Dear Parents,

Welcome back to school! We are so excited to be back together again and your children have settled in beautifully. There is a lovely buzz throughout the school and all children seem to be happy and thriving. I congratulate our Foundation children and their families on the way they have engaged with school and accepted the challenges COVID has created. It is wonderful to see such happy, smiling faces as they emerge from their cars or pass by with their parents, feeling very grown up and confident to make their way into school.  We really appreciate the way you have begun the school year with your child and warmly welcome you to St Mary’s school community.

As you are aware, we are required to follow all COVID safe guidelines as presented to us from our governing body, DOSCEL. Their information comes from government requirements and are updated regularly to ensure we are meeting the standards. One of these requirements resulted in our staggered pick up time. Watching the way families are engaging with our Kiss and Go system in the morning, and the way parents and guardians are picking their children up at the end of the school day, reassures us that we are certainly following COVID requirements. As a staff we have been seeking ways to maximise the learning opportunities for the students while also maintaining our COVID compliance. While this has been a challenge, we feel we have created a COVID safe way to maximise learning and provide a safe and efficient way to pick up your children at the end of the school day.

After extensive consultation with our teachers and ensuring we are following the latest guidelines, we have all agreed to trial the following school pick up arrangement starting from THIS MONDAY, FEBRUARY THE 8TH:

ALL children will be picked up at 3.15pm. We will no longer have a staggered pick up time.

The children will be meeting as a school on the basketball court area at 3.10pm and will be coming to the Kiss and Go area at 3.15pm. We ask that you do not arrive and sit inside the Kiss and Go area early as this creates congestion. Your child’s teacher will bring the class out to the Kiss and Go area at 3.15pm and will wait with them as they have been doing throughout this challenging time. If you need to pick your child up earlier than 3.15pm, please follow our normal practice of parking your car and coming to the office to ask for them so that you can sign your child out.

If you would like to park at the back of the school and pick up your child from there, you need to tell your child (and preferably your child’s teacher) and your child will be escorted with all of the children who will be picked up at the back of the school, and the bus children, at 3.15pm. The children will be kept inside the school grounds near the back gate and will be brought to the parent’s cars as they approach the gate area. The purpose of offering this way of picking up your child is to ease congestion at the Kiss and Go area.

We will be trialling this system with the hope that parents will arrive at 3.15pm and, if you know that your child would be happy to stay until 3.20 or 3.25pm at the Kiss and Go area, feel free to come then and you will hopefully drive straight through, pick up your child, and leave without having to wait. Staff will be with the children until the last child is picked up. The only issue we find is when parents arrive early and sit inside the Kiss and Go area, their child is not ready to be picked up, and the flow of the traffic is considerably compromised. I feel confident that we will be able to make this work in a COVID safe way so that the children are able to have 30 minutes more class learning time each day.

When using the Kiss & Go please make sure that you drive all the way to the end, so that you do not hold up cars that may pull up behind you.

I thank you for your patience as we adapt to meet the challenges faced by COVID-19 and assure you that as soon as we are given the opportunity to ease restrictions further and make the school as “normal” as we can, we adopt whatever we can to provide a safe, happy, settled learning environment for all children.

Wishing you a wonderful week.

Kind regards,

Lisa Broeren

Principal