Y7-11 Absence Line: 01625 627229 Sixth Form Absence Line: 01625 627274 Visit the Sixth Form Website
Y7-11 Absence Line: 01625 627229 Sixth Form Absence Line: 01625 627274 Visit the Sixth Form Website
We hope you have enjoyed the school holiday period and that your son/daughter is looking forward to the start of the new school year. Attached is the letter that we sent to you in July as this includes a lot of information about the organisational arrangements for this week.
In addition, we just wanted to send you a couple of updates in advance of the start of the school year.
If your son/daughter has Covid symptoms, there is no longer any requirement or expectation that you should be isolated or tested. Instead, you are advised to keep them at home until they feel able to return to school. They should not return to school if they have a high temperature.
If the Covid situation worsens, we assume that further guidance will be sent to us accordingly. We will update you about these issues as necessary.
Our Y11 and Y13 students performed brilliantly in their exams this year. We celebrated these results with them a few weeks ago and have posted some photos from this event on our website. These students returned some of the best results that we have ever seen at Fallibroome, which is an extraordinary achievement in light of the challenges that they faced throughout the pandemic.
A lot of work has also been done over the summer to make sure that we make a positive start to the school year and we are looking forward to welcoming everyone back to school this week.
It seems that we are moving into a stage where Covid will be managed in the same way as other illnesses. As such, we expect that we will be able to discontinue our Covid email address from the start of next academic year and that we will no longer need to monitor staff or student isolation periods.
That said, we are also conscious of the fact that Covid cases are on an upward trajectory across the country at the moment and this may lead to a change of government strategy over the summer months. We will monitor these circumstances over the holiday and will let you know if we need to reintroduce any control measures in September. At the moment, this seems very unlikely.
I have attached our updated Covid guidance for the term ahead. As usual, the key changes are shown in red.
Our guidance for positive cases has changed a lot for obvious reasons – so please read this section especially carefully. We have had to write this advice in a way that reflects the fact that access to LFD tests will be very inconsistent this term – so I hope that this approach makes sense to everyone.
I hope that you’ve all had a great break and enjoy the rest of the bank holiday. We are looking forward to seeing everyone back at school tomorrow.
Parent and Student Handbook April 18th 2022
As I’m sure you are aware, in the last few days a number of announcements have been made by the government with regard to the relaxation of national Covid restrictions.
At the same time, we have also been in receipt of advice from the Department for Education, UK Health Security Agency and Local Authority Public Health officials. All of this advice is indicating that we ought to continue to manage Covid in much the same way as we did last half-term. We intend to follow this advice. As such, the handbooks and flow charts that we issued just before half-term have only had to be slightly amended (see attached). Even though these changes are fairly minor, please take a few minutes to review the red text and the highlighted sections of these documents before Monday.
I hope you all enjoy the rest of the weekend and we all look forward to seeing our students back in school on Monday.
Parent and Student Handbook – February 28th 2022 – Updated (1)
Covid Advice Flow Chart – February 28th 2022 – For Students and Parents
I have attached our updated Student Handbook for the start of next half term. The key changes to the last version are shown in red. I have also attached our Covid flow charts, even though this guidance remains unchanged for the time being.
We are aware that further government announcements regarding national Covid management restrictions are likely in the next few days. Once this is published, we will review our guidance and update our handbooks accordingly.
We have just come to the end of Creativity Week 2021-22. This is an important event in our calendar as it is intended to actively encourage and promote creative activities in all subject areas. We also lead this work across the Trust schools and alongside our FLC primary schools too. We have seen a huge range of fantastic activities in the last week that have given a real sense of excitement and joy across our schools. Our media team have been following this closely and have produced a short three-minute video to celebrate the quality of the work that has been going on across our network. You can see this at:
While this term has continued to present significant challenges, it has not been as difficult as we feared in early January. In particular, the level of staff absence has remained within manageable limits and this has meant that we have not had to send any year groups home. It is important to acknowledge the efforts made by our staff in this respect as they have often had to cover for each other at very short notice in order to keep the school running in this way.
After an exceptionally challenging two-year period, it does feel like we are finally emerging from the pandemic. No doubt Covid-19 will always be with us but the vaccination programme has clearly been a success and we hope that this will allow us to take the next steps back to normality next half-term.
I hope that everyone in our community has an enjoyable holiday period with their friends and family and we look forward to seeing you all safe and well next half term.
Covid Advice Flow Chart for Parents and Students – January 17th 2022
Parent and Student Handbook – February 28th 2022
In light of the recent changes that have been made to national guidance, I have attached our revised Covid handbook for students/parents. The key changes to this guidance are shown in red and will come into effect from Monday 31st January.
As this document makes reference to our Covid flow charts, I have attached these diagrams to this letter too.
We will continue to monitor these issues in the weeks and months ahead and will keep you updated as necessary.
Covid Advice Flow Chart for Parents and Students – January 17th 2022
Parent and Student Handbook – January 27th 2022
As can be seen from the data below, Covid case rates in Cheshire East have increased very significantly in the last month:
Age range |
Current case rates (per 100,000) |
Previously reported case rates (December) |
0-3 |
785 |
342 |
4-11 |
1617 |
989 |
12-16 |
2363 |
590 |
17-18 |
2814 |
370 |
Unsurprisingly, we have also seen a substantial increase in the number of positive cases in school, although this increase has not been as dramatic as we feared at the start of term. We are also seeing an increasing number of students who are catching Covid for a second time, sometimes quite soon after catching it for the first time.
As has been explained previously, we are particularly anxious about case rates amongst our staff as this will affect our ability to keep the school fully open, but this has been manageable so far. We hope that this remains the case in the weeks ahead.
As you will have heard in the media this week, further changes have just been made to national Covid guidance that will reduce the isolation period for positive cases to five days from Monday 17th January. Since October, we have also been following Cheshire East Public Health guidance regarding the isolation requirements for close contacts in the same household. We have just been informed that these arrangements are also being discontinued so we will also introduce this change from next week. We have updated our flow charts to reflect these changes (see the red text in the attached document).
As we reach the end of the mock exam period for Y11, I wanted to acknowledge the excellent way in which our Y11 students have conducted themselves during this period. They have taken this process very seriously and have behaved impeccably throughout. We will now take a few weeks to mark these papers and collate the results and we will report these outcomes early next month.
Covid Advice Flow Chart for Parents and Students – January 17th 2022
A few small but important changes have been made to national guidance regarding Covid isolations that I need to bring to your attention:
At this stage, we are aware that the guidance surrounding Covid testing and isolations is becoming increasingly complex. As a result, we have tried to put together a set of diagrams in the form of flow charts to explain how parents/students can navigate through three different scenarios:
These flow charts are attached. We suggest that you either print these out or save them for future reference. We hope that these diagrams will make it easier for you to ensure that you are following this guidance correctly. It seems inevitable that further changes will be made to this guidance in the weeks and months ahead. We will consequently send updates out to you as necessary with the relevant changes clearly marked.
Covid Advice Flow Chart for Parents and Students – January 10th 2022
Late yesterday afternoon, we received revised Covid guidance from the Local Authority relating to isolation periods for students who test positive and their close contacts.
As a result, we have had to amend our Student Handbook (see attached). The relevant changes to yesterday’s version are highlighted in red.
We regret having to send an update out to you so soon after issuing the previous version, but we have had to respond to these circumstances very quickly.
Parent and Student Handbook – January 4th 2022
Please read the latest version of the Parent and Student Handbook.
Parent and Student Handbook January 3rd 2022 – LINK REMOVED – SEE NEXT POST
With apologies for the length of this letter, there are a number of important issues that I need to bring to your attention as we reach the end of term.
We have been asked to LFD test all students on their return to school after the school holidays. As we expect national case rates to be quite high in the school-age population at this stage, we will need to manage this process very carefully. We have consequently decided to approach this in the following manner:
Y12 and Y13 students should come into school to be tested on Tuesday 4th January, the day before the start of term, please see timings below. They can return home once this test has been completed.
11:00 – Year 12
13:30 – Year 13
Normal lessons will start on Wednesday 5th January.
Students will need to bring a packed lunch on Wednesday 5th January as there will be no catering service in the Sixth Form Centre on this date, although students will still be able to access the café and study area. The catering service will resume on Thursday 6th.
We will assume that we have consent to test any pupils in Year 12 and Year 13 who come into school on Tuesday 4th. If you do not wish your child to be tested, please tell them not to come onto site on this day.
Y11 students should also come into school to be tested on Tuesday 4th January, the day before the start of term, please see timings below. They can return home once this test has been completed.
Mock exams will start on Wednesday 5th January. When students are not doing mock exams, they should go to their normal lessons.
10:00 – 11 PROS
12.30 – 11 ICEF
Students will need to bring a packed lunch on Wednesday 5th January as there will be no catering service in the Dining Hall on this date. Students will be able to use A17, A18, the library or E3/4 during break and lunchtime if they wish to do so. The normal Dining Hall service will resume on Thursday 6th.
We will assume that we have consent to test any pupils in Year 11 who come into school on Tuesday 4th. If you do not wish your child to be tested, please tell them not to come onto site on this day.
Students should come into school to be tested on Wednesday 5th January, please see timings below. They can return home once this test has been completed. Normal lessons will start on Thursday 6th January.
09:00 – 7 PROS
09:30 – 7 ICEF
10:15 – 8 PROS
10:45 – 8 ICEF
11:30 – 9 PROS
12:00 – 9 ICEF
13:30 -10 PROS
14:00 -10 ICEF
We will assume that we have consent to test any pupils in Years 7-10 who come into school on Wednesday 5th. If you do not wish your child to be tested, please tell them not to come onto site on this day.
We have been informed that, from December 20th, 12-15 year olds will be able to book a second dose of the vaccine by going direct to the NHS website here.
Alternatively, the School Age Immunisation Service (SAIS) will offer a second dose in school. This will be scheduled no earlier than 12 weeks after the first dose. We will provide more information about this programme next term.
Please keep reporting any positive cases to us at covid@fallibroome.org.uk throughout the Christmas holidays.
We are aware that national guidance regarding the isolation of close contacts has changed in recent days. However, Cheshire East have been operating heightened arrangements in this regard for some time and are asking schools to maintain this approach until January 14th at least. As a result, our guidance regarding this issue remains unchanged for the time being.
We have had far fewer positive Covid cases this half term compared to September/October. The vaccination programme seems to have had a very positive impact in this regard.
Cheshire East case rates have remained quite stable through this half term, although there has been an increase in the primary school age groups:
Age range |
Current case rates |
Previously reported case rates (November) |
0-3 |
342 |
193 |
4-11 |
989 |
779 |
12-16 |
590 |
780 |
17-18 |
370 |
393 |
We expect that Omicron will cause a significant spike in the number of cases next half-term but we hope that the vaccination programme will help to address this in time.
Parents should assume that all large events will be moved online next half-term. The control measures described in our student handbook will also remain in place. If we need to introduce any additional control measures, we will update this handbook and send out again as necessary.
We have three colleagues leaving us at the end of this term. These are:
We wish all three every success in their future ventures and thank them for their contribution to Fallibroome during their time here.
This week also sees the retirement of Peter Rubery. Peter served as Headteacher here from 2002-2014 and he has led the Trust for the last seven years. The scale of his contribution to our school in this time has been enormous. Families who have been associated with Fallibroome for a long time will certainly know the key role he played in establishing our local, regional and national reputation as a centre for excellence. We all hope that he enjoys a little more time with his friends and family in the years ahead and that he is able to look back with great pride on his remarkably successful career and the key role he has played in leading our amazing school.
With great regret, we felt compelled to move all of the major events that we had scheduled in the last few weeks of term online. This meant that our Christmas Concert had to be reorganised and delivered virtually at very short notice. Our Performing Arts team did an amazing job pulling this together so quickly and this event went out to parents last night. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can catch up with it at:
Fallibroome Christmas Concert 2021
I am sure you agree that the quality of the individual and group performances here are extraordinary and this event reminds us once again of what it is still possible to achieve, even in very challenging circumstances.
As we reach the end of another busy term, I hope that you are all able to enjoy a great holiday period with your friends and family over the next few weeks and we look forward to seeing everyone back in school safe and well in the New Year.
In light of the emergence of the Omicron variant, we need to adjust our approach to managing Covid issues in school.
The red text in the attached handbook describes the changes that we will implement from tomorrow. Please go through this carefully with your son/daughter this evening so that they are clear about the importance of these measures before coming into school on Tuesday.
Thank you in advance for your support in this respect.
Parent and Student Handbook – November 30th 2021
Following the half-term break, we saw a significant drop in the number of Covid cases being reported to us. At the end of the first week back, NHS colleagues vaccinated all Y7-Y11 students who were eligible to take part and whose parents had given permission for them to do so. This has reduced case rates still further.
This pattern is also being reported across Cheshire East, with the latest regional data showing the following trends:
Age range |
Latest case rates per 100,000 |
Previously reported case rates |
0-4 |
193 |
307 |
5-9 |
779 |
1298 |
10-14 |
780 |
3118 |
15-19 |
393 |
1741 |
As two weeks have elapsed since our vaccination programme, we feel that it is now safe to relax our current restrictions and to return to the arrangements that we had in place in September. While this means that a limited number of controls will remain in place, this will represent a welcome step back to more normal arrangements. In light of this decision, we have redrafted our student/parent handbook (see attached). Please take a few minutes to go through this information at home so that everyone is clear about how the school will operate from next Monday (22nd November).
Needless to say, we will continue to monitor these issues very closely in the weeks and months ahead and will respond as necessary to any emerging trends. To support these efforts, please continue to report positive test results to us at covid@fallibroome.org.uk. We also continue to urge families to do LFD tests twice every week so that any future cases can be isolated at an early stage. Any parents coming into school (e.g. for our production of Chicago next week) are asked to LFD test either the night before coming in or the morning of the day itself.
We are aware that a number of families were unable to get their children vaccinated in school because they have recently been infected by Covid. The latest information that we have received from the UK Health Security Agency is that children between the age of 12 and 17 should delay getting a vaccine if they’ve recently had Covid to at least 12 weeks after they were infected. While we will not be offering such vaccinations in school, parents and carers now have the opportunity to book the vaccine online: http://nhs.uk/CovidVaccine.
As described in the attached handbook, our dining hall will return to full use on Monday 22nd and ‘holding areas’ will no longer be needed. As such, the usual service at break and lunchtime will resume in the canteen for all year groups so there is no need to pre-order your child’s lunch. However, please ensure your Wisepay account has been topped up to enable purchases to be made when required.
We are supporting Children in Need again this year by having a non-uniform day tomorrow. Parents can donate by following the fundraising link on Wisepay. We have set the minimum level at £1 so that all families feel able to contribute.
We are all really looking forward to our staging of Chicago next week. Having spent so long being unable to stage any major productions, this feels like an important step back to normality for everyone. No doubt, we will all be amazed by the talent that exists in our student community and the extraordinary standards that our students always reach at events such as this. While we have additional Covid control measures in place for this production, I am sure that this performance will generate the usual buzz and excitement that a virtual production can never replicate.
As we reach the end of another period of heightened Covid control measures, I would like to thank all students and parents for the very high levels of support and compliance that we have had over the last four weeks or so. We are very encouraged by the falling case rates and this leaves us optimistic that we might be able to get through the rest of this term without having to impose further restrictions.
With best wishes to everyone in our community.
Parent and Student Handbook – November 2021
Covid rates in Cheshire East are continuing to cause concern. The latest data that we have received show the following case rates:
0-4 year olds: 307 per 100,000
5-9 year olds: 1298 per 100,000
10-14 year olds: 3118 per 100,000
15-19 year olds: 1741 per 100,000
The last few weeks have also been very demanding for us in school. We have seen high case rates in every KS3 and KS4 year group. We have also seen more cases come in for our Sixth Form students. Since the start of the year, 18 of our staff have also tested positive, all of whom were double-vaccinated. Thankfully, no-one has become seriously ill so the vaccinations seem to be working in this respect.
The staff illness issue has been particularly difficult to manage, especially when other colleagues have also been absent due to the requirement to isolate as a close contact. This has meant that our staff in school have regularly had to cover for each other at short notice. To be honest, there have been times when we have only just managed to staff the school. We are aware that this has meant that an increasing number of lessons have had to be delivered by cover staff, but we are doing our best to make these sessions as productive and useful as possible. In many cases, we have been able to connect the absent member of staff to their classroom remotely and this has really helped to minimise any lost learning for our students. We appreciate that this disruption must be causing concern for students and parents but we ask for your patience while we are managing these highly challenging circumstances.
As previously communicated, the NHS vaccination programme is scheduled to start on following dates:
Flu vaccinations: Tuesday 2nd and Wednesday 3rd November
Covid vaccinations: Thursday 4th and Friday 5th November
In order to provide consent for these vaccinations, parents must complete the online form that is available at: https://www.wchc.nhs.uk/econsent/.
The school’s unique code is: WC136278
Please note that if you do not complete this online consent form on time, your child will not be vaccinated.
While the measures we have introduced in school in the last week or so seem to have slowed down the rate of infection a little, it seems obvious to us that this vaccination programme is the only realistic hope of controlling the spread of the virus across our school community. With this in mind, we hope that as many of our families as possible take part in this programme and that the wealth of misinformation about the vaccine that is available online does not deter families from doing so.
Please complete at least two LFD tests over the holidays, with the second one being as close to Monday 1st as possible.
Please continue to report positive test results to us at covid@fallibroome.org.uk.
Please be aware though that we may not be able to set up online learning for students who are isolating on the first day back after half-term. We are expecting quite a high number of cases to come through to us during the holidays and all of these will need to be checked and recorded on our school systems on Monday 1st. We hope to have this completed by the end of the first day back so online lessons should be available for isolating students from Tuesday 2nd.
Despite the challenges that we have faced this half-term, we have managed to keep the school running more normally than has been the case for some time. In particular, we have been delighted to see our students engaging in wide range of extracurricular activities including Duke of Edinburgh expeditions, our production of Aladdin, the Y7 residential, numerous sporting clubs and fixtures, etc. It has been obvious that our students have enjoyed being back at school and we really hope that we are able to build on this success next half-term too.
We hope that everyone enjoys a well-deserved break over half term and we look forward to seeing all our students back in school on Monday 1st November.
A high number of Covid cases have been reported to us over the last three days.
As a result, we have been in touch with Public Health and we have agreed that we need to implement our ‘Outbreak Management Plan’.
The attached document describes the measures that we will implement in school to try to manage this situation. Please take a few minutes to go through this guidance carefully with your son/daughter.
We are aware that many families have become weary of conducting LFD tests at home. In the current circumstances, it is very important that all families return to rigorously testing themselves twice every week. This is probably the most important measure that we can use to address the current high rates of infection in our school and the region.
Parent and Student Handbook – October 2021
We have had a few queries over the weekend with regard to the new Covid advice that we sent out last Friday. This advice said:
If you have a confirmed positive Covid case in your household, your son/daughter must:
To clarify, this advice relates specifically to close contacts in your household. The person with Covid must continue to isolate for ten days.
Also, when counting days, please count Day 1 as the day after the person in your household started showing symptoms. If the person in your household has not shown symptoms, then Day 1 becomes the day after their positive test result.
We hope that this guidance clarifies these key issues for everyone.
The latest information that we have received from Public Health shows the following infection rates in the school age population for Cheshire East:
Clearly, these figures are very concerning. Within Fallibroome we are continuing to see cases being reported to us on a regular basis, although we understand that the situation is considerably more challenging elsewhere.
In light of the above, all Cheshire East schools have just received updated guidance from Public Health with regard to the management of positive cases from this point forward. This guidance is summarised below:
If you have a confirmed positive Covid case in your household, your son/daughter must:
If your son/daughter needs to stay off school for these reasons, please report this to us at covid@fallibroome.org.uk and we will arrange remote access to their lessons.
At the time of writing, we have not yet reached the threshold required to be assessed as a Covid outbreak. We will continue to monitor this closely and will let you know if these circumstances change.
As we approach the start of the new term, I have provided a number of important updates below.
We are being asked to LFD test all our students once before they return to school and again in their first week of the new term. As with previous LFD testing programmes, these tests are not compulsory, although parents and students are encouraged to participate so that the infection risk to the school community at the start of term is kept to a minimum. Students who have had Covid in the last 90 days should not participate in this testing programme as this may lead to a false positive result.
