expectation that children will not attend school unless both parents are working within a frontline service and that they will be required to work away from home during the school opening times.
As far as I understand the aim of this government strategy is to create an environment of “Social Distancing” and that it is expected that less than 10% of children will be at school for this strategy to be delivered as intended.
If you consider that you meet the criteria of essential Key Worker help us by sending an email by 1:00pm tomorrow (Friday) with the following details:
Childs’ / children’s name:
Class:
Nature of essential work role 1:
Employing service 1 address (to enable us to verify details):
Nature of essential worker role 2:
Employing service 2 address (to enable us to verify details):
Best email contact:
Mobile number:
We will aim to send you a confirmation at the earliest point if we agree that your child can attend school during the period of school closure. Please do not send your child to school on Monday until we confirm that they are able to.
I appreciate that these are difficult times for everyone but we do need to plan for the care of these children under very difficult circumstances with regard to staff cover. It may be that our position regarding qualifying Key Worker services changes in light of any government guidance. Please bear in mind these are new times for us all to navigate through. I do not wish to add additional stress to families in any way but we will need to be robust in only offering support to those essential Key Workers (yet to be clearly defined by government).
Best wishes,
Alex Buckley