Week beginning 15th January 2021

Happy New Year! We hope that you and your precious family are safe and well and that you enjoyed your family time over the Christmas break (which now seems some time away!)

Inevitably, we had a difficult and perhaps surprising start to 2021 with us now being in lockdown with schools in London and in many Boroughs moving to remote learning, due to increased transmission of the new COVID-19 strain. The First Minister confirmed that learners will continue to learn remotely and vulnerable children and children of critical workers will have access to on-site provision until February half term (to be reviewed by the government for plans after this). During his address to MPs ahead of the vote on the new Covid rules on Wednesday 6 January, Mr Johnson explained that the emergence from lockdown will be gradual, and likely to run until 31 March.

Any updates, including restriction details can be found here News | The Hayes Primary School. Please know that we share your frustration and concerns – we know that it is an incredibly difficult job to make sure that your own work is done whist ensuring that your children are focussed and engaged. We are very proud of you all and the efforts that you are making as families to ensure that your children are learning at home. However, there will be times where you are all feeling frustrated for many reasons and this is natural – if this happens, please kick off your shoes, wrap yourself in a throw, watch a film, bake something lovely, read a book together –your well-being and your child(ren’s) is far more important than handing in online learning. In fact, if you cannot hand in remote learning for a day or two, please do not worry, just let your class teacher know – we do completely understand and are always here to help. It remains essential that we do all we can to keep each other safe at this time particularly given the increased transmissibility of the new variant. Over Christmas, this has unfortunately had an impact on our school community – with a number of staff and families who have been unwell with the virus or have had to isolate due to being a close contact with a COVID positive family member. We are doing all we can to keep everybody safe and well to ensure a continued provision of home learning and in school learning and ask for your support in this.

On this, if your child has a place in our Hub provision, please ensure that you wear a face covering at drop off and pick up and that you maintain a distance of 2 metres from others at all times. If you do not wear a covering, you will be asked to leave our premises unless you are exempt. We have staggered the drop off points and pick up times to assist with this. May we also remind you that if, at any point, your child develops symptoms (in the Hub), please ensure you book a test and keep them at home until you receive confirmation of a negative result. If your child tests positive, you must inform us immediately so that we can notify all close contacts and they can isolate as required by law. Thank you.

For those of you supporting home schooling- once more, thank you. We have made improvements to our practice since the last lockdown and thank many of you who have written to our teaching staff and the senior leadership team to acknowledge this. We hope that the introduction of Google Classroom, which enables twice daily live contact with your class teacher, will support you with home schooling by providing the children with a teacher-led, clear explanation of the planned learning for the day, a sharing of work and reading of a class book, in the afternoon session. If this has not happened so far in quite the same way, it will do from Monday. It is our expectation that your child is logged in for morning registration and those children who do not attend will receive a follow up call from a member of staff to ascertain their whereabouts. If you are having difficulty logging on please do contact us so we can help you to resolve these. Thank you again!

Next week, we will write to you about our Remote Offer, but in short, the government have stated that remote education provided should be equivalent in length to the core teaching pupils would receive in school and this includes prerecorded or live direct teaching time, and time for pupils to complete tasks and assignments independently. The Hayes is going to provide a mix of digital remote education: blended learning (a mix of face-to-face and remote methods), synchronous education: live (Google Meets); asynchronous education (when the material is prepared by the teacher and accessed by the pupil at a later date). This will be explained in a letter, next week.

The amount of remote education provided will be, as a minimum:
• Key Stage 1: 3 hours a day on average across the cohort, with less for younger children (EYFS)
• Key Stage 2: 4 hours a day.

All of our staff are working incredibly hard during the normal school day hours and beyond to ensure that resources are prepared and feedback given, that Google Meets are a time for learning, reading of a story, answering questions and more besides (and if not, will be this week). Additionally, from next week, you will see an increase in prerecorded videos from experts, such as from Oak Academy or White Rose (KS1 and KS2’s maths curriculum) and anything active, for example, Joe Wicks or our very own CSSP (Croydon Schools Sports Partnership). From 25th January, you will receive more prerecorded lessons from your year group’s teachers, particularly in English and IPC (KS1 and KS2). The live streaming is current - Google Meets at the start of the day and end of the day. We will write to you again at the start of next week with our offer, in more detail.
Printer and Ink: there is no requirement to print the work uploaded to Google Classroom (GC). You can write answers on a piece of paper, take a photo of this and upload to GC or type on a Word document and upload to GC. Please do not feel you need to print off many pages of work. Hub: due to all children taking part in active learning during the day, please ensure your child is dressed appropriately, daily. For example: school PE kit or something comfortable for PE (ie: joggers, sweatshirt, etc) which is not the school PE kit!
Challenges: we are aware that, for some parents, there are challenges associated with home schooling particularly for those who are juggling this with working from home but, unfortunately, we are not in a position to offer spaces in school to children on the grounds that home schooling is difficult, as much as we would love to welcome all of our children back – it simply is not safe to do so. Additionally, the government’s message is also clear – stay at home because it is safer to do so! We really do understand but our first priority is safety and we must keep the number of children in our Hub low enough to ensure the children and staff in the classroom can distance from one another as far as possible. We are very much still open and staff are still working.
e are here to offer help and support with any challenges that you may face and if there are any specific issues you need help/ support with please do not hesitate to email your class teacher directly and she will do her best to assist you. If you or someone you love is struggling with their mental health during this time, the following services are available to you and accessing this much needed support can be as simple as sending a text. Please do reach out.
It is with sadness that Mrs Doble left The Hayes last week, securing a well-deserved promotion as assistant office manager at a local Secondary School - they are very lucky to have her. Whilst we are sad to see her go, we wish her the very best of luck in her new role and thank her enormously for her contribution to The Hayes which has spanned over the last 12 years. She has done so much for The Hayes – a tremendous Chair of the PTA, raising £1000s for our children, her excellent support to pupils as a teaching assistant was second to none and most recently her warm, welcoming smile as part of our admin team. We gave her a good send off and we wish her all the very best and much love. Xx
HUGE Congratulations to our Stars of the Week
*Rainforest: Olivia for being very brave and challenging herself with her home learning!
*Safari: Devon for listening well in class meetings and really challenging herself with her home learning.
*Class 1: Evie for writing a detailed letter to the witch and meeting her checklist targets.
*Class 2: Arthur, for writing a fantastic letter to the witch.
*Class 3: Charlie for writing an outstanding description of Peri the Penguin using adjectives, adverbs, similes and different sentence openers.
*Class 4: Isabelle for an outstanding effort with her home learning and writing a lovely fact file for her toy.
*Class 5: Parker for his fabulous travel guide about Cyprus.
*Class 6: Joshua for producing an amazing travel guide for Switzerland.
*Class 7: Hayden for using brilliant expanded noun phrases in his English writing. *Class 8: Byron for putting 100% effort into his home learning tasks and producing high quality pieces of work.
*Class 9: Dylan for a well written letter which offers a job as a crew member on board Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition.
*Class 10: Lois for being so enthusiastic with her learning and really trying her best. *Class 11: Luke for continuing to share his love for reading and for always put 100% effort into his work.
*Class 12: Gabe for your diary entry about Willie’s day at school, including feelings, conjunctions to link ideas and brackets and exclamation marks to vary your punctuation. Well done!