To meet this national requirement, we have set up our testing centre in the Gym and Sports Hall and will follow the schedule described below:
Year Group |
First Test |
Second Test |
7 |
Thursday 2nd September from 9.00-11.30 |
During lessons between Monday 6th and Tuesday 7th September. |
8 |
Friday 3rd September from 9.00 – 10.30 |
During lessons between Tuesday 7th and Wednesday 8th September. |
9 |
Friday 3rd September from 10.30-12.00 |
During lessons between Tuesday 7th and Wednesday 8th September. |
10 |
Friday 3rd September from 12.15 – 3.30 |
During lessons between Tuesday 7th and Wednesday 8th September. |
11 |
Thursday 2nd September from 12.15 – 3.30 |
During lessons between Tuesday 7th and Wednesday 8th September. |
12 |
Thursday 2nd September from 12.15 – 3.30 Students will be sent a specific time tomorrow morning. |
External Y12 Students: Monday 6th from 8.15 – 8.45. Internal Y12 Students: Monday 6th from 9.00 – 10.30 |
13 |
Friday 3rd September from 12.15 – 3.30 |
During lessons on Tuesday 7th from 9.00 to 10.30 |
Due to holiday arrangements etc., we appreciate that some families may not be able to attend their allocated time for their first test. As a result, we will keep our testing centre open on Saturday 4th September from 10.00 – 1.00 from any students to drop in for an LFD test. If a student is unable to come into school for any of these first test slots, we would urge parents to ensure that an LFD test is completed at home on Sunday 5th September instead.
Once we have been through the above testing programme, parents will be asked to continue with twice-weekly LFD testing at home throughout September. In the first few days of the new term, we will provide students with kits to support this work.
Students will return to lessons at the following times next week.
Year Group |
|
7 |
Monday 6th September at 8.50. Students should gather on the tennis courts at the back of the school before the start of the school day. Parents are asked not to come onto the school site at this time. Staff will be on hand to guide students to the correct area if they are unsure how to get to the tennis courts. Students will need a packed lunch. |
8, 9 |
Students should arrive in school before 1.30pm on Monday 6th. If they have not eaten at home, they will need a packed lunch on this date. Initially, they should go to their form room to drop any bags and coats and they will then go for an assembly for P4. Following the assembly, they will have a session with their tutor for P5. Timetabled lessons will start P1 on Tuesday 7th. |
10, 11 |
Students should arrive in school before 1.30pm on Monday 6th. If they have not eaten at home, they will need a packed lunch on this date. Initially, they should go to their form room for a session with their tutor for P4 and they will have an assembly P5. Timetabled lessons will start P1 on Tuesday 7th. |
12 |
Tuesday 7th September from 8.50. The day will start with an assembly that will continue through P1. Lessons will start P2. |
13 |
Tuesday 7th September. LFD Testing will be in operation for Y13 during P1. Assembly P2. Lessons will start P3. |
Updated national guidance was sent to schools over the holidays. This confirmed that we will not be expected to manage students in bubbles; social distancing arrangements will not be required; face coverings will not be needed; etc. As such, we are expecting to open the school without the majority of our Covid management controls in place. We will retain some sensible measures (such as one-way systems; minimising visitors to the school site; ventilation; site cleaning routines; hand washing; etc.), but our overall risk management plan will be much more ‘light touch’ than was the case last year.
It seems likely that national case rates will increase quite rapidly once schools reopen, especially amongst school-age students who have not been vaccinated. We will consequently need to respond to Public Health advice if we experience outbreaks in our school or in the local area. This may lead to the reintroduction of the sorts of control measures that we have had in place previously.
We will not require students to wear face coverings on their return to school. However, we would ask all students to have a face covering on their person at all times. This will allow us to ask students to wear them at short notice if this becomes necessary. The Local Authority are also asking for face coverings to be worn on public transport at all times. The same will apply to students travelling on our own school bus.
If we have any positive cases in school, we will no longer need to trace and isolate close contacts. This should significantly reduce the disruption to school life that we experienced last year. However, please continue to let us know if your son/daughter contracts Covid during the school term. This can be done by emailing us at covid@fallibroome.org.uk. We will then put measures in place to allow students in these circumstances to access their lessons online, assuming they are well enough to do so.
Please note that online access to lessons will only be possible for students isolating for Covid related reasons. The workload and disruption involved in managing such systems is not sustainable for other types of absence.
We will return to normal lesson times from the start of term. This will also allow us to restart our full extracurricular programme and bring our Dining Hall back into normal use. As it is some time since these were in operation, we will provide more guidance about these arrangements to our students on their first day back.
We have continued to receive updated national and Local Authority guidance throughout the summer holidays. It seems likely that such advice will continue to change in the weeks and months ahead too. We will do our best to keep you informed of these developments as far in advance as possible. In the meantime, we are very much looking forward to starting the new school year and we hope that this will be a much more normal experience for everyone than was the case last year.
Well done to all those students who have won awards in the last few weeks. While we haven’t been able to run Awards Evenings in the normal fashion, these certificates and prizes are really difficult to achieve, and perhaps this has been especially true this year. We were able to run a virtual Night of Achievement in the Performing Arts this week. This evening closed with a video of the range of concerts, performances and other events that we have managed to organise over the academic year, in spite of the pandemic. As a celebration of what can be achieved against the odds, this video could hardly be bettered: https://vimeo.com/570303848
Thanks to an improvement in the weather, we have been able to run Sports Day today. Even though the crowds were smaller than usual, there has been a really positive, enthusiastic atmosphere on the track all day. The students have clearly enjoyed taking part and have really appreciated and supported each other throughout. Perhaps this upbeat, positive atmosphere has been affected a little by recent football results?
We have had another six cases reported to us since I last wrote to you, although only two of these have led to close contacts in school having to isolate.
Initial guidance has been sent to schools this week describing how we will be expected to manage Covid from September. While the fast-changing national picture may cause further guidance and updates to be issued to us over the summer, our current understanding with regards to next term is as follows:
It is important to highlight that none of the above is set in stone at the moment. We are aware of a growing campaign that is being led by medical professionals who are expressing concern about the government’s strategy in this area. If this leads to national policy changes, we will update you accordingly.
Just a reminder that students don’t have to wear uniform next week and we will organise an alternative sponsored walk during PE lessons too. All of this is being done as part of a fundraising drive for our partner schools in South Africa. We have set a target of £5 to £10 per family in the hope that this will raise the £10,000 we need to sustain our important work in this area. If you wish to support us in this way, donations can be made by following the ‘Fund Raising’ link on Wisepay.
We have had another five Covid cases this week, not all of whom have had close contacts in school. While this has led to continued disruption this week, this rate of infection has been a good deal less intense than the previous fortnight. Hopefully, we will see further reductions in this respect in the weeks ahead.
The Covid figures for our region continue to look concerning and we consequently need to be very careful for the remaining weeks of this academic year. In line with Public Health advice, we are currently reviewing the activities that we were hoping to offer in the remainder of this term. This process will inevitably lead to the cancellation or reorganisation of events that are considered too risky in the current climate. We will provide more information about this to the affected families as necessary.
We are conscious of the fact that our Y10 and Y12 students are understandably anxious about any recently completed and forthcoming exams / assessments. As our last two cohorts have had their final grades determined by internal school assessments, this is leading to our current students being fearful of the importance of every assessment that they complete. The fact that a number of these students are isolating at the moment cannot be helping in this respect. With this in mind, I would encourage our Y10/Y12 students and their parents to bear the following in mind:
Most parents will be aware that ‘Investigations Week’ normally happens in the last week of the summer term. While this is our intention again this year, we have had to make significant changes to our original plans in light of the Covid issues that we are currently experiencing. In particular:
As we continue to see a high number of Covid cases in school, we have been working with Public Health to try and agree strategies that we could use to manage the ongoing risks and disruption to our community. This has led to the following approach:
We would like all students and parents in these year groups to book a PCR test as soon as possible.
In these specific circumstances, students and parents do not need to isolate while waiting for the PCR result to come back. This means that students can continue to come to school, unless they have been previously told to isolate.
If you are isolating already because you have been identified as a close contact, you must complete this 10-day isolation regardless of the result of this PCR test. This is because it can take ten days for a Covid infection to become apparent.
If you have had a positive Covid test in the last 90 days, please do not go for another test now, as this may lead to a false positive result.
Please report any positive test results for your son/daughter to us at covid@fallibroome.org.uk. Please include your mobile number as part of this email so that we can follow up with you as necessary. We do not need to have negative test results reported to us.
You can access these tests on a walk-in basis on Commercial Road, Macclesfield (SK10 1GA). This centre is open from 8am to 8pm every day. Alternatively, you can book a slot through the national website – https://www.gov.uk/get-coronavirus-test. When booking this test, on the page headed ‘Why are you asking for a test?’, you should be able to select ‘I have been told to get a test by my local council’.
As we have already used this strategy with Year 7 and Year 12, the need is less urgent in these year groups. However, we suggest that Year 7 and Year 12 repeat this process on Friday and Saturday, following the same guidance described above.
Hopefully, this will help us to identify any asymptomatic cases across the school. It is important to highlight however that, when we did this with Y7 and Y12 last week, we suddenly got a large spike in the number of reported cases. If, as seems likely, we see the same again this time, we will inevitably see many students being asked to isolate in the weeks ahead. While this would clearly be regrettable, we hope that this will help us to bring infection rates down over time.
I am writing to inform you that one of our Y8 students has just reported a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. We have also had other positive cases reported to us overnight and this morning but these students were not in school yesterday, so this does not have any impact on the school.
In light of these issues, we have decided to ask all students in 8PROS to isolate with immediate effect. We will now complete a contact tracing process with a view to bringing most of these students back into school as soon as possible.
Dear Parent/Guardian,
We have just been informed that we have a positive Covid case in your half of the year group.
As a result, we need everyone in this half of the year to remain at home. This will give us some time to complete a seating plan review etc. We hope that this review will allow us to bring most of the students in your half-year back to school as soon as we can. We will write to you with more details about this shortly.
We will switch immediately to online learning for all isolating students today. Your son/daughter will be able to access these lessons at meet.google.com.
In the last 24 hours or so, we have had another 15 cases reported to us, with most of these coming from the groups who were asked to PCR test over the weekend. This certainly suggests that this testing programme has been effective in identifying cases that would not otherwise have been brought to our attention.
We have discussed the possibility of extending this programme to other year groups with Public Health, but they have advised that this is not necessary at the current time. Instead they have asked me to remind everyone of the importance of completing an LFD test either the night before returning to school, or the morning before coming to school if possible.
Please note that if you have been identified as a close contact of a positive case and been asked to isolate, you must complete this isolation even if you have since had a negative PCR test. This is because it can take up to ten days for a Covid infection to become apparent.
It seems inevitable that we will get more cases when we return to school. If this happens, we will manage these circumstances in the following manner:
All students in the year group will be asked to remain at home in the first instance. We will then complete a contact tracing process over the following day or so. We hope that this will allow us to bring most of the year group back into school quite quickly.
All students in the half-year group will be asked to remain at home in the first instance. We will then complete a contact tracing process over the following day or so. We hope that this will allow us to bring most of the half-year group back into school quite quickly.
We will continue to provide online lessons for students who are asked to isolate. Our experience to date suggests that this will keep any lost learning to a minimum.
We will also continue to provide you with regular updates on these issues over the next half-term.
As you will have noticed, we have had a much busier time with Covid issues over the half-term break than we were expecting. Some key advice about these issues and how we intend to manage the school in the weeks ahead is provided below.
Case Numbers
Over the last week, there has been an escalation of cases in Cheshire East. Current case rates are at 41/100,000 (up from 18/100,000 on the 21st May). At school level, 16 cases have been reported to us over half term. While not all of these cases have led to contact tracing processes in school, this does demonstrate that these trends are having an impact on our community. Schools in Macclesfield, Wilmslow and Nantwich are being advised to increase their level of vigilance in response to these developments.
Year 7 and Year 12
Most of our cases have centred on Y7 (six cases) and Y12 (seven cases). I have been in a meeting with Public Health this morning to discuss these issues and we have agreed on the following approach:
– All students in Y7 and Y12 and their siblings should book a PCR test immediately. Students will not need to self-isolate while they wait for the result of this test, unless they are doing so already.
– When booking this test, on the page headed ‘Why are you asking for a test?’, you should be able to select ‘I have been told to get a test by my local council’.
– Y7 and Y12 parents are asked to report any positive results to us at covid@fallibroome.org.uk. Please do not report negative test results to us.
– All parents and other members of the household will also need to get a PCR test, but these results do not need to be reported to us.
– Students who have had a positive PCR result in the last 90 days should not get another PCR test as this may result in a false positive result.
– The school will not be open to any Y7 or Y12 students on Monday. This will allow a little more time for these results to be returned to us. Students can then return to school on Tuesday 8th, unless they have had a positive PCR test.
– Online lessons will be provided to Y7 on Monday.
– Y12 students will need to make contact with their employer and explain that they will not be able to attend work on Monday, unless their PCR result is returned by this date.
LFD tests
These tests are identifying many cases successfully and this is leading to appropriate isolation measures being implemented much earlier than would otherwise be the case. It is crucial that everyone in our community continues to use these tests twice a week. We would also urge everyone who is not in Y7 and Y12 to complete one such test on either Sunday evening or Monday morning.
Inappropriate Use of LFD tests
It is not appropriate to use LFD tests if your son/daughter has symptoms. A PCR test must be booked in these circumstances and your son/daughter must isolate until this result is known.
We have had cases in the past when a parent has used an LFD test on their symptomatic child. When the result has been negative, they have then sent their child to school. This substantially increases the risk to others in our community. Once again, I would urge our parents not to use LFD tests in this way.
Symptoms to Monitor
As we all know, the typical Covid symptoms are:
Public Health officials have confirmed that there are also atypical Covid symptoms, including headaches, sore throat and an upset stomach/nausea. We would consequently ask our parents to deal with such symptoms in the same way as they would for the more well-known symptoms. This means that students with these symptoms should be isolated and a PCR test should be booked as quickly as possible.
In short, we are asking parents to be extra vigilant with respect to monitoring illness at the current time. If you are in any doubt, please do not send your child to school and book a PCR test immediately.
Masks
In light of the above circumstances, we will be reintroducing the use of masks in lessons with effect from Monday 7th June (with the usual exemptions still applying).
I am sure that these developments will be causing some concern to our parents, students and staff. We will consequently continue to monitor this situation very carefully and will update you with regard to any further advice we receive from Public Health in the days and weeks ahead.
I am writing to inform you that three more of our Y7 students have reported a positive Covid-19 diagnosis in the last 24 hours. In total, this gives us four cases in Y7 currently, all of whom are in the 7ICEF half of the year. We have also had a positive case in Y12.
In light of these issues, we have decided to ask all students in 7ICEF to isolate with immediate effect. Public Health officials have confirmed that this is the appropriate approach to take in the circumstances. All Y7 isolating students will need to remain in isolation until Monday 7th June (inclusive), returning to school on Tuesday 8th.
We will complete a more focussed close contact tracing process in Y12 and will communicate with these families separately.
I am writing to inform you that one of our Y10 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. This has been detected by an LFD test so it needs to be confirmed by a PCR test before we can be certain of the accuracy of this result. In the unlikely event that the PCR test comes back negative, we will write to you again to let you know.
We have asked the students who shared lessons and social contact with this student on Friday 28th May to isolate with immediate effect. We do not believe that this case presents a risk to others in our community.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
As we approach the end of another busy half-term, I have provided a number of updates below.
Please continue to report any positive Covid test results to us at covid@fallibroome.org.uk. If symptoms become apparent on Saturday 29th or Sunday 30th, we will trace any close contacts in school and will write to the families affected. As it sometimes takes several days for test results to be completed and reported to us, it would be wise to keep a close on eye on your emails next week.
Please continue using the LFD testing programme during the holiday period. If you run out of testing kits, you can collect this equipment from a local testing site without an appointment. You do not need to take proof of ID or address. This can be done at Commercial Road, Macclesfield, SK10 2QJ between 2.30pm – 8pm.
As I’m sure many of you know already, MMC offers an excellent range of instrumental lessons, music groups and performance opportunities to novice and experienced musicians of all ages. For many years, this has been based on the King’s Girls School site on Fence Avenue in Macclesfield.
We are really pleased to announce that MMC have decided to change their location and will be based at Fallibroome from September. This weekend provision will add another feature to the extracurricular programme for our students and it will also open up greater opportunities for our parents to get involved too. If you would like to know more about MMC, their website can be accessed at:
https://livewp.maccmusiccentre.org.uk/
We had excellent leavers’ assemblies with Year 11 and Year 13 this week. As always, these are emotional occasions – and they seemed especially so this year in light of the challenges that our students have faced in recent times. We hope that our exam groups now have an enjoyable break before we return to celebrate their results with them in August.
The next major adjustment to the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions is scheduled for June 21st. We will review our current arrangements as soon as possible after that date and we are hoping that this will allow us to take another positive step back towards normality.
What better way to finish this half-term than with 37 of our joyous and wonderfully talented students performing ‘Brand New You’ from the musical 13! The Performing
Arts team had a lot of fun putting this project together in only three rehearsals, before filming live on the Fallibroome stage:
Special thanks to Yr12 student Archie Cadman-Jones who was trusted with editing this project and did a fantastic job! It is great to see the next generation of Fallibroome performers coming through and we really look forward to getting them and all our other Performing Arts enthusiasts back on stage with a full audience as soon as we can.
With best wishes to everyone over the holiday period.
I have provided some updates below.
Having reviewed the plans around the Y11 Prom on July 1st, we expect this event to go ahead as planned. We have received a lot of support for this idea from our staff, many of whom have volunteered to support the supervision on the night. We have also been able to clarify the insurance arrangements to our satisfaction.
It is important to bear in mind that we may still need to cancel the Prom at late notice if Covid-19 restrictions remain in force beyond June 21st. We will monitor this closely and let you know if our plans need to be changed in this respect at any point. We also reserve the right to exclude any student from joining the Prom if their behaviour between now and then gives us any cause for concern.
We hope that this event gives our Y11 cohort a really positive experience at the end of a difficult two years. If all goes smoothly, we will also give serious consideration to making this an annual event in our school calendar in future years.
I have attached our updated Risk Mitigation Plan for your information. This is very similar to the one sent to you when we reopened the school in March. We have just made some minor changes to reflect the adjustments that were necessary following the May 17th announcements.
Due to Covid-19 and the current restrictions on gatherings, we have decided to change the traditional format of our Awards Evenings. Instead of scheduling these in the evening, we will be holding special year group assemblies during the school day on Tuesday 6th July where we will celebrate the achievements that our students have made throughout the year. If your child is due to get such an award, we will contact you separately nearer the time of this event.
We have now completed the KATs for both GCSE and A-Level. Teaching staff and subject leaders are currently working hard to mark these tasks and consider them alongside the other assessment evidence that we hold in school. Our final grades will be sent to the Exam Boards by June 18th.
A-Level Results Day is scheduled for Tuesday 10th August, with GCSE on Thursday 12th August. This process will also include the opportunity to appeal if parents wish to do so. We will send out more information about the appeal processes in advance of the Results Days.
Well done to Tabitha Wilkin-Cortes, Evie Hurst and Izzy Harrison for organising this concert this week. In total, this event raised over £800 for a very worthy cause. Thanks also to the students who took part. The quality of the performances was excellent – and it was great to see that we are still able to deliver this sort of event in these challenging times.
With thanks for your ongoing support for the school.
Please see a few key updates below.
Please remember that your child must go for a PCR test if you suspect that they have Covid symptoms. LFD tests are not intended for use with symptomatic cases and may consequently give a false negative result in these circumstances.
If you send your child for a PCR test, then your entire household (including any siblings) must isolate while you are waiting for the result.
Revised national guidance regarding the use of face coverings in schools was published earlier this week. While this guidance has already needed to be clarified and amended in the last few days, it is clear that we can end the requirement for students to wear coverings in lessons from Monday 17th May. While we are pleased to be able to relax our controls in this way, please bear in mind that teachers may occasionally ask students to wear a covering in lessons if social distancing is difficult (e.g. if students are moving around in a practical lesson).
In light of the narrow corridors and low ceilings in some parts of the school, we will continue to ask students and staff to wear coverings when moving between lessons. Students will also need to wear coverings in the holding areas, unless they are eating/drinking.
We have also been asked to remind our parents and students that coverings remain an expectation on public transport, in shops, etc.
As we reach the end of our Key Assessment Tasks, I would like to congratulate our Y13 and Y11 students, all of whom conducted themselves impeccably throughout this process. These assessments have run very smoothly and it has been obvious that our students have taken them very seriously. As we had a Covid case in Y13, we will be using the backup window to complete these assessments next week. We will then look forward to the Leavers’ Assemblies at the end of the month.
From next week, all our emails will include the following text in the footer:
The Fallibroome Academy respects the work-life balance of its staff and does not expect them to read or respond to emails outside of their normal working hours.
While the vast majority of our parents are very understanding with respect to this matter, we do occasionally have to manage some unreasonable requests regarding email response times. We hope that this helps these parents to understand our approach to this issue.
One of the unexpected benefits of the Covid pandemic has been the way in which it has required us to develop systems to allow parents’ evenings to be delivered online. A lot of work has gone in behind the scenes to put these systems in place and the feedback that we have received suggests that this approach is better than running such events in school. Parents have found the conversations to be more private; less time has been wasted waiting in queues; and more parents have been able to attend too. Staff have also reported similar benefits. With this in mind, it is our intention to move all subject-based parents’ evenings online next year.
