Dear parents,
I wanted to write to each of you to provide an update on several aspects of school life. Can I thank the hundreds of you who responded to our recent survey on your experiences of parent’s evenings during the COVID pandemic, it was very helpful to have such a large response to guide our planning for future events.
Face Masks
This week has seen the publication of new guidance for schools, including specific mention of face masks. I include links to both documents within the text for your reference. However, I would like to summarise a key message from this documentation.
Some of the press coverage that this guidance has generated has not in my view been helpful to schools who will still require students to wear face masks. They must remain part of the daily routine for all of us for a while longer. Please can you reiterate to your children that they will still be asked to wear a face mask whilst they are moving around the school. The only occasions they should remove their masks are:
- When sat in a lesson.
- When eating or drinking at a break or lunch time
- When outside at a break or lunch
Maintaining this approach will help us ensure we can keep all students and staff, but particularly our Year 11 and 13 students in school and free from the threat of isolation.
Testing
You should all now have been provided with another set of rapid tests for your use at home. Please can I urge you to continue using these, as well as reporting the result via the link provided. The efficiency of this system was underlined earlier this week, when some 30+ Year 7 students and a member of staff had to isolate whist the student had a confirmatory PCR test. The return of this PCR test in less than 24 hours, which happily confirmed a negative result and enabled all to return to school the next day. Let’s all please continue to make use of this system of early detection.
INSET Day
Can I please remind you all that the school will be shut for all students this coming Friday, 21st May. This is an INSET day that we moved from the planned date earlier in the year, when the students had just returned from lock down. It was not sensible to use it at that point, but rather to defer it to this point when staff are engaged in the process of marking and moderating the summer assessments for Year 11 and 13 students, that will be used to guide the Teacher assessed grades that will soon be submitted to the examination boards.
Year 11 & 13 summer assessments
As suggested above our Year 11 and 13 students have been brilliant throughout the series of summer assessments that they have been completing. The results from these along with our prior knowledge of past performance for each student will be used to compile the grades for each student this year. Details as to how the final weeks of schooling for each of these year groups will be shared with parents of these specific year groups via a separate letter. However, all the staff at Highams Park would want to acknowledge the resilience the students in these two-year groups have shown throughout a challenging process. We look forward to seeing each of the students move on to their A Level and BTEC courses here at Highams Park or indeed our Year 13 students off to University, apprenticeship or employment. Your endeavours will reap the appropriate success.
Privacy Notices
Finally, Mr Hyde has asked me to inform you of a procedural matter with regard to a small change in the schools Privacy notice. The DfE require all schools to make an addition to the notice to include record of our sharing of personal data (students’ personal learning record (PLR) with the DfE Learning Records Service (LRS) in order to generate Unique Learner Numbers (ULN). The process is not new, schools have generated ULNs for students for years – these unique codes are like National Insurance numbers, but used in education to identify students. However, the need for this to be on our privacy notice is new and parents and students need to be informed when these notices are updated. Consent is not required from learners in order to generate a ULN or share their PLR and so no action is needed by parents or students. The Privacy notices can be found in the Policies section of our website, for more information, please see our Data Protection Policy, or contact Mr Hyde our Data Protection Officer on
Yours faithfully and on behalf of the school.
Phil Grundy
Principal
