Many of you will have seen on the news or in the press that the government changed their mind about their 'ambition' to bring back all year groups for a month before the summer holidays.  They have now realised that schools, even using halls and gyms, would not have the physical space or numbers of teachers to be able to maintain the social distancing they have asked us to put in place and also have all the children back to school. 

For us here at Fordley, we would not be able to have any more than 160 children at the absolute maximum (including our key worker children) and that would be asking all of our dedicated teachers and teaching assistants to lead a bubble of children.  To put that into perspective, we have 360 children on roll at Fordley this year.

We would love, love, love to have every single one of your fantastic children back with us right now!  Our building is gradually coming back to life as we welcome more children each week.  All of our staff team are in school working with children (class bubbles and key worker bubble), completing reports, planning new topics for the Autumn term, putting up new displays and preparing books so that all is ready for as soon as we can have everyone back.

We do not yet know when that will be but we will continue to provide work packs, online learning and additional support on a daily and weekly basis.  From next week we will also have reading books available for children, as we have found a way to do this safely (information will be shared tomorrow about this).  We also continue to have lunches available every day, to deliver lunches and food parcels and also to make sure families who are eligible receive food shopping vouchers. 

End of Year Reports

We will be finalising these over the next few weeks and then we will hand deliver them to you.  They cover the year up to the end of March.

New Classes and Transition

Sadly we won't be able to have our three transition days for new classes as we would normally do.  We are currently working on class lists for September.  Whilst we do not, as yet, know what the government has planned we will, as always, consider what we need to do to be ready to welcome all of our children as soon as we can.  We are working on plans around how we can ensure each child gets to speak to their new class teacher before the end of this term (we will share more information around this shortly).

New Reception Children (September)

For those of you who have children who are due to start Reception class in September, we will be hand delivering (where possible) a new starters pack which includes a brochure and information about Reception and how it works.  If we can make it happen in a safe way, we will try to invite you in for a visit before the end of term.  Again, we will keep you informed.

Year 6 Children and Transition

North Gosforth Academy have their own transition page to support Year 6 children who will be starting there next term.   The link is here:

Year 6 Transition to North Gosforth Academy

They have also set up a dedicated transition email account so any parental enquiries can be emailed to transition@northgosforth.co.uk

The first week of activities have already been uploaded to look at the role of the form tutor and create a pupil profile.

Mr Maule is also liaising with the other secondary schools too.

New Nursery and Fordley Flyers Starters

We have had many applications for both our two year old provision (Fordley Flyers) and our Nursery.  Thank you for sending them in and we very much look forward to meeting you and your children.  We will be in touch with you directly as soon as we have a start date for your child.  If you were hoping to have a 30 hours place for your child for September, our advice would be to apply for the funding as normal and we hope to also have 30 hours provision once we can open our Nursery fully to all children.

Finally

We continue to welcome new groups of children from Reception, Year 1 and Year 6 over the next few weeks as planned.  It has been an absolute pleasure to have a group of Y1 and Y6 children in school this week, and also to see how happy they all are to be back.  

We are here to answer your queries, either on the phone or by email.  If you want to pop up to collect work packs or just to say hi, there will always be someone at the front door between 11:00-12:30 each day.  We love to see you and your children. 

Our Fordley Family may be much more spread out than we would like right now, but we truly hope that it won't be too long before we are all back together.