We will continue to schedule parents’ evenings in school when we feel that a face-to-face meeting is particularly important (e.g. when meeting tutors for the first time etc.). It is also our intention to continue Open Evenings and other information events in school too. We will collect feedback about these changes next year and consider if we wish to continue with this approach in the longer term.
It seems that the country is continuing to emerge from the Covid ordeal and that the vaccination programme is progressing at an impressive rate. We hope that the next key milestone (June 21st) will lead to further relaxations in the pandemic restrictions and that school life will feel increasingly normal over the summer months.
We are writing to inform you that one of our Y13 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
Initially, we have asked those Y13 students who are close contacts and in the student’s lessons to isolate with immediate effect. In the next few days, we will compile a contact tracing process that will attempt to identify the students who can return to school. Y13 KAT Assessments for those students self-isolating will be rearranged into the back up KAT window. Online lessons for all isolating students in other Year Groups will begin on Tuesday
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
As we enter the final term of the school year, I have provided some important updates below.
Towards the end of last term, Mr Payne notified us of his intention to retire at the end of this academic year.
Mr Payne joined Fallibroome in 1992. Since then, he has worked as a Music Teacher, DTL Music, Director of Performing Arts and Director of Sixth Form. In his various roles, Mr Payne has had an enormous influence on a huge number of students over the last 29 years. It is also no exaggeration to say that our success as a Performing Arts College was built on his tireless leadership. Without his commitment, encouragement, creativity and relentless insistence on excellence, the exceptionally positive culture that we now enjoy in the arts would simply not exist.
My Payne took on the role of Director of the Sixth Form in 2013. While the quality of our Post-16 provision was already very strong, he has built on this success enormously. We have returned our best ever results in recent years; student applications to join the Sixth Form are at their highest ever level; and we have expanded the range of Post-18 destinations that we support quite significantly. Most importantly, Mr Payne has developed an exceptionally positive relationship with our Sixth Form students, and I know that they are all very sad to see him leave.
Of course, this development has left us with a key vacancy in our Senior Leadership Team and we have been looking closely at this issue in recent weeks. Following a thorough recruitment process, we have decided to appoint Mrs Knott to the role of Director of Sixth Form from September. Mrs Knott is already a highly respected senior leader here and has worked at Fallibroome since 1998. In this time, she has been DTL for Modern Foreign Languages, Assistant Principal for Teaching and Learning and Director of Teaching School. She consequently comes with a wealth of experience that will suit the Director of Sixth Form role very well. As an internal candidate, her appointment also means that she will be able to work closely with Mr. Payne in the summer term and this should ensure a seamless transition to the new leadership arrangements in the Sixth Form from September.
In order to give you as much clarity as possible about GCSE and A-Level grading processes, we have published additional information on our website that can be accessed at:
http://fallibroome.academy/gcse-and-a-level-grades-summer-2021/
This guidance is divided into subject titles and lists the key evidence that we will use, in addition to the forthcoming KATs, to determine final grades for our students. We are not able to provide the marks that your son/daughter has achieved on these assignments or their weighting relative to each other. We are providing this information to give you and your son/daughter a summary of how final grades in each subject will be determined.
We recognise that, in certain exceptional circumstances, Covid-19 issues might have had a notably more negative impact on this evidence base for a small minority of our students compared to their peers. For example, a student might have been suffering from Covid when a particular assessment took place, or a close family member might have passed away during a key assessment period. In order to give parents the opportunity to bring such issues to our attention, we have designed an ‘Evidence Query’ document, which can be accessed from the same page of our website. Please note, however, that we have very limited flexibility to adjust for such issues. Your circumstances would need to meet very specific criteria and be substantially more severe than others in the year group for us to make any allowance for such factors. If you wish to raise such a query with us, this will need to be submitted by Friday May 7th.
We appreciate that this is an anxious time for Y11 and Y13 students and their parents. In some cases, this is leading to us receiving requests for further information about grading processes and reassurance that the school will consider the importance of these grades for individual students. Please note that we cannot engage in such discussions as this might be construed as us being subject to inappropriate influence when making final grading decisions. As this would be regarded as malpractice, we would be obliged to report such issues to the Examination Boards. We are consequently asking parents not to engage in such communications with school staff.
Parents will be aware that entry to our Sixth Form is dependent on achieving strong GCSE grades. These entry criteria include the requirement to achieve at least a high Grade 5 in the subjects that the student wishes to study (sometimes Grade 6 is required). While other entry criteria also need to be met, this assessment of Grade 5 performance is an important element of the process. (Full information regarding our Sixth Form entry criteria is available on the Sixth Form section of our website).
In a normal GCSE year, we would look at the raw scores achieved by students in their GCSE examinations in order to assess if a ‘high Grade 5’ has been achieved in the relevant subjects. As our students will not be sitting GCSE examinations this year, this analysis of raw scores will not be possible.
To address this problem, we will use a Grade 5+ for our internal grading systems this year. This means that, when deciding GCSE grades, our teachers / subject leaders / senior leaders will use this grade to identify students who they believe have a sufficiently strong grounding in their subject to be successful at A-Level. Where relevant, this grade will be shown on student transcripts in August so that students and parents know if the entry criteria for a particular subject has been met.
Last year, we also used Grade 5+ on our internal grades to support decisions about Sixth Form admissions and this approach worked very well. We are consequently confident that repeating the same approach this year will offer parents and students clarity regarding admissions to the Sixth Form in a timely manner.
As I’m sure you have heard already, the decision to ask students to wear face masks in lessons has been extended until May 17th at least. We will continue to monitor national advice in this area and will let you know if this changes in the months ahead.
Our first week back in school after the Easter holidays has gone very smoothly. We have had no Covid cases reported to us this week and we really hope that will remain the case in the weeks ahead as we try to administer key GCSE and A-Level assessments. We have been pleased that we have been able to relax some of the Covid management systems this week too as this has given the school a much more normal and relaxed atmosphere. The improved weather has helped in this respect too. Hopefully, we will be able to continue in this vein in the months ahead and that we will be able to reinstate our full provision of curricular and extra-curricular activities from September.
With best wishes to everyone in our community.
As we approach the end of term, I have provided several important updates below. Please take a few minutes to go through this carefully as I have included some key information about the holiday period and how the school will operate on our return.
We will need to continue to monitor any student Covid cases that arise over Easter. Please report such cases to us by emailing covid@fallibroome.org.uk.
We will trace the close contacts of such cases if the date on which they first showed symptoms falls on or before Saturday 3rd April. Sometimes, such cases are reported to us several days after first symptoms appear so it would be wise to monitor your emails closely for at least the first week of the holidays.
We had a second Covid case in Y11 this week. However, as the student in question was already isolating at home as a close contact of the previous case, we did not need to take any further action.
Students are expected to continue using their LFD tests over the holiday period. If any tests are positive, please isolate immediately and let us know using the above email address. Please note that current guidance also requires positive LFD tests to be confirmed by a PCR test.
We understand that national announcements regarding the use of face masks in schools will be made over the holiday period. We will write to update you about this issue as soon as we know more.
The first week of Y11 KATs (starting April 26th) will be quite intensive with students sitting several short assessments throughout the day. As a result, we have decided that they should go to their normal lessons when they are not sitting these assessments. These lessons will either include some revision activities for the subject in question, or the students will be able to complete their own independent study.
The second week of KATs (starting May 3rd) will be less intensive for most students. As such, we feel that it would be more appropriate for them to go on study leave from this point onwards. This will allow them to go home and study independently between assessments. If they wish to revise in school, we will set aside a quiet area for them to do so.
Y11 students will remain on study leave until the May half-term break. This will allow us to complete the KAT processes, including any backup KATs that need to be scheduled for students who are Covid isolated in this period. We will then schedule a ‘Y11 Leavers’ Assembly’ on Thursday May 27th.
We will also provide ‘transition activities’ in every subject for students who hope to be admitted to our Sixth Form next year. This work will need to be completed independently at home in June. In a similar vein, we will provide additional study advice and guidance for Y11 students who expect to continue their studies elsewhere next year.
Y13 will be placed on study leave when their KATs start on May 3rd. When not sitting assessments, students can choose to study at home during this period or use the Sixth Form Centre. In the same way as Y11, this period will also continue throughout the rest of the month, with our Y13 Leavers’ Assembly being scheduled on Friday May 28th.
In light of the recent changes that have been made to national guidance, we will discontinue the use of external holding areas from the first day of next term. Students will consequently be able to use any of our normal outdoor spaces and will no longer have to confine themselves to particular areas of the site.
For similar reasons, we will discontinue the use of internal holding areas before school from the same date. Students will consequently need to wait outside before school and then go to form rooms at 8.50. We will post rooming information for form rooms on the Google Classroom for each year group.
Internal holding areas will remain in use at break and lunchtime.
A group of our Sixth Form students have launched a new school magazine about the Performing Arts. They have called this ‘The Green Room’ and a copy can be found at:
https://www.flipsnack.com/thegreenroommag/the-green-room-edition-1.html
As I’m sure you will agree, the quality of this work is exceptionally good. It is remarkable that a group of students have managed to produce this to such a professional standard. This brings great credit to themselves, the Performing Arts department, the Media Studies department and to our school in general.
When we returned to school in September, we knew that we were heading into a very challenging set of circumstances with a lot of uncertainty for everyone in our community. We expected these difficulties to continue until Easter at least, and this has certainly proved to be the case. At the moment, there are very encouraging signs that we are finally beginning to emerge from the worst of this crisis and that more promising times lie ahead. Hopefully, we will see the gradual relaxation of restrictions in the summer term and the return of something much closer to normal school life in September.
I hope that everyone is able to have a proper break over Easter and that we can all meet up with family and friends who we have not seen for some time.
I am writing to inform you that one of our Y11 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
Initially, we have asked students who shared lessons with the positive case to isolate with immediate effect. In the next few days, we will complete a contact tracing process that will attempt to identify the students who can return to school. Online lessons for all isolating students will begin on Monday.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
In the last few days, we have had two instances when families have sent their children into school while they awaited a PCR test result that has since come back positive.
I need to remind everyone that sending your child into school in these circumstances increases the risks to everyone else. If your son/daughter develops symptoms having attended school in this way, this increases the likelihood of us having to isolate other students and staff who might have been spared this consequence had these issues been managed differently. At such a critical time of year, this is something that we are desperate to avoid.
It is also important to remind everyone that LFD tests are not especially accurate. They are simply a useful device to help schools to identify and isolate some positive cases; they will not reliably identify all such positive cases. As such, they cannot be used to determine if it is safe to send a child to school or not.
We are also increasingly hearing about people getting positive Covid-19 results having had mild or atypical symptoms. We would consequently urge families to err on the safe side if your child is unwell, especially if this seems to be a respiratory illness. In these circumstances, we would urge you to:
Thus far, we have been very fortunate since reopening as no students have tested positive for Covid-19. We know that other schools across the country are having a more challenging time at the moment so we all need to be vigilant if we are to minimise the impact of these issues on our school. Your ongoing support in this respect is very much appreciated.
We have now completed our LFD testing programme in school. All students who took part have been tested three times, with only one positive result. Special recognition is due to the staff who worked so hard to deliver this programme. In the end, we completed this process two days earlier than planned and, by the end of last week, we were getting through nearly 500 tests an hour! My thanks also goes to our students, all of whom took part in a sensible and mature manner throughout.
We have now received home testing kits for all our students. These have been issued today, along with an instruction booklet that explains how to complete the tests, process the result and record the findings online. Please take the time to go through these materials very carefully with your son/daughter at home. Having done the test under supervised conditions three times in school, our students will know how to swab themselves correctly. However, they are likely to need support when it comes to processing the result and uploading the findings online.
It is very important that any positive LFD tests are reported to us in school at covid@fallibroome.org.uk. The student and the rest of the household will need to isolate with immediate effect in these circumstances. As these tests are completed at home, any positive results will need to be followed up by a PCR test in one of the testing centres in the region. If the PCR result is negative, the student will be able to return to school and the household will be able to stop isolating.
Students will need to test themselves every 3-5 days so the kits provided to them today should last for 2 weeks. We understand that further kits will be provided to cover the rest of the academic year in due course.
As you may be aware, the government is also asking households, childcare and support bubbles of school-age pupils to take part in the testing programme. Please do not use the kits provided for your child for this purpose. These tests are provided for student use only. If you or other members of your household or bubble wish to access lateral flow self-testing kits, Cheshire East Council advises that they can be collected from the Macclesfield Testing Centre, Commercial Road SK10 2QJ between 1.30pm and 7pm. Further information can be found on the Cheshire East Council’s website.
This LFD testing plan is a key part of the national strategy to reduce the risk of Covid outbreaks in schools. If everyone engages in the process in a systematic and careful manner, we should be able to minimise the risk of significant disruptions in our school in the weeks and months ahead. Your support in this respect would be greatly appreciated.
As we approach reopening, I have provided a number of important updates below.
We have revised our guidance for students/parents in light of the changed circumstances that will operate on reopening (see handbook attached). A separate version for the Sixth Form is also provided. Please read this documentation very carefully before Monday.
We have now decided upon a number of key policy positions with regard to A-Level and GCSE grading systems for this year. While some detail has yet to be finalised, we know that our students, parents and teachers are desperate for clarity with respect to these matters. As it is very difficult to explain these issues adequately in a written form, I will record a Loom presentation that outlines our intended approach and will send this out to Y11 and Y13 students and their parents over the weekend.
We have a Parents’ Evening for Y13 scheduled for March 24th and we anticipate that parents and students will be very keen to receive updates about likely grades on this date. We would ask you to be patient with us in this regard. We will still be in the middle of collating evidence at this stage so it will not be possible for our staff to provide this sort of information. That said, we feel that it will still be worthwhile to go ahead with this event as it will allow our teachers to offer advice about topics to revise for the forthcoming assessment processes in their subject.
An overarching risk assessment for all the schools in the Trust is attached. This is supported by a second document that describes the mitigation measures that are specific to Fallibroome.
If parents wish to comment on any of the measures and approaches described here, this can be done by emailing: covidriskassessment@fallibroome.org.uk
As mentioned previously, our LFD testing programme has progressed remarkably well this week. We have now done the first round of student tests with over 1400 tests being completed in total. In the majority of cases, families who have chosen not to take part have done so for very good reasons (e.g. they have had Covid-19 recently). While we have only had one positive result from this process, we still feel that it was worth doing – if only to provide us all with some reassurance that it is safe to return to school.
In light of the efficient way that these systems are working, we hope to complete the second and third tests more quickly than originally planned. More detail about this will follow separately.
If any families have returned from overseas recently, please bear in mind that you will not be able to return to school until the required 10-day isolation process has been completed.
The Local Authority has asked us to forward the attached letter to you. I hope that this gives you a sense of how our plans align with those being developed across the region.
As we seem to be approaching the end of the pandemic, there is a risk that we will ‘drop our guard’ and be less vigilant with regard to our risk control measures. It is crucial that this does not happen. We know that the new variant of Covid is in the Cheshire area and that this is likely to prove more transmissible. That said, we also know that the overall infection rates in Cheshire East are relatively low and the vaccination programme nationally is progressing at an impressive rate. We are consequently hopeful that school life will not be interrupted by further outbreaks.
In order to help us manage these issues, we would ask for our parents’ support in the following areas:
We are very much looking forward to having all our students and staff back on Monday. Everyone has definitely had enough of remote learning and our school has certainly felt empty and soulless during lockdown. If nothing else, this period has served to remind us all of how much we enjoy the social interaction and variety that comes with school life in normal circumstances. The prospect of getting back to the exciting, varied and engaging activities that typify life at Fallibroome is something that we all feel is long overdue.
Just a quick note to let you know that our LFD testing programme has run very smoothly today. Remarkably, our testing team is getting through these tests at a rate of about 200 per hour, which is much quicker than we expected. We will see how this goes for the remainder of the week, but we are now beginning to look at the possibility of completing the second and third tests next week more quickly than originally planned.
We have had one positive test result today. We have contacted this family to let them know that they will now need to isolate for ten days. As the process in school has been managed very carefully, we do not think that any other close contacts need to be followed up. That said, this does reinforce the value of this testing process, and the importance of us continuing to be careful regarding social distancing etc. going forward.
You may have heard that prior to students returning to school on 8th March, all schools will be delivering a testing programme for students without coronavirus symptoms. This will be done by using quick COVID-19 tests known as Lateral Flow Devices. This letter is to help give you more information about this testing programme at Fallibroome.
Up to one third of people who have coronavirus are asymptomatic. By testing we will help to reduce the spread in school and college settings through asymptomatic transmission. I am therefore strongly encouraging that all students at Fallibroome are tested as they return to school.
In line with national guidance, we plan to test all students three times as they return to school. After this, students will be issued with home testing kits so that they can complete Lateral Flow tests at home.
Their first on-site test will take place before they start to attend lessons. The second and third tests will then take place during lesson time from 8th March, when all students have returned to the school site. Tests need to be scheduled so that they are taken between three and five days apart.
For the first test we will be asking our students to attend the school site between 3rd -5th March for a test only.
The following schedule details when students will need to attend for their first test:
Date | Year groups / Tutor Groups | Waiting Zone |
Wed 3rd March | Y11 / Y13
9am: 11 PROS 10am: 11 ICEF 1pm: 13 POIC 2pm: 13 EBX
|
GYM/ Training Hall GYM/ Training Hall GYM/ Training Hall GYM/ Training Hall
|
Thurs 4th March | Y10 / Y12/ Y7 PROS
9am: 10 PROS 10am: 10 ICEF 1130am: 7 PROS 1pm: 12 RSFT 2pm: 12 LAM
|
GYM/ Training Hall GYM/ Training Hall Sixth Form Common Room GYM/ Training Hall GYM/ Training Hall
|
Frid 5th March | Y8 / Y9 / Y7 ICEF
9am: 8 PROS 10am: 8 ICEF 1130am: 7 ICEF 1pm: 9 PROS 2pm: 9 ICEF |
GYM/ Training Hall GYM/ Training Hall Sixth Form Common Room GYM/ Training Hall GYM/ Training Hall
|
Practical details for the first test
When we deliver the second and third tests, from 8th March, we will supervise groups of students to leave their lessons briefly in order to be tested.
We hope that you will be supportive of our plans to test the students on site. However, if you feel uncomfortable about this, there is no obligation for your son/daughter to be tested. If you have not yet done so, please indicate your consent for the test by completing this Google Form:
This form also collects the other student details that we will need in order to register the test with NHS Track and Trace. The Privacy Notice regarding the processing of personal data by the DfE is also attached to this email for your reference.
Those taking the test will be supervised by trained, experienced staff. The lateral flow tests are quick and easy to undertake, using a swab of the nose and throat. Results (which take around half an hour from testing) will be emailed and texted to parents/carers. The full testing process is demonstrated on this video link:
Students will only need to complete the part shown between 2:56 and 4:30 on this video, the rest will be completed by our staff. We would encourage the students taking part in this programme to watch this small segment of the video before coming into school as this will make it easier for them to follow the written and verbal instructions that we will also provide in our testing centre.
If a student tests positive on a lateral flow device, you will be informed immediately by school staff. In line with national guidance, the pupil will need to stay at home and self-isolate for ten days.
While a small number of students may need to repeat the test if the first test was invalid or void for some reason, students who test negative should return home as normal (first test) or stay in school and continue their learning as normal (second and third tests). The negative result will be emailed and texted to parents/carers.
We will notify any staff or students who have been in close contact with someone who tests positive and ask them to isolate for ten days, in line with national guidance.
This testing programme at school is for people with no symptoms. If your child develops symptoms at any time (including a high temperature; a new, continuous cough; or a loss or change to their sense of smell or taste) they must immediately self-isolate, and book a test by calling 119 or visiting https://www.gov.uk/get-coronavirus-test.
If you have had Covid-19 in the last 90 days we suggest that you do not get LFD tested in school. This is because you may get a false positive result in these circumstances. You can choose to come in for an LFD test, but if you do get tested positive, you will then need to isolate for ten days.
LFD tests are not designed for people with symptoms. You are advised to book a separate PCR test in these circumstances.
Yes. Parents can choose to manage the testing process entirely from home. However, the home testing programme is not due to start for several weeks. Ideally, we would prefer to test as many students as possible in school before reopening so that as many asymptomatic cases can be identified as possible.
If you have any questions regarding any aspects of this testing, please email Mrs Gill (Business Manager: gil@fallibroome.org.uk)
We have been working very hard in recent weeks to get these systems up and running and we believe that this will be a very important step in helping to control the spread of the virus in our community.
In light of the important national announcements that have been made this week, I have provided some key updates below.
All schools nationally will start to reopen on a phased basis from Monday 8th March. At the same time, we are being asked to conduct three LFD tests on every student. This is a huge undertaking. In total, we will have to conduct nearly 5,000 tests in a very short period of time. Apart from the physical space required to accommodate this programme, we will need to assign 25 staff full time to this work. We were prepared to manage such a testing programme during the school closure period. Delivering this while the school is running will be considerably more difficult.
