Dear parents and guardians,
I hope that the initial stages of our Remote Learning offerings have gone well, and your children have been engaged in a range of online activities and learning.
Following on from our letter dated 31 December, there have been new developments in response to the ongoing COVID-19 situation. Yesterday, the Prime Minister confirmed that schools in England will move to remote learning until at least the February half-term break, which begins on February 15th. We have therefore closed the school buildings and moved to our remote learning model until that time. However, children who are deemed vulnerable and children of parents who are key workers can come into school to be supervised during their remote learning. If you consider yourself to fall into one of these categories and would like this provision then please fill out the following form as soon as possible.
The most important thing for us at this time as a Dwight community is to be there for each other and to provide support, care and guidance. This is not only to ensure that the students make progress with their learning, but also to ensure that students stay mentally positive and well. Should you, or your child, have any mental health concerns during this period then please do reach out to the school as we have a myriad of resources we can deploy if needed. With regards to lessons and learning, we will continue to utilise the pre-existing Google Suite for Education across the school to provide high quality remote learning provision. If you experience any difficulties then please reach out to Nick Brown at the Upper School or Waseem Rehman at the Lower School.
This also inevitably means a delay to the planned COVID-19 testing for the Upper School. Despite the enforced closure, we will continue to prepare to have the procedures around testing staff and students in place so that we are ready for this eventuality once students begin to physically return to the school.
We will continue to update you over the coming weeks when we have further guidance from the government via email, text message and the dedicated website page.
I would like to thank you for your continued understanding, support, resilience and flexibility. We will continue to do everything we can to minimise the impact upon our community.
Kind regards, Alison Cobbin Head of School Chris Beddows Upper School Principal Matt Parkin Lower School Principal |