Thank you to those parents who gave the school feedback about the Online learning we have been offering in the first week of the Restricted Movement Order. 

Here is a brief overview of the survey.

- About 90% of parents that responded are happy with the online learning that they have seen.
- 70% of parents think that the quantity of work is suitable or too much, with about 3% commenting they had not seen any online learning.
- Between 5% and 6% of parents commented that they had concerns about their child’s access to a device or the quality of their WiFi connection. We also know that some of our teachers have problems with their Wifi connections.

This is all great feedback to us, with the additional comments about subjects very useful. Following up from this survey, I would like to remind parents and students that these online lessons are not a complete replacement for the normal classroom activities but they do allow learning to continue. 

Part of the online learning offered will be face to face video conferencing for students in Year 6 and above. Most lessons will not be like this but some will be. For a child to be part of the video conferencing we do need a parents consent. The link to the secondary consent form is herehttps://forms.gle/MTtn86LgBgjfBDMV6. Primary students in Year 5 and 6 will receive this through their class teacher or Year leader Without consent, a teacher cannot allow a child to participate. The reason behind this, is that parents need to KNOW and CONSENT to their child being on a video link with the teacher (an adult). This protects your child and the teacher and upholds our safeguarding measures, and it should also be noted that these video sessions cannot go ahead with less than five participants for the same reason. In secondary about 60% of parents have given consent, which of course means 40% have not.

Normal online learning such as Google Classroom does not require consent as there is no direct video contact between student and teacher.

We do rely upon parents monitoring the online learning that is happening. We are aware, for example, that some students are active for certain lessons in a day but not others. Some students are picking which lessons to take part in and not taking part in all their allotted lessons.

We will issue a student survey about online learning on Wednesday. This will come to them through their teachers, and Google Classroom. They just need to log in using their student email address to carry out the survey. This will give us more useful feedback.

As we are also approaching the end of the school term, school reports will be issued as normal through Engage. Parents will get messages from each section telling them the dates from which these reports will be available. To access these reports, parents will need to log on to the school website, parents portal and select Engage.

This morning, we found out that Cambridge Examinations will NOT be continuing with the May 2020 IGCSE papers due to COVID19. Here is the link to this news. In this information you will see that CAIE will work with schools to get information so that grades and certificates can be awarded. The details of how this will work is unknown at the moment. This affects our students sitting for IGCSE Malay, and Chinese (First, Second and Foreign languages) and IGCSE Drama students. Teachers will be in contact with the students affected when we have more details. This now means that all examination boards offering IGCSE, A level and IB examinations worldwide have cancelled their May/June 2020 examinations.

Finally, our counselling team have put together a really useful set of slides to help both parents and their children get through this prolonged period of isolation at home. Please follow this link to see these slides.
Please remember to stay at home and follow the advice of the authorities. By doing so, we reduce our risk of getting this virus, and passing it to our loved ones.

Stay safe, healthy, and at home.

Peter Wells