On Wednesday, a concession was made to allow schools to start this testing programme in the latter half of next week. We intend to make use of this opportunity and will consequently launch our testing programme on Wednesday 3rd March. In this way, we expect to be able to complete one test on everyone who consents to this process before our school reopens. We hope that this will help us to isolate any asymptomatic Covid cases before everyone returns to school. This approach also means that we will be able to open the school fully for all year groups on Monday 8th March, rather than opening on a phased basis as was originally suggested.
Our students will shortly receive an invitation to come into school between the 3rd and the 5th March to be tested. Once the test has been completed, they will need to go home immediately; they will not be able to attend any lessons in school on this date (unless they are part of the key worker/vulnerable group). We will take particular care to ensure that our students are socially distanced while they are on site and they will need to have their face masks with them too. We also ask our parents to emphasise to their son/daughter that they must not assume that this is an opportunity to socialise with their friends, either in school or around Macclesfield. These arrangements are being put in place before the end of the national lockdown so it is crucial that our students behave accordingly. For similar reasons, students should avoid public transport if at all possible.
While everyone is urged to take part in this programme, all students/parents have the right to opt out if they wish to do so. To give your authorisation for this testing, please complete our consent form at:
A privacy notice has also been attached to this letter. These consent forms need to be completed by 12 noon on Tuesday 2nd March. Please bear in mind that students who arrive on site without having completed the above consent form will not be tested. Students who have had Covid-19 in the last 90 days are also advised that they do not need to have an LFD test.
Privacy Notice: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19LaLz2GyJXCLxlKJ-mltiaHGYFrXMKhh/view?usp=sharing
We will send more information out early next week about this testing programme. This will include more detail about the times that each year group will need to arrive on site; where they should wait for their test; how results will be managed; etc.
Once we have completed this first round of testing, we will complete the second and third tests on a rolling programme across the first six school days from March 8th. Students will consequently be taken to and from their lessons during this phase, although we will do our best to minimise this disruption. As we have to use our Dining Hall for this programme, this means that all students will need to bring a packed lunch to school until Monday March 15th (inclusive). We will also need to find an alternative ‘holding area’ for Y11 during this period and we will provide more information about this in due course.
Once we have completed the three rounds of testing in school, we will be providing all families with testing kits that can be used at home from that point onwards. We will update you about these arrangements closer to the time.
Ofqual’s response to the national consultation regarding A-Level and GCSE exams was published yesterday. We will need to take the next few days to scrutinise this documentation and decide how best to implement these proposals in our context. While the scale of this challenge is quite daunting, we were pleased to note that schools are being given a lot of flexibility to design assessment process that suit their particular circumstances and this should help to avoid the blatant injustices that we saw last year. We know that our students, parents and staff are desperate for clarity on these issues at the moment so we hope to provide further guidance in this respect before our students return to school on March 8th.
We are currently reviewing our risk assessments in advance of reopening to ensure that we comply with national advice in this area. We expect that this will lead to a continuing emphasis on social distancing, personal hygiene etc. On this point, we would ask parents to remember to replenish your son’s/daughter’s stock of hand sanitiser and surface wipes in advance of them returning to school.
We also note that the latest national guidance is strongly advising schools to use face masks in lessons when 2m distancing is not possible. While we recognise that this has not been made mandatory, it is “highly recommended”. As we are not public health experts, we feel that it would be unwise for us not to follow public health advice of this nature and we will consequently adopt this measure as part of our risk management processes. However, we will not expect students to wear face masks when engaged in physical/sporting activities or when 2m social distancing can be maintained. We understand that the national guidance on this issue is also due to be reviewed during the Easter break. If this leads to a change of recommendation, we will respond accordingly.
I hope that this helps to clarify some of the key issues that we are managing at the moment. We are very much looking forward to having everyone back in school in the near future and we hope you all remain safe and well in the meantime.
As we reach the end of this half term, I have provided some important updates below.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to complete our surveys. We had over 1,000 returns so this has really helped us to get an accurate view of our students’ experiences at the moment. I have attached a summary of the key findings from this survey. Please take a few minutes to go through these slides as the feedback is really encouraging. Some key points to highlight include:
It is obvious from this survey that student anxiety levels are quite high at the moment, especially in Y11 and Y13. The ongoing ambiguity surrounding national examinations is clearly at the heart of these concerns so we hope that we are able to address these issues soon after half-term. We will also review this survey data in greater depth after the break and decide if any other adjustments to our approaches are necessary. It will be easier for us to do this once we have more clarity about how long the school closure is likely to continue.
We have been collecting feedback from staff about students who have demonstrated an extra level of kindness or commitment to our community during the lockdown. In total, we have had nearly 40 nominations, each of whom will receive a ‘Community Spirit Award’ from us. The detail supporting these nominations is really heart-warming and shows how our students can be incredibly supportive and generous with each other at times. Some anonymised examples include:
XXX XXXX (Y10)
XXX arrives at every online lesson with a big smile and infectious positive energy. I really appreciate the way she takes the time to ask how everyone is doing just before the lesson starts. We all know that there are some barriers to online lessons, however, XXX is one of those students who goes the extra mile to include others and make them feel involved.
XXX XXXX (Y8)
XXX saw that another student was feeling lonely as he didn’t want to play football with the others at lunch and it was cold standing around outside. She asked if he would like to go for a walk round the school site for some fresh air and a break from the screens in E6.
XXX XXXX (Y8)
Over the last few weeks, XXX has created thoughtful artwork for each of her subject teachers to raise their spirits during the lockdown. She told me she just wanted to do something nice to cheer everyone up. What a lot of teaching staff may not realise is that XXX did a little detective work behind the scenes to find out small details like her teacher’s favourite colours for example so she could personalise her drawings for each of them. I was so delighted with my drawing, it certainly made me smile and gave me the lift she intended! Thank you XXX, your drawings were so kind, thoughtful and gratefully received.
There were many more examples too. We hope that these certificates support our efforts to remind everyone how important these characteristics are to our school.
In addition to delivering lessons, our staff have also done their best to keep as many extracurricular activities going throughout this period too. Special mention in this respect has to go to the Performing Arts team. We have all enjoyed the weekly performances that have been posted online and we know that a lot more has been going on behind the scenes too (e.g. full cast virtual rehearsal for four Shakespeare Schools productions, boys’ dance company, Yr8 band, Yr11-13 Musical Theatre projects, etc.). To end the half-term on a high note, the team have put together another performance titled ‘Wicked – One Short Day’. This includes performances from a number of our current students, alongside some well-known faces from previous years:
I honestly don’t think that there’ll be many schools in the country who are doing something like this at the moment, or who have the combination of skills, talent and work ethic to pull it off. Hopefully, this has made the lockdown period a little more bearable for everyone so I am sure that you will want to join me in thanking all the students and staff who have contributed to this work.
As the vaccine continues to be rolled out across the country, we seem to be edging closer to the end of the worst of this crisis. Hopefully, we will start to get our students back into school next half-term and things will start to progressively improve from there. In the meantime, we hope that you all have a great half-term and that our students are able to get a proper break from their school work (and their computer screens in particular).
We are still planning how we might approach A-Level and GCSE exams this year and are awaiting confirmation of national arrangements in this respect. At this point though, we have reached the conclusion that we will not be able to run formal mock exams for either Y11 or Y13.
We know that our Y11 and Y13 students are anxious to know how their grades will be decided this year and we regret that we are not able to offer more clarity about this issue at the current time. As soon as the national guidance in this area is published, we will communicate our school’s approach to these issues as soon as we possibly can. In the meantime, the best advice for our Y11 and Y13 students is to remain fully engaged with their online learning activities.
As we reach the end of our first month of online lessons since lockdown, we think that this would be a good point to survey our students about how these systems are working at the moment. We hope to get information out to all students about this next week.
Please note that school will not be open to any students during the February half-term.
At the current time, it is not necessary for parents to report positive Covid cases to us, unless their son/daughter has been in school in the days before they started to show symptoms.
Students who have been attending our key worker provision should report any positive Covid tests to us so that we can contact trace in the usual fashion. We will continue to support these processes for these families through the February half-term too.
Latest government announcements have stated that schools won’t reopen before March 8th and we probably need to plan on the assumption that this period might be extended further. While this is disappointing, we have been really impressed with the resilience that our students have shown by fully engaging in their online lessons throughout the lockdown period to date. This leaves us hopeful that we are being successful in minimising the amount of lost learning and that we will be able to get everyone back on track very quickly on their return.
With best wishes to everyone in our community.
We have had some feedback from staff, parents and students about the intensity of the school day currently.
To help with this, we are going to change our school day timings for all year groups to try and create a little more breathing space at break and lunchtime, as described below:
We have kept lesson changeover times to give students and staff space to login/logout etc. It would help if students stick closely to these times so that they do not join their next session before the previous group has left. Also, parents of students who are attending school currently will need to make note of the later finish time (3.30 instead of 3.20) when making pickup arrangements etc.
This approach will start from Wednesday morning. It might be wise for everyone to print out these lesson timings and put them on display in their work area until these new routines become established.
We hope that this creates a little more space for our students to get away from their computer screens and perhaps take some exercise during the school day.
A few key updates from this week below:
As you will have heard in the national media, this testing has been criticised in recent weeks and this has led to a change in the government’s approach to this issue. However, it is important to emphasise that schools have not been instructed to stop testing entirely (as has been suggested by some media outlets). On the contrary, we are being encouraged to maintain the regular testing of those students and staff who are attending school currently – and we are keen to keep these systems in place too. It is the proposal to repeatedly test close contacts of a positive case that has been dropped. We were pleased by this change of policy as we didn’t consider this type of testing to be workable in any case.
While lateral flow tests are successful at identifying some asymptomatic Covid cases, they are not reliable enough to identify all such cases. As a result, it is possible that a student may get a negative result and still be positive. With this in mind, it is very important that all students who get a negative test result from us continue to follow normal guidance regarding social distancing, wearing masks, etc. We have spoken to our students about this issue in school, but it is probably worth reinforcing at home too.
When schools reopen, we expect that we will need to test all students and staff twice (a total of 3500 tests). This is a huge task, but it is one that we are working towards currently. We have heard this week that we will be given two weeks advance notice of schools being asked to reopen. We think that this is just about enough time to complete such a testing programme. On the assumption that there are no further policy changes in this area, we will provide more information about this testing programme closer to the time.
The overwhelming majority of feedback that we have received to date about the quality of our online lessons has been very positive. In the weeks ahead, we will survey students/parents and staff about these issues so we get a more complete review of this key aspect of our work. In the meantime, a few key points are worth making about these lessons:
A national consultation about GCSE and A-Level started last Friday and will continue until January 29th. The consultation document is detailed (50 pages) and the feedback survey is lengthy (over 60 questions). We have been working through this process this week and submitted our response last night. Our overriding concern at the moment is the urgent need for clarity with respect to these issues. We know that our students and staff desperately need to know how national assessment systems will work this year so that we can all plan accordingly. We consequently hope that we will hear some clear national policy statements in early February so that we can update you about how we will approach these critical issues as soon as possible thereafter.
While this is clearly a very challenging time nationally, there are some indications that the number of Covid-19 cases has peaked, so we can only hope that we will soon see a similar downturn in the mortality rate too. I hope that you are all managing to stay safe at the current time and we remain hopeful that we will be able to reopen the school soon.
In light of tonight’s announcements about school closures, I have tried to address a number of key issues below:
Our plans to support the children of key workers remain unchanged. These students should continue to come into school as planned (in school uniform / dress code).
We will continue to provide live online lessons whenever possible for all year groups. Please bear in mind, however, that that the changed national circumstances will inevitably leave many of our teachers with childcare issues and this will make it impossible for them to deliver live lessons throughout the day. Teacher availability will also be impacted by the need to staff our provision for key workers and vulnerable students through this period. Nevertheless, I know that our staff will do all they can to keep their live lessons running and they will set high quality work through Google Classroom when this is not possible. As a school, we are in a far stronger position to support this type of provision than we were last year so we are optimistic that we can minimise the negative educational impact of this lockdown period.
We will suspend Y11 Mock Exams until further notice. Our current understanding is that schools will remain closed until at least February half-term. We will look again at this issue as soon as it seems likely that we will be allowed to reopen.
We have a number of external GCSE exams scheduled for the week beginning 11th January. We understand that these will go ahead as originally planned and we will issue guidance in the days ahead about how we will manage these exams safely. For clarity, the relevant exams are:
Sports Studies
Creative iMedia
Business Enterprise
Tonight’s announcements implied that GCSE and A-Level exams in 2021 are unlikely to run in the usual fashion. This leaves the possibility open to some sort of modified formal exams, or Centre Assessed Grades, or a combination of the two. We will let you know more about these issues as soon as we can. In the meantime, we would urge our Y11 and Y13 students to remain focussed and committed to their studies throughout the school closure period.
We will suspend our plans to deliver lateral flow testing to our students and staff with immediate effect. As all our staff must now work from home unless it is absolutely essential for them to come into school, this also means that we will be unable to progress with these plans in the weeks ahead in the way that we originally hoped. We are currently working on the assumption that we will need to revisit these plans once schools are asked to reopen so will provide more information about this in due course.
While these developments are not unexpected, it is a source of great regret that the continued spread of Covid-19 has led to such an outcome. We know how damaging this disruption can be for our students and the concern that this must be causing for many of our families. Nevertheless, I also know that we will all do our best to support our students through this period and that we are immeasurably better equipped to manage these circumstances than we were last time around. I am confident based on the feedback that we have received to date that our provision of remote learning has been highly regarded by our students and parents and that this has helped to build trust in our ability to manage these challenging circumstances successfully. On this basis, I am sure that we will return to school in excellent shape in the near future.
In light of the changes that have been made to national guidance in recent days and weeks, I am writing to update you with respect to our plans for the start of the Spring term.
We have decided to take up the option of assigning the first day of term (Monday 4th January) as an INSET day. As such, no lessons will be provided for any year groups on this date.
We will provide online learning for all year groups for the remainder of this week. We will do all we can to ensure that these lessons are delivered as live online sessions. Students can access these lessons by going to meet.google.com at the appropriate lesson time and entering the staff code for the teacher of the lesson in question.
During this week, a lot of other work will be happening in school behind the scenes. This may have an impact on our ability to deliver live lessons at certain points in the week. If we are unable to deliver live lessons, teachers will set assignments for their students through Google Classroom.
Children of key workers in Y7-Y13 will be able to come into school from Tuesday 5th January. Parents who need access to this support will need to contact Mr Smalley in the first instance (sma@fallibroome.org.uk). These students will be able to join their lessons online in the same way as those working from home.
Y11 and Y13 will return to school this week.
Y11 will be involved in Mock Exams. We are currently working on redrafting our timetable for these exams and more information about this will follow in due course.
Y7, Y8, Y9, Y10 and Y12 will continue to be supported through online learning as described above.
Children of key workers in Y7, Y8, Y9, Y10 and Y12 will be able to come into school. These students will be able to join their lessons online in the same way as those working from home.
Students in Y7, Y8, Y9, Y10 and Y12 will return to school this week.
All students attending school will need to abide by normal school uniform and dress code expectations.
As has been reported widely in the media, schools are being asked to introduce ‘lateral flow testing’ in an attempt to identify asymptomatic Covid cases and thus help to manage the spread of the pandemic. While we understand and support the desire to establish such systems in schools, the scale of this challenge is simply enormous. To give a sense of the extent of these issues, we are being told that it takes a team of five staff a full working day to test 108 students. As our community includes nearly 1800 people, it is hard to see how we can deliver repeated tests of this nature without additional staffing, rooming and other resources.
We intend to use the first few weeks of the new term to learn how lateral flow testing works and to understand the sorts of administrative and logistical systems that are required to deliver it effectively. Once we have more clarity in this respect, we will write to you again to confirm how we intend to tackle these issues.
It seems very obvious at the moment that we are at a critical stage of the pandemic and that significant challenges lie ahead for all of us. At the same time, this week’s announcements about the Oxford / Astra-Zeneca vaccine are excellent news and this should give us all real hope for the future. I am sure that the Fallibroome community will continue to show the optimism and resilience that has served us all so well until now and that we will all be able to look back on this difficult period very soon.
With best wishes to you and your family.
In the last day or so, we have been receiving a series of updates from the Department for Education about revised national plans for schools in January. This information covers a range of issues including the partial reopening of schools in the new year; the provision of lateral flow testing in schools; and the possibility of allocating additional INSET days.
It is very frustrating that this information has been sent to us so late as a number of these issues present quite substantial logistical challenges for schools. The way in which we are receiving updates to these plans also leaves us with the impression that they may change again at any point in the next few days. In this chaotic environment, it would seem unwise for us to make any firm plans for January at the moment.
One key aspect of these directives from the Department for Education is that schools should only open for Y11 and Y13 for the week beginning January 4th, with the rest of the school returning on January 11th. On this basis, it would be wise for parents to assume the following for the time being:
We intend to take the next ten days or so to monitor government communications in the hope that we can get more clarity about what is being asked of us and whether we feel that this can be delivered in our context within the timescales suggested. Our senior team will meet on December 30th to review this information and we will make final decisions with regard to our plans for January at this point. We will then try to get an update out to all parents on either the 31st December or 1st January.
We regret that we are unable to be clearer about these issues at the moment, but we hope that the above information allows you to at least make provisional child care plans for January.
I am writing to inform you that one of our Y12 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
Initially, we have asked students who share lessons or social time with this student to isolate with immediate effect. In the next few days, we will compile a contact tracing process that will attempt to identify the students who can return to school. Online lessons for all isolating students will begin this afternoon.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
I am writing to inform you that we have had another two Covid-19 cases in Y13.
As a large number of Y13 students are already isolating, we hope that we will not need to ask many additional students to take the same precautions. Nevertheless, we will follow our usual contact tracing processes and will decide upon isolation periods accordingly.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
I am writing to inform you that another one of our Y13 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. This case is in addition to the one that I informed you about this morning.
As we only heard about this positive test result this afternoon, we will contact the parents of students of Y13 and explain that we will now identify close contacts based on:
These students will be asked to self-isolate for the next two weeks, returning on Wednesday 9th December. Online lessons for all these students will begin on Monday morning. All other Y13 students will be allowed to remain in school.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
I am writing to inform you that another one of our Y13 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
As we only heard about this positive test result shortly after school started, we have had an assembly with Y13 this morning to explain these details to them. We have again been able to identify close contacts quite quickly based on:
These students have been asked to self-isolate for the next two weeks, returning on Wednesday 9th December. Online lessons for all these students will begin this afternoon. All other Y13 students have been allowed to remain in school.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
We are writing to inform you that another one of our Y13 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
As we only heard about this positive test result shortly after school started, we have had an assembly with Y13 this morning to explain these details to them. In this instance, we have been able to identify close contacts quite quickly based on:
These students have been asked to self-isolate for the next two weeks, returning on Friday 4th December. Online lessons for all these students will begin this afternoon. All other Y13 students have been allowed to remain in school.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
We are writing to inform you that one of our Y13 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
As we only heard about this positive test result shortly after school started, we have had an assembly with Y13 this morning to explain these details to them. In this instance, we have been able to identify close contacts quite quickly based on:
These students have been asked to self-isolate for the next two weeks, returning on Friday 4th December. Online lessons for all these students will begin this afternoon. All other Y13 students have been allowed to remain in school.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
We are writing to inform you that one of our Y8 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
Initially, we have asked all the students in Y8 PROS to isolate with effect from tomorrow morning. In the next few days, we will compile a contact tracing process that will attempt to identify the Y8 PROS students who can return to school next week.
Students who are asked to remain isolated will be able to return to school on Tuesday 1st December. Online lessons for all isolating students will begin tomorrow.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
We are writing to inform you that one of our Y7 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
Initially, we have asked all the students in Y7 PROS to isolate with effect from tomorrow morning. In the next few days, we will compile a contact tracing process that will attempt to identify the Y7 PROS students who can return to school next week.
Students who are asked to remain isolated will be able to return to school on Tuesday 1st December. Online lessons for all isolating students will begin tomorrow.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
This is to inform you that one of our Y13 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
As we only heard about this positive test result shortly after school started, we have had an assembly with Y13 this morning to explain these details to them. In this instance, we have been able to identify close contacts quite quickly based on:
These students have been asked to self-isolate for the next two weeks, returning on Tuesday 1st December. Online lessons for all these students will begin tomorrow. All other Y13 students have been allowed to remain in school.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
I am writing to inform you that one of our Y11 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
As we only heard about this positive test result shortly before school started, we have kept Y11 in their holding area this morning while we have tried to make arrangements for them to leave the site. In the next few days, we will compile a close contact list based on the policy changes that were explained in my recent letter and Loom presentation. We consequently hope to bring a proportion of the Y11 cohort back into school within a few days. Online lessons for all isolating students will begin this afternoon.
