Dear Parents,

In a previous newsletter, I wrote to you about the various working parties taking place across the school over this term. One of these working parties is focusing on partnership with parents and a key area they are considering is communication. Each week a number of newsletters (like this one) get sent to all families and whilst we think it is very important that we keep you informed about what is going on in the school we also do not want to bombard you with so many emails, newsletters, notices, and letters that you feel overwhelmed or find it difficult to find the information that is relevant to you. We would like to know what you think about this so the working party will be sending you a quick questionnaire and we would really appreciate your feedback. When you receive the questionnaire, please take a few minutes to complete the survey so that we can take your opinion into account when making decisions about future communications between the school and home.

Another project, also centred on communication, is the setting up of a parent portal so that parents can access information from the school via the Internet quickly and conveniently. This project has taken longer to set up than we imagined as we were confronted with some unexpected technical challenges. However, I am pleased to say that we are in the final stages of preparing the portal and you should be receiving information about how to access the parent portal next week.

Initially, the portal will be a hub for communications between school and home and we hope you will find it a quick and easy way to access information relevant to your children’s learning and activities. This term we will also be piloting a learning platform that will become linked to the portal where parents will be able to access curriculum information and homework flow. This will be piloted with a few classes this term and we hope to roll it out to other classes during the autumn term. Please be patient with us as we populate the portal and learning platform with curriculum material as it will take some time to put all the relevant information in the appropriate places.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the portal, newsletters or other methods of communicating with the school we would love to hear your thoughts. Please take advantage of the surveys that will be sent to you from the various working parties over this term as it is always helpful for us to know what parents find helpful and how we can improve.

Best wishes for a warm and sunny weekend

Alison Cobbin
Head of School