As in previous cases, you or your family do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
As we seem to be entering a very challenging period in our management of Covid related issues, we have reviewed our working practices and systems very carefully over the last few weeks. The Loom presentation below explains the pattern in the Covid cases that we have had so far in school and describes how we intend to adapt our response plan to deal with such cases this half term:
https://www.loom.com/share/1c75b5e4a4cf421c88c017155955641f
I also need to update you that we have had another Covid case in school this week. This student started to develop symptoms on Monday 2nd November. As the student in question had close contact with a positive case outside school at the end of last week, they have been self-isolating since. As a result, this student was not in school at all while infectious and we did not need to take any further action. I would, however, like to thank this family for the way in which they managed these circumstances. The action they took to self-isolate following close contact with someone outside school avoided the risk of illness and further disruption to our community, for which we are very grateful.
If you need to report a Covid case to us, please do so by emailing covid@fallibroome.org.uk. It would be very helpful if you could include a contact mobile phone number in this email. Please also use this address to let us know if your son/daughter needs to isolate because of a positive case in your household. We will then make sure that the relevant teachers are informed so that appropriate online learning arrangements can be put in place.
We have noticed that an increasing number of students are coming to school without a pack of surface wipes to clean their work spaces in every lesson. As this is an important element of our risk management plan, we would ask all parents to check this issue with their son/daughter so that we can maintain these routines successfully this half-term. Evidence also seems to emerging at the moment that keeping rooms ventilated can reduce the risk of infection in enclosed spaces. We will consequently try to keep doors and windows open in classrooms as much as possible. This will be at the teacher’s discretion and students will be allowed to wear coats in their lessons if this helps to keep the room ventilated.
There is some confusion at the moment regarding the national guidance that has been provided to schools relating to extracurricular activities. At face value, it seems that we are being instructed not to provide extracurricular clubs after school during the national lockdown period, although this has not been made absolutely clear. It seems very strange to us that we are permitted to run such clubs at lunchtime, but cannot do so after school. As a result, we have decided to continue to offer these activities until this issue is clarified for us. Please be aware, however, that we may need to end such clubs at short notice if clearer instructions are provided to us about this matter in the days ahead.
With thanks for your ongoing support at this time.
I am writing to inform you that another one of our Y9 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
As this student started to feel ill on the 29th, they will have been infectious between the 27th and the 29th. As they were not in school in this period, we do not need to take any further action in this instance.
I am writing to inform you that another one of our Y9 PROS students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. Although this has been reported to us today, the student in question first developed symptoms on Sunday 25th October.
Due to a previous case, we have already written to Y9 PROS to explain that they need to self-isolate until Wednesday 4th November, returning to school on Thursday 5th November. In light of the above circumstances, we will now need to delay Y9 PROS returning to school until Friday 6th November. Y9 ICEF can return as normal on Monday 2nd November.
As with previous cases, you do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
We are writing to inform you that one of our Y7 students and two of our Y9 students have had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. Key details are as follows:
As with our previous cases, you do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms.
We are writing to let you know that another member of our teaching staff has just informed us that they have had a positive Covid-19 test.
We do not believe that the person in question had close contact with our students in the two days before their positive result. As such, we do not think that we need to ask any students to isolate at home.
We are currently reviewing the close contact that might have occurred between this case and the rest of our staff. As the colleague in question was last in school last Friday, any isolation periods for close contacts on our staff will not impact on lessons after half-term.
We will of course update you if these circumstances change in any way in the days ahead.
As we reach the end of a hectic half-term, I just wanted to record my thanks to everyone in our community who has supported us through this period. It is certainly true that we have all faced many challenges and have had to find ways to work differently in order to minimise the impact of Covid-19 on our school. We are very proud of the way our students have responded to these circumstances to the best of their ability. Our staff have also had to adjust to a totally different working environment, but have risen to this challenge remarkably well. It is certainly true that we are much better placed to manage these issues now than we were a few months ago and this leaves us very well placed to cope with the challenges that no doubt lie ahead.
We have just heard today that the second person in Y11 has confirmed that they have tested positive for Covid-19. As reported earlier in the week, this person lives in the same household as the other Y11 case. As we designed our response plan on the assumption that this second case would be confirmed, we do not need to take any additional action at this stage.
In terms of managing the impact of Covid cases over the holiday period, the next few days are very important. If we receive any further cases between now and Sunday, this will have an impact on the students who can return to school after half-term. We will consequently be monitoring this very carefully and will update parents accordingly. From Monday onwards, any positive Covid cases will not lead to the assessment of possible close contacts in school. As a result, such cases will only impact on the individual family and their social contacts. In order to help us manage these issues, please continue to report any positive Covid results in your family over the holiday period to:
Once again, thank you to everyone for your support at this time. We know that our students and staff are really looking forward to a well-earned break. We trust that everyone will stay safe in the holiday period and we hope to see everyone back fit and well at the start of next half-term.
I am writing to inform you that one of our Y11 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. In addition, another person in their household, who is also in Y11, is currently symptomatic and has been tested. The symptoms being shown by the second person suggest that it is very likely that they will also be confirmed as a positive case in the days ahead.
In light of these circumstances, all students in Y11 will need to isolate at home with immediate effect. These students will return to school on Monday 2nd November. In reaching this decision, we have had to balance a number of educational and medical considerations. I attempted to explain these issues to parents through a Loom video that I sent to all families a week or so ago. If you have not seen this yet and wish to understand our approach to such decisions, the Loom video can still be accessed here:
https://www.loom.com/share/21694d3cd55e47cbacfe149d5d965a6a
Over this half-term, we have invested huge efforts in improving our provision of live online lessons and have now reached the point where the bulk of our lessons are delivered in this way to students who need to self-isolate. We are also currently on track to meet our target of delivering the vast majority of lessons in this way to all isolating students by the start of next half-term.
As the Covid-19 rates rise in our region, it seems likely that we will continue to see this impacting on our school next half-term. However, we are in a much stronger position now to support live online interaction between students and teachers than we were a few months ago. The feedback that we have received about the quality of our online provision this half-term has been excellent so we are confident that the work we have done in this area will keep the educational harm caused by such isolation periods to a minimum.
We are writing to inform you that one of our Y7 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
As we have been able to organise Y7 into half-year groups, this means that 7ICEF will need to self-isolate at home until Monday 2nd November (inclusive). They can return to school on Tuesday 3rd November.
7PROS can continue to come into school as normal. We will be working closely with the Health Protection Team in this period and we will let you know if our approach to these issues needs to be amended in any way in the days to come.
As with our previous cases, you do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms. When we have had Covid-19 cases in other year groups earlier this term, it did not transfer to any other students or staff. We are consequently hopeful that this case can be controlled in a similar manner.
We are writing to let you know that a member of our teaching staff has just informed us that they have had a positive Covid-19 test. We do not know if this is connected to the student cases that we have had in Y13 and Y10 in recent weeks.
We do not believe that the person in question had close contact with our students in the two days before their positive result. As such, we do not think that we need to ask any students to isolate at home.
We are currently reviewing the close contact that might have occurred between this case and the rest of our staff. This may lead to further absences as colleagues are instructed to self-isolate for a period of time.
We will of course update you if these circumstances change in any way in the days ahead.
Another one of our Y13 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis over the weekend. For reasons of confidentiality, we are not permitted to release the name of this student to our community. We do not know if this case is directly linked to the other case that we currently have in Y13.
As Y13 are already self-isolating at home, we do not need to take any further actions to manage this case. Also, as the dates for the two cases in Y13 overlap, the same isolation period will continue to apply. As such, Y13 will return to school on Tuesday 20th October. We will continue to work with the Health Protection Team in this period and we will let you know if our approach to these issues needs to be amended in any way in the days to come.
While we are getting a lot of support for the way in which we are managing the current circumstances, the most common queries that I am receiving at the moment relate to the following two issues:
In order to answer these questions, I have prepared a short Loom presentation that you can access here:
https://www.loom.com/share/21694d3cd55e47cbacfe149d5d965a6a
This presentation is only 15 minutes long and attempts to explain our approach to these two issues. I hope that this helps parents to understand the rationale for the decisions we have made to date and also gives a sense about how we intend to approach these issues in future.
I am writing to inform you that one of our Y10 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. For reasons of confidentiality, we are not permitted to release the name of this student to our community. However, I can confirm that we do not believe that this case is connected to the Y13 case we had earlier this week or to the other cases that we had some weeks ago.
In light of these circumstances, all students in Y10 will need to isolate at home with immediate effect. These students will return to school on Wednesday 21st October. We will be working closely with the Health Protection Team in this period and we will let you know if our approach to these issues needs to be amended in any way in the days to come.
While these circumstances will cause concern for everyone in our community, you do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms. When we had a Covid-19 case in Y8 earlier this term, it did not transfer to any other students or staff. We are consequently hopeful that this case can be controlled in a similar manner.
I am writing to inform you that one of our Y13 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. For reasons of confidentiality, we are not permitted to release the name of this student to our community. However, I can confirm that this case is not connected to the other cases that we had some weeks ago.
In light of these circumstances, all students in Y13 will need to isolate at home with immediate effect. These students will return to school on Tuesday 20th October. Y12 will not need to isolate as we separated Y13 from Y12 some weeks ago. We will be working closely with the Health Protection Team in this period and we will let you know if our approach to these issues needs to be amended in any way in the days to come.
While these circumstances will cause concern for everyone in our community, you do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms. When we had a Covid-19 case in Y8 earlier this term, it did not transfer to any other students or staff. We are consequently hopeful that this case can be controlled in a similar manner.
As you will be aware, we have been managing a number of Covid cases in the last few weeks. In summary:
Our lesson routines rely on students using their own hand wipes and gels to clean their desks, chairs and hands at that start of every lesson. While this is working well, we are noticing that an increasing number of students are not bringing this equipment into school. I am consequently asking all parents to check this with their son/daughter this weekend and to ensure that any necessary additional purchases are made before Monday.
Public Health England have asked us to forward the attached letter to you providing key advice about testing and isolation procedures.
My thanks go to all our staff who have done everything possible to cover for absent colleagues during this period and have thereby helped us to keep the school open for all students this week. We have been very close to having to send a year group home on a couple of occasions, but have managed to avoid this to date. We know that the first half of next week will continue to be very challenging in this respect so we will keep parents informed if staff shortages make it impossible for us to have all our students in school on any particular date.
As always, we are very grateful for the patience and support of our parents at this time.
We am writing to let you know that another member of our support staff has informed us that they have had a positive Covid-19 test. The key dates when this person was probably infectious are 17th-18th September. This person was already in isolation at home on these dates so we do not believe that this case presents an additional risk to our community.
We will of course update you if these circumstances change in any way in the days ahead. Thank you for your patience and understanding at this time.
We are writing to let you know that another member of our support staff has informed us that they have had a positive Covid-19 test. This colleague first showed symptoms on Tuesday 15th September.
At the moment, we do not think that this is connected to the Y8 case, but it seems very likely that it is connected to the IT technician that we wrote to you about last week. We do not believe that the person in question had any close contact with our students in the two days before they started to feel unwell.
We are currently reviewing the close contact that might have occurred between this case and the rest of our staff. The colleague in question supports the English department and so works closely with this team on a day-to-day basis. As a result, we have instructed a number of teachers in this department to self-isolate until Tuesday 29th September. These colleagues will continue to set work for their students throughout this period.
At the moment, we have a large number of teachers who are being asked to self-isolate either because they have had close contact with a confirmed case, or because someone in their family is awaiting test results. This level of teacher absence is now reaching an unmanageable level. While we have been able to cover the timetable today, we are concerned that this may not be possible for the remainder of the week. If we are not able to cover the timetable fully, we will have no option but to send a year group home until Tuesday 29th so that we can redeploy staff to cover for absent colleagues. If this becomes necessary, we will probably choose to ask Y9 to remain at home for a few days. If we need to take this action, we will do our best to let parents know at least the day beforehand.
We will of course update you if these circumstances change in any way in the days ahead.
Thank you for your patience and understanding at this time.
Another member of our IT team has just informed us that they have had a positive Covid-19 test.
At the moment, we do not think that this is connected to the Y8 case but it seems very likely that it is connected to the IT technician that we wrote to you about yesterday. We do not believe that the person in question had any close contact with our students in the two days before their positive result. As such, we remain of the view that our students do not need to be sent home.
We are also currently reviewing the close contact that might have occurred between our IT technician and the rest of our staff. While we do not expect this to be a significant issue, it is likely to leave us without any IT technical support on site for the next two weeks. Our students and staff will consequently have to be very patient with respect to these issues in this period.
We will of course update you if these circumstances change in any way in the days ahead.
We are writing to let you know that one of our IT technicians has informed us that they have had a positive Covid-19 test.
At the moment, we do not think that this is connected to the Y8 case that was reported earlier this week, but this is something that we are investigating very carefully. Also, we do not believe that the person in question had any close contact with our students in the two days before they became ill. As such, we do not think that any students need to be sent home.
We are also currently reviewing the close contact that might have occurred between our IT technician and the rest of our staff. While we do not expect this to be a significant issue, it is likely to lead to some additional staff absence that we will need to manage.
We will of course update this information if these circumstances change in any way in the days ahead.
I am writing to inform you that the Covid-19 test for our Y12 student has been returned as a negative.
Clearly, this is excellent news for this student, her family, the Sixth Form and the school generally. On this basis, we will be allowing Y13 and Y12 back into school tomorrow. The student herself will be returning a few days later (i.e. at the end of her 14 day isolation).
In light of the seriousness of the issues that we have been managing this week, we have been reviewing all our processes in school to see if any changes are necessary. In particular, we have been looking at the size of the Sixth Form bubble (350 students) to see if we can separate Y12 and Y13. We think that we have developed a workable approach to this which we will explain to our students when they come into school tomorrow. In order to present this to them, we will schedule an assembly for each year group as follows:
Over the last few days, a number of parents have questioned the size of our bubbles in other year groups and have asked whether these can be reduced in size in order to minimise the risk of having to isolate an entire cohort in the way we have had to do this week. While we think that we will be able to separate Y12 and Y13 in this way, this is not possible for the other year groups for the following reasons:
For these reasons, the September national guidance asked schools to organise themselves into year group bubbles in the way that we have done. If the national guidance had not been relaxed in this way, it would simply not have been possible to fully re-open secondary schools across the country. However, one consequence of this approach is that a Covid-19 case in a particular year group can potentially impact on a large number of other people during the two days before the ill student started to show symptoms. This makes it exceptionally difficult to trace the close contacts of a student who has been diagnosed with Covid19. If we cannot complete such a tracing exercise with a high degree of confidence, then sending the entire year group home is the most sensible course of action in our view. Having discussed this with the Health Protection Team, they have supported our conclusions in this respect.
There is clearly a risk that similar incidents will occur again later in the year. We will use our experiences this week to remind our students of the importance of following recommended procedures and protocols so that these risks are minimised. Closing the school for any students is something that we are desperate to avoid so I’m sure that parents will want to reinforce these messages at home too.
With thanks to the many parents who have written to us to support the actions we have taken at this exceptionally difficult time. We are very much looking forward to having our Sixth Form students back in school tomorrow and our Year 8 students returning on Monday.
We have been in touch with the regional Health Protection Team (HPT) this morning and they have confirmed that we have taken the correct actions to date. We have also taken this opportunity to clarify the exact isolation periods that will need to be applied to Y8 and the Sixth Form, as described below:
The student in Y8 who is currently ill was last in school on Friday 4th September.
On this basis, Y8 will be able to return to school on Monday 21st September.
The Y12 student who is currently ill was last in school on Friday 11th September.
On this basis, the Sixth Form will be able to return to school on Monday 28th September.
At the moment, the Y12 student has not had their test results returned. If this comes back negative, we will bring the Sixth Form students back to school straightaway.
It has also been confirmed by the HPT that students/siblings/friends/etc in other years groups do not need to isolate during this period. Parents are advised to monitor the health of their children in the weeks ahead and to isolate them if they start to show symptoms. More information about this is provided below.
I would also like to take this opportunity to clarify a number of other key messages.
If your child is ill, please do not send them into school. In the current circumstances, it would be wise to be extra cautious with respect to illness of any sort.
If your child is displaying Covid-19 symptoms, please sent them for a test. In these circumstances, it is crucial that they and everyone else in the household isolates until the test results are returned.
Please avoid all social gatherings of any sort if anyone in your household is ill.
If your child gets a positive Covid-19 test, we need to know urgently. We have set up the following email for
this purpose: covid@fallibroome.org.uk
Please include the following information in your email:
You do not need to email us at this address if you are sending your child for a test. We just need to know if this test is confirmed as positive.
There is understandable anxiety in our community about the learning that will be lost as a result of these issues. We share these concerns as we know that online delivery can never replace being in school in person. Nevertheless, we will do all we can to provide high quality, relevant learning materials throughout this period. Where possible, we will enhance this delivery using live online lessons and information will come out about this from your teachers shortly. Please bear in mind though that our teachers have had to respond to this issue at very short notice. Adjusting to an online approach takes some time to prepare.
There are also technical limits to how many of these lessons we can deliver from school at the same time so we will need to manage this accordingly. We may also need to redeploy some of our Y8 and Y12/Y13 teachers to cover teacher absence so they might not be available to deliver their lessons at the normal times. Despite these issues, we are fully committed to ensuring that the educational harm caused by this school closure is kept to an absolute minimum.
We have spoken to our students today about the importance of our school routines and expectations. So far this year, we have been very impressed with the high levels of compliance that we have had regarding hand washing, the cleaning of work spaces, one-way systems, masks, etc. All of this is especially important in the current climate so I’m sure that parents will want to reinforce these messages at home too.
We are very conscious of the fact that we will need to monitor these issues especially closely in the weeks ahead and that further action may become necessary at short notice. As cases can be reported to us out of school hours, email is the most efficient way of sending updates to parents. We would consequently urge everyone to monitor your emails with particular care in the weeks ahead.
With thanks for the messages of support that we have received to date and with best wishes to everyone in our community.
As you may have heard, one of our Y8 students has had a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. For reasons of confidentiality, we are not permitted to release the name of this student to our community. In addition, their sibling who is in the Sixth Form, is also feeling unwell and is currently being tested. The positive case will be isolating for ten days. If their sibling tests positive, they will also be isolating for the same period. All other members of the family will be isolating for 14 days.
At the moment, we are waiting for advice from the Health Protection Team (HPT) regarding who we should isolate etc. While we are waiting for this advice to be provided to us, we have chosen to take the following interim actions:
In the days ahead, the HPT may be able to support us in identifying the close contacts for the two ill students. This may allow us to ask a smaller group of students to isolate and to bring others back to school. In the absence of such advice, we are choosing to be very cautious by asking the entire ‘bubble’ for both students to remain at home.
While these circumstances will cause concern for everyone in our community, you do not need to be tested unless you are showing symptoms. We are also hopeful that the measures we have put in place in school will have been successful in avoiding the transmission of the virus to others. As mentioned above, we will work closely with the HPT in the days ahead and will let you know if our approach to these issues needs to be amended in any way in the days to come.
As we prepare to reopen the school to all students this week, I wanted to write to welcome everyone back and to reassure you that we are very eager to begin the process of getting back to normal as soon as possible.
A great deal of work has been done to get the school ready for reopening and we are confident that our plans will allow us to do this safely. We are very much looking forward to seeing everyone back in lessons and helping our students to make up for the time that we lost last year. Without doubt, we have lots of work to do, but I am sure that the wholehearted commitment of our students and staff will help us to make up any lost ground very rapidly.
Before the holidays, we sent our Student Handbook to all families detailing the way in which the school will operate in order to manage Covid-19 issues. In case you cannot find this handbook, I have attached it again to this page and would encourage you to go through this with your son/daughter before they return to school.
As always, we will do our best to keep you fully informed of any changes that we need to make in response to issues that may emerge during the year.
In light of recent changes to national policy regarding the use of face masks in school, we have reviewed and updated our policy in this area (see attached).
In our circumstances, these changes are quite minor, but I wanted to bring them to your attention in any case. The key message here is that all students will need to come to school with a face mask, unless they have been granted an exemption on medical grounds. If you haven’t done so already, please remember that you will need to purchase such a mask in time for the first day back next week.
The government has recently revised its guidance to schools so that students in Y7 and above are required to wear masks in communal areas in lockdown areas. In addition, it has been emphasised that schools can require the wearing of masks if this is considered appropriate in their circumstances.
Fallibroome decided some months ago that the wearing of face masks in corridors during lesson changeovers would be a sensible precaution. In our view, our corridors are very narrow in certain areas of our school and our students would inevitably encounter students in other year groups at these times. We were consequently reassured to see that the national advice has now adopted a similar view.
We are also mindful of the elements of the new national guidance that refer to other communal areas. As has been reported to parents previously, we intend to use indoor ‘holding areas’ for each year group at specific times of the school day. These areas will accommodate 240 students at certain times, with approximately 350 in the Sixth Form Centre. This seems to us to be an additional area of risk that we ought to manage more closely. As a result, we have decided to expect the wearing of masks in these areas during busy periods of the day, as described below:
As students gather in the holding areas before school, we will ask them to wear their face masks.
If the weather is fine, it is likely that most students will choose to go outside at break/lunch and this will leave the holding areas relatively empty. However, during poor weather, the indoor holding areas may become busy and we will consequently ask students to wear face masks in these circumstances. Students who are eating/drinking will not be expected to wear masks though.
As the number of students in the Sixth Form is higher, the students are older and the time spent in this area tends to be longer, we feel that we need to manage these spaces more carefully. As a result, we will ask Sixth Form students to wear face masks whenever they are in the Sixth Form Centre, unless they are eating / drinking downstairs. In this way, we hope to be able to continue to maximise the use of our study facilities during the school day.
Some students may be unable to wear masks for medical reasons. In such cases, we will provide these students with a card to explain that they have permission not to wear a face mask. Requests for such a card should be submitted to the relevant Learning Manager along with any supporting medical evidence.
In taking this approach, we are making use of the flexibility that we have been given to respond to this issue as appropriate to our school. We feel that the policy described above represents a measured attempt to manage the risks to our community.
We will continue to monitor national guidance in this area and will update this policy in response to changing circumstances as necessary.
As we reach the end of the school year, I have provided some key updates below:
The new school year starts on Thursday 3rd September. Students will need to come into school for 8.50 and go immediately to the following ‘holding areas’:
Students will need to be in their full school uniform. All students will also need a cloth face mask so that they can wear this when instructed to do so by a member of staff.
As Y7 have not had the opportunity to engage in any transition work with us during the summer term, we are going to bring these students into school on Wednesday 2nd September. In this way, Y7 will have the chance to meet their form tutor and other key staff – and will have the opportunity to learn about the school with very few other students on site. More information about these plans will be sent by Mr Dale to Y7 families in due course.
For similar reasons, we are also going to run an induction day for Y12 on Wednesday 2nd September. More detail about these arrangements will be sent out by Mr Payne in the near future.
One of our students (Edie Barstow Y11) has decided to make face masks in support of East Cheshire Hospice. She has asked me to send you this message:
Hi I’m Edie. After my GCSE exams were cancelled I felt I could use my spare time to help people and raise some money for charity at the same time by making face masks. After Mr Power’s email about having two reusable face masks for school and needing them to enter shops, they are especially useful now. I have a large variety of different patterns and colours to choose from as well as smaller ones for younger students and children. If you would like to order some, contact me via edie.g.barstow@fallibroome.com. I’m not asking anything for them except a donation which will go to the East Cheshire Hospice. If you want to have a look at what I’ve been up to check out my JustGiving page www.justgiving.com/fundraising/facemasksbyedie. Thank you.
It would be great if we could support Edie with this work so please get in touch with her if you can.
Towards the end of this month, we expect to receive additional guidance from Ofqual about the management of the results weeks. We will review this information when it comes in and will provide further information to parents and students at the beginning of each results week. With this in mind, it would be wise for Y11 and Y13 families to keep a close eye on their emails in the days leading up to the GCSE and A-Level results days.
Last week, I sent you a link to our Review of the Year. The Performing Arts department have since produced this amazing video to celebrate all that has been going on this year, even through the school closure period:
Please take a few minutes to watch this video – it has certainly reminded us of how much we are missing and leaves us especially keen to get back to normal as soon as possible.
This has been an extraordinarily challenging year for the school. Alongside the usual hectic nature of school life, we have had to cope with the loss of Claire Smith, which I know that many of us have not really come to terms with yet. Several families in our community have also had to cope with the loss of loved ones to cancer and they all remain in our thoughts at this time too. Despite these challenges, we have been hugely impressed by the maturity and commitment of our students as they have had to adapt to a totally new way of learning with little or no notice. Everyone here is really looking forward to having all our students back with us in September. While we know that school life next year will still be very different, this is an important step on the way back to recreating the dynamic, creative, exciting learning community that we all know Fallibroome to be.
At this point, everyone deserves a holiday! I hope you all have a great break with your friends and family and we look forward to seeing everyone again in September.
We have tried to outline the key elements of our reopening plans in the Loom presentation below:
https://www.loom.com/share/31e37d0df8a6469c9ba008b745e45433
Other key documents that are attached to this update include:
We are currently working on our programme of activities for the first week back in September, particularly regarding the times at which the various year groups will be asked to come into school. We hope to finalise these plans and send them out to you by the end of this week.
We hope that this information gives you some reassurance that we are taking great care over our plans for September. We are very much looking forward to having our students back in school and are wholly committed to doing this in the safest way possible.
We have done a lot of planning for September and we presented our draft plans in this respect to the Governing Body last night. We will reflect on the feedback received through this process and will circulate guidance documentation for our staff, parents and students on Monday.
As our fundraising for our South African partner schools has got off to a slow start, Mr Atherton has decided to launch a PlayStation / XBox FIFA competition for all Fallibroome students. More information about this can be found at:
https://fallibroome.academy/fallibroomes-community-fundraising-challenge/
As mentioned last week, we are keen to hear about any other fundraising suggestions too. Donations to this important campaign can also be made direct through our Wisepay account.
We are currently planning for the GCSE and A-Level results days in August. We decided to give the students the option of collecting their results in school or having them sent to them by email. As some of our students have indicated that they would prefer to collect their grades in person, we are now working on plans to do this in a socially distanced manner. Students who have indicated that they would like to receive their grades by email should not come on to the school site to collect their grades as our systems will be specifically designed for the students who have indicated that they want to pick them up in school.
Please note that we have been instructed not to release our internal grades to students or parents during this process. As this advice has not changed, we will not be providing this data on the GCSE and A-Level Results Days. As such, students will only receive a report listing the grades that have been decided upon by the Exam Boards – and these grades may be different from those that we submitted at the start of this process.
For GCSE students, we will also provide a report that indicates if their internal grades were assessed at 5+ or higher in each of their subjects. This will allow us to use a student’s internal grades to determine Sixth Form admission if it is to the student’s advantage to do so.
The national guidance that has been circulated in recent days continues to emphasise the importance of students avoiding public transport if at all possible. As a result, we anticipate that more students may choose to cycle to school next year.
In order to prepare for the possibility of an increase in bicycles on site, and the consequent need for more bicycle racks, we would like to gauge numbers. If you expect your son or daughter to cycle regularly to school, please email Mr Smalley (sma@fallibroome.org.uk) by 4pm on Tuesday July 14th so we can consider increasing our provision for storing bikes on site.
Please note that students who cycle will need to wear a helmet and bring a secure lock for their bike into school.
Even though our school year has been cut short, it is amazing how much we managed to squeeze in before we closed in late March. All of this has been celebrated in our Annual Review, which can be accessed at:
http://fallibroome.academy/fallibroome-academy-annual-review/
Please take a few minutes to look through this – some of the events seem a long time ago now, but are definitely worth reviewing in this way. If nothing else, it will remind us all of how much we are missing!
We have compiled some updates below in response to a number of important developments this week.
Yesterday, we received the Department for Education guidance regarding the national plans for school reopening in September. This is available at:
The key message here is that we are expected to reopen for all students and all subjects in September. While everyone at Fallibroome is keen to return to some sense of normality, this guidance includes significant restrictions that will necessitate substantial changes to the way that our school normally operates. We will study this documentation very carefully in the days ahead and start planning our response accordingly. It is our intention to have firm plans in place before the end of term so that everyone in our community is very clear about these issues before the summer break.
Ofqual have also just published their consultation documents relating to proposed changes to GCSE and A-Level examinations for 2021. This consultation process will continue until July 16th. We hope that this will lead to clear decisions being made about these issues in time for next academic year. Our staff desperately need this clarity so that we can plan our courses and explain these issues to our students and parents as soon as possible.
We have received excellent feedback from parents and students about the increased number of live lessons that have been provided this half-term. However, a number of our teachers are reporting a noticeable decrease in the number of students engaging in these sessions, especially in Y10. We would consequently urge our parents to monitor this issue and support us in this respect as much as possible.
We are currently finalising our plans for the Results Days’ in August. We hope to get more information about this out to parents and students next week.
It has been confirmed that we will not be asked to continue our support for key workers and vulnerable children through the summer holidays. As a result, the school will close to all students on Friday 17th July.
have provided some information and guidance related to a number of issues below:
Every year, we use our sponsored walk to raise funds for our partner schools in South Africa (Dennegeur and Grabouw). Not only has this project brought substantial benefits to the young people in South Africa, it has also greatly enhanced the experiences of our own students and staff – especially those who have had the opportunity to visit these schools. Please take a moment to watch the video clip below as it summarises the mutual benefit and joy that this relationship brings to everyone involved:
As we have not been able to schedule a sponsored walk this year, we are very anxious to try to raise an equivalent amount by other means. With this in mind, our Community Managers are asking our students to raise sponsorship for any physical activity of their choosing and, if their parents are happy for them to do so, to send us a video clip of their efforts. Please take a few moments to review the website materials that our Community Managers have put together to support this campaign:
http://fallibroome.academy/fallibroomes-community-fundraising-challenge/
We have set the students a target of raising £6 each as this represents the 6km between Dennegeur and Grabouw. Your support in encouraging such fundraising efforts would be greatly appreciated.
Mr Billington has created two excellent video guides for students to help them manage their Google Classroom activities and to explain how to engage in live online lessons. I would really encourage you to watch these with your son/daughter as they help to clarify a number of queries that we receive on a regular basis:
How to…Manage your work using the Google Classroom To Do list – Watch Video
How to…Join a live online lesson using Google Meet – Watch Video
Recent government announcements suggest that it is their intention to reopen schools fully in September. While we are aware of these headlines, as yet we have not yet received any updated guidance as to how we are expected to relax the current restrictions in order to deliver this ambition. We understand that such guidance should be sent to schools next week. As soon as we know more, we will update you accordingly.
We have updated our safeguarding policies in light of the significant increase in online lessons that are taking place currently. The attached letter provides some key guidance for parents with respect to these issues and also gives you the opportunity to opt out of live online lessons if you wish to do so.
At the moment, everyone returning from foreign countries (except the Channel Islands and the Republic of Ireland) is obliged to self-isolate for two weeks. With this in mind, it would be wise for parents to avoid booking overseas holidays in the last two weeks of August as this may mean missing school time if we are able to open school more broadly in September. We understand that updated national guidance in this area is likely to be published from June 29th so please monitor these issues very carefully if you are considering international travel in the holiday period.
We expect subject lessons to continue in their current vein until the end of the summer term. We will not be setting alternative ‘Investigations Week’ activities in the final week of term.
The only exception to this will be for Y12 on Tuesday 14th July as the Sixth Form team are planning a range of activities on this date.
Our Performing Arts department continue to try to offer opportunities for our students to engage in creative activities and to share these with our community. This week’s offering is performed by students in both our Drama Senior and Youth Companies:
With best wishes to everyone in our community.
Fallibroome is developing new ways of working to provide children with engaging learning opportunities, especially at times when they may need to be learning at home. There are occasions where we believe it is in the best interests of your child to learn collaboratively with their classmates and teachers, using video conferencing.
The online safety of your child is our priority. Fallibroome follows the guidance that has been developed by organisations such as DfE, NSPCC and UK Safer Internet Centre.
The video platforms the school will be using are Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and WebEx.
We ask you to ensure:
Should you not wish for your child to participate in video conferencing, please email your child’s Learning Manager:
It has been really encouraging to be able to welcome an increased number of students back to school this week. On average, we have had 50-60 Y10 students, approximately 40 Y12 students and 20 children of key workers etc. in school each day. Even though the taught sessions have felt very different from normal, they have clearly been highly valued by our students and staff. We have also been impressed by the way in which our students have responded to our expectations regarding social distancing etc. We very much hope that these tentative steps back to normality can be built upon in the months ahead.
We are hearing various suggestions in the media regarding the possible arrangements for schools in September. However, no further guidance has been provided to us in this respect. While we are doing our best to plan for various scenarios at the moment, we are unable to engage in detailed planning until we have some clarity from the government in this regard. At the moment, we are assuming that social distancing expectations will remain in place to a greater or lesser extent and that this will have unavoidable consequences for our ability to open the school normally after the summer holidays.
We have had some reports of our students attending social events outside school and not making any attempt to socially distance in line with current government guidelines. In a few cases, this has been brought to our attention through social media posts etc. We have responded to these issues by banning some individuals from the school site for a period of 14 days. While we take this action with great reluctance, we feel that this approach is necessary in order to reassure the other families in our community who are also aware of these issues.
As you will be aware, we have chosen to suspend uniform expectations for the summer term. However, it would be wise for parents to plan on the assumption that uniform will be reintroduced as school starts to reopen after the summer holidays.
We have a long-standing association with two schools in South Africa (Dennegeur and Grabouw) which has entailed international visits, cultural exchanges and other work of mutual benefit. Every year, we have also raised money for these schools through our sponsored walk and this has brought tangible benefits to these communities. It has also allowed us to sponsor some individual students to continue their education to secondary level, with life changing consequences.
As we cannot organise a sponsored walk this year, our Community Managers are currently developing alternative fundraising ideas that would allow us to continue our support for our partners in South Africa. More detail about these plans will be sent out to parents in the near future. While we recognise that our community may not be able to contribute as generously to this initiative as they have in the past, we know that our support is needed more than ever at the current time.
It is very much our hope that we will receive clear guidance before the end of term regarding national expectations for schools in September. This will then allow us to plan properly and keep you informed of these arrangements well in advance. In the meantime, thank you for your ongoing support for the school at this extraordinary time.
As we begin to bring more students back to school, I have provided a number of key updates below. While most of this information is particularly relevant to Y10 and Y12, I would encourage all our students and families to familiarise themselves with the documents mentioned here.
As I am sure you have picked up from the media, there has been a lot of debate locally and across the North West in recent days about whether or not the reopening date for schools (15th June) ought to be further delayed.
A key factor for us in deciding how to proceed has been the advice received from the Local Authority (LA) with regard to this matter, particularly with respect to the guidance that they are getting from their Director of Public Health. In summary, the LA has received a joint statement from the Directors of Public Health for Cheshire and Merseyside supporting the phased reopening of schools from next week. A copy of the joint statement and the LA letter is attached to this email for your reference.
On this basis, the LA are advising their schools to reopen as planned and, alongside the other schools in the Trust, we have chosen to do likewise. Y10 and Y12 students/parents will shortly receive separate emails describing the scheduling and rooming for these sessions.
We have written a short handbook for every student who will be coming back into school. It is particularly important that all Y10 and Y12 students/parents read this guidance carefully as it describes how the school will function during the summer term.
For reference, I have also attached the risk assessment that has been compiled for all the schools in the Trust. This overarching advice is supported by our Reopening Plan, which is much more specific to our school.
We are really looking forward to having some students back in school during the remainder of the summer term. At the moment we are still very unsure about how schools will be expected to function in September and are awaiting further national guidance in this respect. It seems likely, however, that normal service will not resume after the summer holidays, although we very much hope to be able to extend our provision at this stage and that this will lead us gradually back to normal in the months that follow.
Some key points from this week below:
We have been through all the parent survey responses and have used this feedback to produce a Frequently Asked Questions document. I hope that this helps to answer a number of your queries, even though some of these issues are heavily influenced by factors beyond our control.
Read the Frequently Asked Questions
We are currently compiling a short ‘handbook’ to describe how the school will function during the summer term. We will try to keep this as clear and concise as possible. We will get this out to you next week. We are also finalising our risk assessment documentation at the moment and will make this available next week too.
During next week, Y10 and Y12 students/parents will start to get information about lesson timing, rooming etc. from Mr Priest. Please keep an eye out for these emails as they will include important information about when and where the in-school lessons will be taking place.
If your son/daughter is attending school during the summer term, the Local Authority are asking you to complete the following transport survey. This is particularly important if your child has previously been using one of the subsidised school bus services provided by Cheshire East/TSS.
I mentioned in my last letter that face masks can be purchased from Finesse in Macclesfield. While this is the case, it seems that they only provide such items for adults. However, this stock is currently available from Classworx at:
https://classworx.co.uk/school/fallibroome-academy/
Remarkably, the school has now been closed to most students for nine school weeks. We are all looking forward to starting to reopen from the 15th June and hope that this will lead to us being able to return to normal in the near future. In the meantime, I hope everyone is keeping themselves safe and well.
As we reach the end of the half-term break, I have provided a number of important updates below:
For the last few weeks, we have been promised national guidance for the secondary sector, but this has been repeatedly delayed. Eventually, I felt that we had to make some decisions before the half-term holiday so that staff and parents had at least some sense of how we intend to manage the reopening process. This led to the Loom presentation that I sent out last week. In going ahead like this, we knew that our plans might need to be revised if/when the national guidance was finally published. This is exactly what has happened. New national guidance for the secondary sector was published on Monday and can be accessed here:
This new guidance includes a number of requirements that necessitate important revisions to our previous plans. As a result, we have been working on amendments to our plans this week in order to make them complaint with the new guidance. Our new approach is described in the Loom presentation below. I have also taken this opportunity to briefly summarise the staff and parent survey responses that we have gathered to date:
https://www.loom.com/share/fd8d050fa4be497fb729a95b6cd245bd
I have also attached a copy of this presentation to this email so that you can go through it separately if you wish to do so.
At this point, we feel that it would be sensible for our Year 9 students to focus on those subjects that they intend to continue next year. We have asked our teachers to bear this in mind when setting work for their Y9 classes. As a result, Y9 Google Classroom assignments will start to have a GCSE flavour and we hope that this might help us to mitigate some of the consequences of what is likely to be a disrupted start to Y10 next year.
We are reaching the end of our internal processes relating to the submission of GCSE and A-Level grades to the various Exam Boards. However, we remain under strict guidance regarding the confidentiality of these grades so will not be able to release this information to parents. Also, we have not been told that we can release our internal grades to parents after the Results’ Days in August. We are consequently working on the assumption that this will not be permissible.
As we want to allow our students to choose to use their internal GCSE grades for Sixth Form admission processes if they wish to do so, the above restrictions are problematic. To deal with this issue, we are currently working on an approach that will allow us to let students know on GCSE Results’ Day if they have achieved an internal Grade 5+ or higher in each subject without disclosing their actual internal grades. In this way, students will still be able to rely on their internal grades for Sixth Form admission processes if it is to their advantage to do so.
Ofqual have also recently issued further guidance relating to appeal processes. In summary, it is their intention to only allow appeals in very restricted circumstances. For example, if a school thinks that an administrative error has been made in calculating the grade, this can be brought to the Exam Board’s attention as part of an appeal procedure. Crucially, however, it will not be possible for students to appeal against the perceived ‘fairness’ of their grades. Ofqual explain this position in the following manner:
Following our consultation, we have given serious consideration as to whether a student could appeal against their school or college’s centre assessment grades and position in the rank order. On balance, we have decided it would not be in the interests of all students, or the fairness of the arrangements overall, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the appeal would have to be undertaken by someone better
placed than the student’s teachers to judge the grade they would likely have received if the exams had taken place – in the unique circumstances of this summer we do not believe there is any such person. An appeal would also require students to have access to the information their school or college put forward before being submitted to exam boards. This may compromise the reliability of
this year’s approach. Furthermore, if one student successfully appealed against their position in the rank order, it would have negative implications for other students who would, in turn, need to be given an opportunity to appeal. We intend that students who feel that their grades from the summer do not reflect their ability will have the opportunity to take their exams in the autumn series or in summer
2021. If they choose to do this, students will be able to use the higher of the two grades for future progression
While we have serious misgivings about the absence of an appeal process, we recognise that these circumstances are exceptional and the difficulty that Ofqual would have implementing a procedure that was fit for purpose.
As a result of the above, it is important for our Y11 and Y13 students to consider whether they would be willing to re-sit their examination in the proposed autumn 2020 and summer 2021 windows. If this is an option that individual students wish to pursue, we hope to be able to provide more information about these processes in August.
As explained previously, it is our intention to enhance our online lessons for Y10 and Y12 from June 8th. Between now and then, we will be in touch with you to ask whether your son/daughter has access to IT infrastructure at home that will allow them to engage in these lessons. If not, we will try to offer in-school support to bridge this gap. For obvious reasons, we will need to keep the number of students that we bring into school to access our IT facilities to a minimum. As a result, we would ask our Y10 and Y12 students to continue to work from home during this period if at all possible (unless they are invited to attend school for specific lessons as described in my Loom video).
As mentioned in my Loom presentation last week, it is our intention to introduce the use of face coverings for staff and students in September. We expect that these will become necessary when social distancing is difficult to maintain (e.g. in the corridors and around school). We are consequently asking our parents to purchase at last two of these masks for their son/daughter in time for September. Our uniform suppliers (e.g. Finesse in Macclesfield) have already picked up this issue for us and will have face masks in stock if parents wish to purchase them in this way.
Please note, however, that it would be our strong preference to avoid wearing such masks in school. We will consequently end this practice as soon as we are able to do so safely.
We are also asking our parents to provide tissues and hand wipes / hand sanitiser for their son/daughter. This will assist greatly in maintaining safe work spaces for everyone during the school day.
We do not intend to insist on school uniform being worn during the summer term. We also anticipate that this may remain the case in September. However, please bear in mind that we will reverse this position as soon as we feel it is appropriate to do so. Parents are consequently advised to ensure that their son/daughter has all the usual uniform requirements in place so that we can return to normal at very short notice if need be.
We have been very encouraged by the survey responses that we have collected in the last week or so. At such an uncertain time, we seem to have succeeded in reassuring the vast majority of our community and retained the strong support of our parents for the decisions that we have taken to date. No doubt, we will have many more obstacles to overcome in future, but I am confident that we will continue to meet these challenges successfully.
With best wishes to everyone.
As promised, we have prepared a presentation to explain how we are intending to respond to the recently announced government plans to enable “some face to face contact” for Y10 and Y12 students and their teachers next half-term. While the content of my presentation focuses strongly on our Y10 and Y12 cohorts, it also includes guidance that is very relevant to all our families. The video of this presentation is just over 30 minutes long and can be accessed at:
https://www.loom.com/share/dbb513a31c954ff396b1168cfd224c9e
As mentioned at the end of this video, we are also asking for feedback from our parents and students about these plans. This process includes the opportunity to raise any additional issues or questions that are concerning you at the moment. We will try to collate these into a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ document and respond as soon as we can. Please take a few minutes to complete this short survey by Monday as this will give us the time to review your feedback over the holiday period and plan accordingly:
We hope that the above guidance helps you to understand the issues that we are working on at the moment and offers some reassurance about our plans for the future too. Please bear in mind though that we may need to change these plans at short notice if further government advice is published that conflicts with our currently preferred approach.
We hope that you are all keeping safe. We are really hoping that this crisis will pass soon and we will be able to get back to normal in the near future.
We are conscious that you have not been updated with respect to our reopening plans and that this must be causing you some concern at the moment, not least as this is the subject of so much media speculation at the current time.
As you know, national guidance was provided to schools about reopening arrangements at the beginning of last week. However, this was predominantly aimed at the primary sector and only suggested that secondary schools should try to offer “some face-to-face” contact with their Y10 and Y12 students before the end of the summer term. We were promised more detailed guidance about these matters by last Friday, but this did not materialise. We were then told that further guidance would follow early this week, but again nothing additional has been sent to us. As we are very conscious that our students, parents and staff are very anxious to get some clarity about our intended plans for next half-term, at this stage we feel that we have no option but to make decisions based on the limited information that we have been given to date.
In developing our plans, we have had to assume that the key limitations placed on the primary sector will also apply to secondary schools. A key element of these restrictions is the expectation that students must remain in a small, single group throughout their time in school. This is very important in the secondary sector as it means that groups of students cannot be rearranged for options subjects etc. during the school day, or even from one day to the next. As all secondary schools normally function by moving students between subjects and sets throughout the school day/week, this represents a substantial change to our normal working practices.
In anticipation of these arrangements being confirmed for the secondary sector, we have been working hard on the possible options at our disposal. We hope to finalise our intended approach by the end of this week and I will send out a detailed explanation of our rationale in this respect over the weekend. As part of this process, we will include the opportunity for you to provide feedback to us and we will consider your comments, suggestions and queries over the half-term holiday period.
Of course, it is possible that the government will publish guidance in the next few days that will cause us to reconsider our approach. However, in light of the fact that we are reaching the last few days of this half term, we thought it would be best to proceed on the assumption that this clarity would not be forthcoming. If these circumstances change, we will of course let you know as soon as we can.
As you have probably heard, national guidance has been published this week about the reopening of schools. These documents can be accessed at:
Detailed as this guidance is, it is very heavily focussed on primary schools. For example, the recommendations relating to class groupings and curriculum delivery would not allow a secondary school to operate in anything like a normal fashion. Yet, we know that secondary schools are also being asked to facilitate some ‘face-to-face contact’ with their Y10 and Y12 students, although the nature of such arrangements and their proposed start date are very unclear. As a result, we are left with many questions as to how to implement these guidelines in our setting and we know that all the other secondary schools in the region are facing similar difficulties.
We understand that further guidance relating to the secondary sector will be published shortly. We hope that this additional detail will allow us to judge what is achievable in our context and we will update you with respect to our approach as soon as possible thereafter. We are also conscious of the fact that each family will need to make their own decisions regarding an appropriate return date for their son/daughter so we do not intend to put pressure on parents to send their child to school before you consider it appropriate to do so. We will do everything possible to keep you updated with respect to our preparations so that you can make an informed judgement as to the best course of action for your family.
Please note that our school is still only open for vulnerable students and the children of critical workers. We know that some employers will be encouraging you to return to work at the current time, but we’re not in a position to extend places to other children until we receive further government advice and guidance.
With thanks for your ongoing support for the school.
Further updates from our Trust can also be found at: http://www.fallibroometrust.com/ceos-letter-to-parents-guardians-and-students-may-12th-2020/
I have chosen to focus my letter this week on the survey results that we have collected over the last week or so. I have provided an overview of the key results below with some conclusions and associated actions at the end.
We had 365 parent survey returns in total. These were evenly spread across the school, with between 60 and 80 from every year group.
We also received 611 student survey responses. We had at least 100 responses from each year group from Y7-Y10 and a smaller number from Y12.
The parent responses to each of the questions is provided in the tables below. A short commentary is also given under each table to explain how this data compares to the student surveys and to offer other explanatory information.
Work is being set on a regular basis | ||||
Strongly Agree | Agree | Disagree | Strongly Disagree | % of positive responses |
41% | 57% | 2% | 0.2% | 98% |
The student responses to this question generated even stronger results (99% positive with 56% strongly agree).
How long on average is your child spending working each day | |||||
Over 5 hours | 4-5 hours | 3-4 hours | 2-3 hours | 1-2 hours | Less than an hour |
18% | 23% | 25% | 20% | 13% | 2% |
The student responses to this question generated very similar results.
Perhaps predictably, there is a noticeable increase in working hours in Y10 and Y12 with about a third of Y10 students and nearly half of Y12 students reporting working in excess of five hours a day. To us, this seems excessive so we will provide further guidance about how this might be managed at more sensible levels in future.
When we asked about whether the volume of work being set was appropriate, the majority of parents (60% approx.) reported that it was ‘about right’ with 20% saying that it was a little too much and 5% saying is was far too much. The student view seems to be that too much work is being set, with 60% replying that it was either ‘too much’ or ‘far too much’.
In terms of the quality of the work being set, we received the following responses from parents:
How would you rate the quality of work being set | |||||
1
(excellent) |
2 | 3 | 4 | 5 (very poor) | |
Overall | 20% | 37% | 30% | 9% | 4% |
Student responses to this question were very similar.
At the moment, we ask our staff to set tasks that are similar in style to what would normally be completed in lessons and/or homework. An alternative approach that is being used in some schools involves the setting of longer term project work that gives the students more flexibility to complete assignments in different ways over longer time scales. The overwhelming response from parents (94%) was in favour of maintaining our current approach, with 80% of students taking the same view.
We also asked parents how they felt their child was coping with the current circumstances. This generated the following results:
How well is your child coping? | |||||
1
(very well) |
2 | 3 | 4 | 5
(not at all) |
|
Overall | 31% | 33% | 24% | 10% | 1% |
This suggests that about two thirds of parents feel that their son/daughter is coping well at the moment with about 10% suggesting that their child is struggling. The student feedback to this question is quite different though:
How well do you feel you are coping? | |||||
1
(very well) |
2 | 3 | 4 | 5
(not at all) |
|
Overall | 13% | 29% | 30% | 20% | 8% |
Year 7 | 39% | 31% | 34% | 15% | 3% |
Year 8 | 10% | 33% | 6% | 7% | 8% |
Year 9 | 13% | 55% | 33% | 17% | 10% |
Year 10 | 11% | 19% | 26% | 30% | 13% |
Year 12 | 4% | 39% | 32% | 14% | 11% |
The number of students reporting that they are not coping well at the moment is about 25% in most year groups, and rises to over 40% in Y10. This suggests that student anxiety levels are quite high currently and this is certainly something for parents to discuss at home with their son/daughter. We imagine that the reasons for this anxiety are quite varied and probably cover issues such as:
We will certainly be discussing these themes in school to see what we can do to alleviate these issues and they will be a very high priority for us on our return to school too.
We also asked if you felt that we were communicating with you adequately. This generated the following response from parents:
Very well informed | Well informed | Quite well informed | Not very well informed | Not informed
at all |
|
How well informed do you feel about the school closure and other associated issues? | 57% | 33% | 8% | – | 2% |
We also asked parents and students to suggest other ways in which we could improve our current approaches. This led to a number of requests relating to setting tasks and deadlines more clearly etc. that we will look into. The two most common requests received were:
While we understand the demand for this additional support, it is important to explain why delivering such provision is less than straightforward. To explain this, I have tried to respond to each of these issues separately below:
We know that many of our parents are really struggling to balance the conflicting requirements of managing their work and domestic commitments at the moment. The same is true of our teaching staff. In particular, colleagues here have to manage their own personal health and wellbeing, the caring responsibilities for their own families, issues related to IT hardware and access, etc. As a result, the capacity that colleagues have to provide live online tutorials is very varied. We are also very conscious of the additional safeguarding issues that arise when delivering video lessons into people’s homes.
For these reasons, we have been careful not to insist that all our teachers should offer online live lessons to their students. That said, we have encouraged colleagues to offer occasional sessions like this when it is possible/appropriate to do so. When this is more difficult, we have asked colleagues to provide narrated PowerPoints and/or directions to the excellent resources that are available on BBC Bitesize and the Oak Academy. From a parent’s perspective we recognise that this is resulting in a very mixed provision, but this is genuinely the best that we feel that we can do in the circumstances.
It is completely understandable that students and parents want feedback on the work that is being submitted each week. In normal circumstances, we would absolutely expect this dialogue between students and teachers to be happening on a regular basis. It is so much more difficult for us to manage this workload in the current circumstances though. Some of our teachers teach over 300 students so providing individual feedback using online systems would quickly become unmanageable for our staff. We are very conscious of this problem though and we will look again at these issues to see if more can be done in this respect.
In all likelihood, there is a connection between points 3 and 4. To address these issues, we will work in the following way in future:
Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond to our surveys. The feedback has been very encouraging and has also allowed us to address some of the issues that exist in our community, even if we cannot resolve all of the concerns that have been reported to us. I hope that you find the above summary informative and that we are able to continue to work together positively for the remaining period of the school closure, however long that may be.
We have compiled some more key advice and updates below:
Thank you to those parents and students who have already responded to our surveys. We have had hundreds of responses so far and are keen to increase this number still further if possible. We will be closing these forms on Monday morning so please try to contribute before then if you can by going to:
We will review these surveys very carefully next week and will update you regarding any conclusions that we reach from this process as soon as we can.
We feel that it would be inappropriate of us to conduct end-of-year assessments for Y7-Y10 based on activities completed during the school closure period. As a result, we will not be providing subject reports or attainment grades for Y7-Y10 at the end of this year. Once we return to school, we will review these issues and make alternative arrangements as necessary.
We will produce end-of-year reports for Y12 as these will be needed to support UCAS application processes at the start of next academic year. That said, any grades included in these reports will be largely based on the work completed by our Sixth Form students prior to the school closure, although work completed during closure will still be considered before finalising these grades.
We have heard this week that Sarah Rawsthorn (Parent Governor) has chosen to step down from this role so that she can pursue other interests as her family move away from the area.
Sarah has given an enormous amount of time to the school in her years as a governor. Her SEND expertise has been especially valuable to us and she has also played a key role in providing a parent’s perspective on our work. She leaves with our grateful thanks for her contribution to the school and we wish her every success in the future.
Mr Jones has compiled the following video as a celebration of the various dance shows and performances that we have seen at Fallibroome in recent times: https://vimeo.com/412805786
If nothing else, as we are all probably getting fed up of being locked away in isolation, this serves to remind us of what we have to look forward to when things get back to normal!
We have compiled some key advice and updates below:
I am aware that many families have been accessing the BBC Bitesize resources that have become available in the last few days. Alongside this, we have also seen the launch of ‘Oak Academy’ this week (see https://www.thenational.academy/). This impressive resource includes a wealth of online lessons and activities for a wide range of subjects up to Y10. We expect these materials to expand over the weeks and months ahead too. I know that our teachers will be making use of these resources in the tasks that they set through Google Classroom, but there is plenty here that can be accessed independently by students and parents too.
We are keen to gather feedback from students, parents and staff about the way that our distance learning systems are working currently. With this in mind, we have prepared surveys for Y7-10 and Y12. Please take a few minutes to complete the survey that is relevant to you so that we can decide if any changes to our approach are needed in the weeks / months ahead. Please encourage your son/daughter to complete the student version too. We will take this feedback very seriously so would really encourage as many students and parents to complete this process as possible.
We always complete ‘exit surveys’ for our Y11 and Y13 cohorts. We will do this again this year, but this information will be sent out separately.
As previously explained, we will stop setting work for Y11 from Friday May 1st.
We will then use the following week to create new Y11 Google Classrooms based on the students who have opted to study each subject in the Sixth Form. Teaching staff will then set Y11-Y12 transition work for students in each subject starting from Monday May 11th. This will include 3 or 4 tasks that the students can complete independently over the summer months. We will not ask our staff to provide ongoing support and feedback for these tasks. Instead, we will ask them to design the tasks in such a way as to help students make a positive start to Y12 and to include a review and discussion of this content in the first few lessons next year.
In setting up these transition activities, it is important that students and parents do not assume that admission to the Sixth Form will necessarily follow. Decisions with regard to Sixth Form admission will not be made until after the GCSE results have been published and the quality of any transition work completed will not form part of these considerations.
There have been a number of good news stories in the media recently with a Fallibroome connection:
While it seems to me that the UK has passed the peak in the current crisis, it is obvious that the return to some sense of normality is going to be very slow. Keen as we are to put all this behind us, we know that the next stages will need to be managed with real care and patience. We remain very unsure when schools will be asked to reopen, but we will let you know more as soon as we are able to do so.
With best wishes to everyone in our community.
As the official Easter holiday has come to an end, I have provided a few key updates below:
Our staff will now return to providing regular work for our students. We would consequently encourage parents to try to re-establish working routines at home so that our students retain some sense of normality at this time.
I would also like to draw your attention to the BBC Bitesize resources that are being launched from April 20th (https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize). There is a wealth of high quality resources available here that can be accessed by our students independently. Our staff are also likely to make use of these materials through the work that they set in Google Classroom.
It has been confirmed that the A-Level results this year will be published on 13th August and the GCSE results will follow a week later on the 20th August.
We have plans in place to ensure that we provide the data required by Ofqual to support GCSE and A-Level results and we will be working hard on this over the next six weeks or so.
Our work providing PPE for frontline workers has continued throughout the holiday period. Up to last Friday, we had delivered over 2,000 face visors to offices right across the region. This has been a remarkable achievement by all the staff and students involved. As you may have already noticed, our work in this area was featured in the Macclesfield Express last week. We also understand that East Cheshire Hospice intend to feature our support in a follow-up article in the Macclesfield Express this week. I know that the team of colleagues and students who have led this work have been greatly heartened by the public response to their efforts and they remain determined to keep this output going for as long as the need exists.
There is a lot of media speculation at the moment about the need to re-open schools, with some even suggesting specific dates when this might happen. Our understanding is that no such date has been agreed and that this is very unlikely to be confirmed in the near future. It is consequently better to assume that schools will remain closed for some time to come.
We are very conscious that student, parent and staff anxiety about lost learning and the particular impact that this will have on examination courses will increase as the school closure period continues. We understand that these problems are acknowledged by Ofqual and that they accept that a sensible approach with regard to future examination expectations will need to be developed, particularly for Y10 and Y12 students. We await further detail about these matters and will update our students and parents as soon as we know more. In the meantime, I would encourage all our students to try not to worry unduly about these issues and to assume that a reasonable approach to future national examinations will be developed in response to the current crisis in due course.
With best wishes to everyone in our community at this time.
As we come to the end of our third week of closure, I have provided a number of updates below.
Letters from Ofqual have already been sent out to Y11 and Y13 families to explain how the exam grading processes are going to operate this year. Ofqual have now produced the following video to support this documentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXuDOrtJY1Q&feature=youtu.be
So far, we have manufactured and delivered 804 face visors for frontline workers. The full list of offices that we have supported so far are:
We are continuing to produce more today and, because demand has been so high, we intend to continue this manufacture tomorrow (Saturday). While we have been surprised by the extent of the need for this equipment, it was a particularly emotional moment for everyone involved when we saw this message from the Intensive Care team at Stepping Hill:
Thank you to those families who donated to our food bank appeal just before the school closed. If you are able to continue to support this work, the Silk Life foodbank continues to need contributions. They have a collection box in Sainsbury’s or the Silk Life building, which is open from 9.00 am-11.30 on Tuesday mornings on George Street (behind The Snow Goose pub). There is a particular need for rice, tinned veg, tinned meat meals – as well as coffee, jam and sugar.
We continue to offer a skeleton provision in school for families of key workers and vulnerable students. Typically, we have had fewer than ten students attending school through this period, some of whom are with us on the bank holidays too. We have been pleased to support these families in this way and the students themselves have been a great help as enthusiastic contributors to our face visor production line!
With thanks for the messages of support that we continue to get from our community and with best wishes to everyone at this difficult time.
As you are aware, last Friday Ofqual published their description of how the national examination system will operate at A-Level and GCSE this year. Having discussed this documentation at length with senior staff, we have reached some key decisions about how we intend to manage these processes at Fallibroome.
In summary, we now know that GCSE and A-Level grades will be decided upon in two stages this year:
Schools will be asked to provide a grade for each student by the 29th May. As such, we will need to refer to all the work produced by every student. In completing this task, we will not use the mock exam grade on its own. Instead, we will consider the work done by the students before and after the mock exam period. Key coursework assignments will also be considered, including those that were only partially completed at the time of the school closure. It is very important to highlight that
we will not be considering the work done by students after the school closure (March 20th) as this may disadvantage students who have been ill and/or do not have access to high quality IT facilities at home.
The process will not be a simple aggregation of the marks achieved by each student throughout the two year course. We know that many students work much harder in Y13/Y11 than they do in Y12/Y10. Every year, we see some students improve quite rapidly in the final months so our staff are used to seeing the difference that such late transformations can have on a student’s final grade. Our staff will be asked to consider all such factors when deciding upon their internal grades.
Our staff are also aware of the SEND students in their groups and will also know who has been awarded access arrangements for their examinations. As our teachers are accustomed to seeing the difference such factors can make to a student’s performance in their formal examinations, they have also been asked to include this in their considerations when deciding on their internal grades.
This process is not unlike that normally used by us towards the end of our GCSE and A-Level programmes every year. Our staff are very accustomed to providing ‘predicted grades’ for their students in this way and we have a strong record of doing this accurately.
In providing these grades, teachers will be asked to use the normal grade range (A*-E at A-Level and 9-1 at GCSE). At GCSE, we will also ask teachers to use ‘5+’ to identify those students who are performing at the upper end of Grade 5, as this may be needed to decide upon Sixth Form entry (more detail provided on this below).
Subject leaders will be responsible for ensuring that the grades awarded by individual teachers are consistent and fair across their team. This process will also be subject to oversight by the Senior Leadership Team. Final decisions regarding Internal Grades will rest with the Headteacher. Parents are consequently asked not to direct any queries in this respect to individual teachers. Also, please remember that we are not permitted to share these internal grades with parents before the final grades are decided upon by Ofqual. It is also not yet clear if we will be authorised to make our internal grades available to parents and students even after the final grades have been published. As we would prefer to make our internal grades available to our families at the end of this process, we will do so if at all possible. At the moment, we are assuming that this will be allowed.
We will submit our internal grades to Ofqual who will then be responsible for reviewing and moderating them as appropriate. Our understanding is that this will be done quite mathematically. In summary, Ofqual will be responsible for ensuring that the distribution of grades nationally and within each school are similar to previous years. In doing this, we understand that they will look closely at the national grade distributions in each subject as well as each school’s historic performance before finalising each student’s grades. The scale of this task can only mean that it will be done in quite a formulaic fashion. We consequently assume that the internal grades that we submit will be amended to some extent. In this light, it is very important that parents and students do not assume that the internal grade submitted by us will be simply accepted and converted to each student’s actual grade by Ofqual.
The External Grade will be published for each student as their official GCSE/A-Level grade. We understand that this is likely to be on the same date as usual (mid-August), although it may be earlier. This will have the same standing as any other GCSE or A-Level grade in previous years. As stated above, this may differ from the grade submitted by us to Ofqual. At the moment, we
know very little about potential appeal processes, but we will share this with our students and parents as soon as we know more. We understand that resit opportunities will be made available in the Autumn term 2020 and Summer 2021, although little detail has been published about these arrangements at this point in time.
The External Grades will use the normal grade range (A*-E at A-Level and 9-1 at GCSE). The external system will not use Grade 5+ at GCSE.
Every application will be considered individually, but it is important that students demonstrate a strong core of academic ability in order to provide the best foundation for a successful outcome at the end of A-Level study. The changes to national GCSE grading systems detailed above require us to adapt our approach to Sixth Form admissions, as described below.
Students should have achieved at least four External Grades at 4 and above, although two may be accepted. These should include GCSE Mathematics and GCSE English at External Grade 4 or above. Please note that these grade passes will only be accepted from GCSE qualifications. In addition, students should be able to meet the Subject Specific Entry Criteria, as detailed below.
Students should have achieved an External Grade 6 in all the subjects that they have chosen to pursue in the Sixth Form. If students achieve an External Grade 5 in their chosen subject/s, we will then review their Internal Grades. Through this process, we will admit students who have been awarded an Internal Grade 5+ in their chosen subject. Students who achieve an External Grade lower than 6 and an Internal Grade lower than Grade 5+ will not be admitted to study this subject in the Sixth Form.
Students wishing to study Maths in the Sixth Form should achieve an External Grade 6 in Maths. If a student fails to achieve an External Grade 6 but has achieved an Internal Grade 6 in this subject, we will admit them onto the Mathematics course. Students with an External Grade for Maths lower than 6 and an internal grade of 5+ or lower will not be admitted to study this subject in the Sixth Form.
We are conscious of the fact that Ofqual may choose to moderate our grades in a negative manner and this may result in our students getting grades lower than we feel they deserve. While we will do all we can to avoid such a scenario, it is a possibility that we cannot ignore. To manage such a set of circumstances, we have decided that we will allow students to choose either their internal or external grade for Sixth Form admission purposes (i.e. whichever is higher). For example, if astudent gets an External Grade 5 in their chosen subject but has been assessed by us as Grade 6, we will allow them to study this subject in the Sixth Form. This will allow them to start their A-Level courses in the normal manner and then choose to re-sit any GCSE examinations if they wish to do so, although this will not be obligatory.
We hope that this will provide some protection for our students in these circumstances and that this will reassure those who are anxious about how the external systems will be applied. We recognise that there is a lot of anxiety amongst our student body at the moment about these arrangements. As I mentioned in my letter last week, we think that Ofqual have done the best they can in these circumstances and we remain optimistic that the national system will treat our students fairly in the end. I hope that the above detail offers some clarity about how we will manage these systems at Fallibroome and that you are reassured that every effort will be made to ensure that our students’ achievements are recognised appropriately.
Ofqual have published their guidance to students, parents, teachers and school leaders today. I have attached this information to this email for your reference. In our view, Ofqual’s guidance is clear and helpful. It also seems to us that the processes that they have described here are probably the best that can be done in the circumstances. The desire to be fair and reasonable to all Y11 and Y13 students across the country is also very evident.
At the heart of this process is the requirement for all schools to report “the most likely grade a student would have achieved if they had sat their exams this summer and completed any non-exam assessment”. When schools submit these grades, they will be closely scrutinised by Ofqual and will be subject to adjustment in order to ensure comparability with national trends and previous cohorts. It is important to highlight at this stage that schools are specifically prohibited from sharing their internal grades with students and parents until after the final grades are decided by Ofqual at the end of this process.
Parents and students are asked not to contact their teachers to make their case for a particular grade during this period. As a school, we have an excellent track record of assessing our students’ likely outcomes accurately so we believe we can complete this process in a way that is fair to all our students and that protects the integrity of the A-Level and GCSE examination system nationally. It is clearly very important for our students and parents to trust us to complete this exercise in a carefully considered, rigorous and professional manner.
We will review Ofqual’s documentation very carefully over the Easter holiday period and will provide further guidance and clarification as soon as we can. We intend to take these processes very seriously and we recognise the important role that we have to play in ensuring that every student gets the grade that their efforts deserve.
Year 11 & Year 13 Letter 03.04.2020
Letter_to_students_-_Summer_2020_grading
Summer_2020_grades_for_GCSE_AS_A_level_EPQ_AEA_in_maths_-_guidance_for_teachers_students_parents
We were expecting information from Ofqual earlier this week about GCSE and A-Level grading systems. We now understand that this will be published tomorrow, although it might be delayed until next week. Once Ofqual have clarified this for us, we will provide supplementary information to explain how these processes will work in our school as quickly as possible.
At the moment, it seems clear that we will not be expected to use the work that students have completed after the school closure date to inform their final grade. As a result, we intend to adopt the following approach to the ongoing provision of work for Y11 and Y13.
No further work will be set for Y13 after Friday 3rd April. By this stage, the teaching of the examination courses would normally have been completed and lessons would be focussing on examination revision. There seems little value in focussing on this revision when we know that these examinations will not be taking place. Instead, Mr Payne will be providing guidance about pre-university work for all Y13 students in the coming days.
We will continue to set GCSE level work for Y11 up until Friday 1st May (excluding Easter). However, we do not expect Y11 students to complete all this work. Instead, we encourage students to continue working on those subjects that they intend to study next year.
From Monday 4th May, we will set Y11-Y12 transition work for those students who are hoping to join us in the Sixth Form. New Google Classrooms will be set up in each subject for this purpose. However, this work will not be set on a lesson-by-lesson basis. Instead, we will ask our teachers to provide some guidance resources and suggested activities that students can complete at their own pace over rest of the school year.
We intend to remain open for the families of key workers and vulnerable students throughout the Easter period, including the bank holidays. That said, we are keen to keep the number of students coming to school as low as possible in order to maximise social distancing arrangements. Parents are asked to contact Mr Smalley (sma@fallibroome.org.uk) if they want to access this provision. As mentioned previously, our teachers will not be setting work for their students during the Easter break.
When our students are in school, we are very careful to manage their access to the internet so that inappropriate websites etc. are not accessed. As we cannot do this at the moment, we would strongly urge parents to apply web filtering safeguards at home. Different web providers will be able to provide advice about how this can be done, but links to this service for the major companies are provided below:
With thanks for your ongoing support for the school and with best wishes to everyone in our community at this time.
As we reach the end of our first week of school closure, I have provided some key updates and advice below.
We have been hugely impressed by the volume of work being completed by our students at this time. However, we are also hearing about some students becoming anxious/stressed about keeping up to date, missing deadlines, etc. This can be a particular issue for our SEND students as they do not have access to their TA. Please reassure your son/daughter that they are only expected to do the best that they can in the circumstances. When everyone returns to school, we will review what has been achieved and plan future lessons accordingly. There will be no sanctions applied to students for not being able to complete work during the school closure period.
The best way for parents to monitor the tasks being set and completed by their children is to sit with them with their Google Classroom account open. The parent version of Google Classroom is not particularly helpful so it is much better to use the student screen.
Please note that we do not intend to set work for our students during the Easter period. However, our skeleton provision in school will remain open at this time for key workers and vulnerable students. If students are in school over Easter, they will need to bring appropriate materials with them to read etc. However, parents of these students are asked to bear in mind that we will not be able to allow group activities, board games, etc.
All of the Macclesfield Head Teachers are getting reports about teenage children gathering in groups on the local parks and skate parks. This is clearly putting their own lives and that of others at risk. We would consequently urge all parents to ensure that their sons/daughters behave in a socially responsible manner during this period of national crisis. These gatherings should simply not be taking place.
We understand that announcements about the systems to be used to decide GCSE and A-Level grade will be announced by Ofqual next week. We will update you about this as soon as we have clear guidance in this respect.
With best wishes to everyone in our community at this time.
As national measures relating to the management of Covid-19 are clearly escalating, I wanted to update you with respect to several issues, as outlined below.
We are continuing to offer a skeleton provision for parents who desperately need this support. In managing this facility, it is very important for us to limit this service to the smallest possible number of students as doing so helps to minimise the risk to our staff and the students themselves. Thank you to all those parents who have worked very positively with us in this respect.
As yet, we have had no clarity regarding the national systems that will be used to determine A-Level and GCSE grades. At the moment, it seems likely that teachers will be asked to provide a professional estimate for each student, but it is already clear that other important factors beyond the school’s control will also be used for this purpose. Also, external moderation systems will be required to maintain a sense of fairness across the country and we do not how these will be designed and implemented. In this climate, it is important that parents do not email staff asking for estimated grades or other indicators of likely performance. We will respond to any national requirements that are introduced and will keep parents informed about these processes as much as possible.
Under current proposals, it seems that students who are disappointed with the GCSE or A-Level grades this year will be given the opportunity to sit these examinations in September 2020 or May/June 2021 if they choose to do so. While such an outcome would clearly be less than ideal, it does seem that such a fallback provision is being planned currently. In this light, it remains important for our Y11 and A-Level students to continue studying in case they decide to follow such a route in future. At the moment, we are not in a position to provide advice as to how applications to our Sixth Form will be managed. Once we know how the GCSE grading systems will be applied, we will then consider how these outcomes will need to be interpreted for this purpose.
We had excellent final assemblies with our Y11 and Y13 Leavers last Friday. The quality of the performances was remarkable in light of the fact that we only had 24 hours to prepare. While there was a lot of sadness that the year had come to an abrupt and premature end, it was great to have this opportunity to recognise the huge contribution that these students have made to our school in their time here. We wish them all every success in the future and we look forward to hearing from them in the years ahead too.
Staff and students are working very hard to keep on top of our online learning systems. We have been impressed by the way in which our students have responded to this new environment and this gives us hope that we can recover any lost ground very quickly once service returns to normal.
While current developments are very concerning, we remain optimistic that our community will manage these circumstances successfully and we look forward to bringing everyone back to school in the near future.
As has been reported in the national media, we have been instructed to close the school at the end of the school day on Friday 20th March until further notice. At the same time, we are being asked to continue to provide support for vulnerable students and the families of ‘key workers’. Our pastoral team are currently working hard to identify and work with such families so that we can put this provision in place in time for Monday morning. I have tried to summarise other key information and advice for our community below.
The cancellation of this year’s GCSE and A-Level examinations has come as a shock to everyone. After so much hard work has been done by our students and staff, this is a deeply disappointing outcome, not least when we know that both cohorts were on track to do exceptionally well this year.
At this point, we do not know what the government’s plans are with respect to recognising the achievements of our Y11 and Y13 students. In this uncertain situation, it remains important for our students to continue studying their examination courses at home. While this work will inevitably be less focussed and intense than would have otherwise been the case, our students need to note that we may be asked to provide ‘estimated grades’ for them in the future and we do not know what evidence may be required from us for this purpose.
We are also very conscious of the need for our students to be fully prepared for the next stage of their education, even if they do not have to sit formal examinations. With all this in mind, our teaching staff will continue to set work for Y11 and Y13 students up to their official leaving dates (Thursday 7th May for Y11 and Friday 15th May for Y13). We also looking at trying to provide ‘transition work’ for Y11 students who are hoping to join us in the Sixth Form and we hope to provide more information about this later in the year.
Last night’s announcements mean that tomorrow will be the last day in school for our Y11 and Y13 students. We are determined not to let this moment pass without taking the opportunity to celebrate their time at Fallibroome with them and to recognise the enormous contribution that they have all made to our school during their time here. We are consequently planning ‘Leavers’ Assemblies’ for tomorrow afternoon and we will treat this as a non-uniform day for both cohorts. Y11 students will also be allowed to bring their school uniform shirts in to be signed, as has become customary at this time of year.
We will do everything we can to continue to provide work for all our students in this period. With this in mind, we intend to use Google Classroom as the key resource for setting work and communicating with our students. We recommend that you review your son’s /daughter’s Google Classroom account with them every evening so that you can support them in structuring their studies at home as much as possible. We suggest that students do their best to follow their normal timetable routine by completing tasks relevant to the subject that they would normally be studying at that point in the school day. This might help to maintain some sense of normality through this difficult period. When setting assignments, our teachers may choose not to set new work for every individual lesson. Instead, they might set work on the Monday that needs to be completed throughout the week. Where possible / appropriate, we have asked our teachers to provide a time indication for each assignment so that students can structure their work accordingly.
The length of the school closure has heightened our concerns for these cohorts in particular. We have consequently asked our staff to pay special attention to supporting these students over the months ahead. In particular, we have asked teachers to do their best to provide enhanced materials (e.g. PowerPoints with audio explanations and/or online live group sessions using Google Meet) for these students. While the ability of our teachers to provide this support will be very dependent on their own health and caring responsibilities, I know that our staff are very determined to do all they can to support their examination classes in this way.
It will clearly not be possible for us to mark work and provide ongoing feedback during the closure period. However, we have asked our teachers to prioritise responding to any email queries they receive from their Y10 and Y12 students so that additional support can be provided as necessary. Teachers will also do their best to answer queries from Y11 and Y13, although we anticipate that these will be quite few in number. To make this manageable, we ask that students and parents in KS3 year groups avoid emailing their teachers at this time. Also, please bear in mind that our teachers may be unwell themselves so may not be able to respond to such queries quickly.
In a normal school environment, teachers design tasks based on the progress students have made in the previous lesson. As this school closure period is going to be very lengthy, this continuity will be lost and it will become increasingly difficult for our staff to set really meaningful work for their students. This is especially true of non-examination cohorts. While we will do our best in these circumstances, we ask for your understanding with respect to these issues.
While this closure is far from ideal, we will do all we can to minimise the impact on our students. Even though our Y12 and Y10 cohort are a very high priority for us during this period, we know that a lot of extra work will also need to be done with all our students to help them to catch up on their return to school.
Please bear in mind that, once the school is closed, it becomes much more difficult for us to send bulk emails out to our parents. We will do our best to keep these systems operational, but we may need to resort to posting updates only through our website. We consequently advise everyone to check our website regularly for any additional information or advice during the closure period.
Our students have been remarkable throughout this period. They have shown great resilience and have continued to take their studies very seriously. Nevertheless, maintaining this focus and energy at home for months ahead with much reduced support from school is clearly a daunting challenge and will require much oversight and guidance from parents. Having witnessed the way in which our students have responded thus far, I am sure that they will rise to this challenge and that we will be able to recover any lost ground very quickly once everything returns to normal in a few months’ time.
I would also like to take this opportunity to recognise the extraordinary efforts that have been made by our staff in recent weeks. School staff have been very much in the front line in this crisis and I am immensely proud of the way in which our community has responded to these exceptional circumstances with positivity and commitment. I have no doubt that this will continue throughout the closure period too.
While the current circumstances seem especially unfair on our Y11 and Y13 cohorts, the nation’s health clearly has to remain everyone’s most important priority. At this point, we must all trust in our political leaders, senior medical professionals and the examination system to make the right decisions and to treat all our students fairly when final grades are decided upon. I remain very optimistic that all necessary actions will be taken to allow our young people to progress on to their chosen destinations.
We have received many supportive and positive comments from our parents over the last few weeks, for which we are very grateful. As we are facing very uncertain times in the months ahead, I would like to send our best wishes to every member of our community. We are very much looking forward to having everyone back in school fit and well in the near future.
I am writing to update you with respect to our ongoing approach to the management of the coronavirus pandemic. To my knowledge, we have not yet had a confirmed diagnosis of Covid-19 in our student/staff community, although this may be because very few people are being formally tested for the condition. We are certainly seeing an increasing number of students and staff self-isolating.
The increasing number of staff self-isolating is making it impossible to support all year groups in school safely. For this reason, we need to ask Year 10 to stay at home from tomorrow, Thursday 19th March until at least the end of school on Tuesday 24th March. We have asked our Year 10 teachers to provide work for their students using Google Classroom.
While it was our original intention to send Year 8 home if we reached this stage, we have chosen Year 10 as we are hoping that this will reduce the need for parents to put caring arrangements in place for their children. If our staffing situation continues to worsen, our next course of action will involve the suspension of Y12 lessons. If these circumstances arise, we will still allow our Y12 students to study independently in our Sixth Form Centre if they wish to do so.
We will review this position over the next week and consider the following future options:
We have asked our staff to provide work for Y9 and Y10 using Google Classroom. However, I need to ask parents to refrain from sending emails to their teachers requesting additional advice and guidance. The volume of this communication is already becoming very difficult for our staff to manage. Instead, we request that your son/daughter does their best with the tasks that have been set. We will then deal with any issues or uncertainties on their return to school.
Alongside the other Macclesfield schools, we are supporting a campaign to collect non-perishable items for local food banks. We anticipate that some families are likely to really struggle in the weeks and months ahead so would like to do what we can to help. If you have any such items that you can donate, please ask your son/daughter to bring them into school. We will have collection points outside my office in A-Block and in the main school Reception area.
As events continue to move quickly, we will monitor these circumstances very carefully and will provide further updates as necessary.
With thanks for your understanding and ongoing support for the school.
Following last night’s announcements by the government, I am writing to update you with respect to our ongoing approach to these issues.
The national decision to increase self-isolation periods to 14 days has added to the staffing difficulties that we are experiencing at the moment. For this reason, we need to ask Year 9 to stay at home from tomorrow, Wednesday 18th March until at least the end of school on Tuesday 24th March. We have asked our Year 9 teachers to provide work for their students using Google Classroom. We will review this position over the next week and consider the following future options:
We will update parents regarding these options at a later date.
In light of the national guidance to avoid all non-essential travel, we are going to cancel all off-site school trips and scheduled activities until at least Easter in the first instance. Further information regarding individual events will be sent to parents from the leaders of these activities in due course.
We are also reviewing any on-site events that will involve large numbers of visitors coming onto our site. With this in mind, we have decided to cancel the Y7 Parents’ Evening (Wednesday 18th March) and the Y13 Review Evening (Monday 23rd March). We have also decided to cancel the Spring Concert (Wednesday 1st April). All other school events are currently subject to review. In the near future, the leaders of such events will let the relevant parents know whether or not they are going to be cancelled.
Once we have returned to normal, we will do our best to reschedule as many of these events as possible. We recognise, however, that this may not always be feasible. As events continue to move very quickly, we will continue to monitor these circumstances very carefully and will provide further updates as necessary.
With thanks for your understanding and ongoing support for the school.
As the Covid-19 outbreak continues, I am writing to update you with respect to our ongoing plans to manage these issues.
At the moment, the intention seems to be to keep schools open for as long as possible. We are conscious, however, that this may change quickly. In the event of school closure, we will do our best to provide work for our students using Google Classroom. We will also prioritise supporting Y11 and Y13 during this critical period.
It seems inevitable that staff absence levels will increase in the weeks ahead as colleagues are instructed to self-isolate, either because they are ill themselves or because someone in their household has become poorly. While wehave processes in place to cover such scenarios, it is likely that our resources in this respect will become overstretched quite quickly. In these circumstances, we may choose to instruct one of our year groups to stay at home for a period of time. This will then free up a number of our teaching staff to be redeployed to cover other staff absences. If these actions become necessary, we will probably choose to ask Year 9 to stay at home first as they are the oldest non-examination cohort. Further escalation of these issues may cause us to ask Year 8 or Year 7 to stay at home.
In the event that such actions become necessary, we may need to act very quickly. We may only be able to communicate such decisions to parents on the day itself and will use email and our website for this purpose.If at all possible, we will try to provide such information the day before any school closures decisions are applied.
The current guidance states that self-isolation is appropriate if someone has a new persistent cough and/or a high temperature. If you need further advice in this respect, please contact medical professionals as school staff are not able to offer guidance in this area.
If you decide to isolate your child at home, please let us know by contacting the absence line on 627229.
If we notice students in school with a persistent cough and/or a high temperature, we have set aside a separate room for them to wait while their parents are contacted and asked to take them home.It is our intention to authorise absences for students who need to self-isolate. Please provide a note to this effect on their return to school.
If we need to partially or fully close the school, every effort will be made to provide work and ongoing support for our students, with particular priority being given to our examination cohorts.
If students need to self-isolate while the school remains open,they will need to monitor the assignments and lesson materials being posted on Google Classroom and do their best to keep up in this way.Regrettably, it will not be possible for our staff to set work for individual students who are absent from school for these reasons.
We have been working with our school cleaners to prioritise the regular cleaning of ‘touch surfaces’. We are also monitoring the toilets on a daily basis to ensure that soap, hot water and hand dryers are all provided and working properly. Unfortunately, this is being made more difficult by a small minority of our students who wilfully overuse or even abuse these facilities. While this can be very frustrating in normal times, it is particularly so in the current climate. We would consequently ask all our parents to speak to their children about these matters and to let us know if they see or hear of any students who behave in such a socially irresponsible manner. We would also encourage parents to provide their son/daughter with tissues that they can use during the school day.
In the event that our catering staff are unable to come into school, we may be unable to provide hot meals during the school day. We may consequently need to switch to a cold service and/or packed lunches for all students. Again, this might be necessary at very short notice.
We will continue to monitor these circumstances very carefully, particularly with respect to government advice regarding expected school actions.