Dear Parents and Carers,

Thank you!

As always, you, our fantastic Fordley Family, utterly blow us away with how brilliantly you have all adapted to this third lockdown and how well you are supporting your child with their learning.  I have no doubt on many days you don’t feel it.  I can imagine there are times when you feel frustrated, overwhelmed and utterly fed up of the current situation.  Please remember that the most important thing is that your child is safe and loved; and your children are definitely that.

When looking at Tapestry and Seesaw, I am so proud to see all of the learning your children are sharing every single day and that is also thanks to you.  I am incredibly happy to be able to continue to share Stars of the Week for home learning, as well as in school, as the effort the children are putting in needs to be acknowledged (different children are chosen each week). 

Your child’s teachers are also buzzing about the learning they are seeing, and enjoy commenting on your child’s work as well as getting comments back from your child.  They are also enjoying making regular phone calls to you and your child at home to see how things are going, and offer support where they can.  Please remember to email office@fordleyprimary.org.uk or ring 2502207 and your child’s teacher (or a teacher on home learning duty) will be more than happy to ring you back.  As I’ve said before, sometimes it’s just good to offload on one of us and it might help you, as a parent, feel a bit less stressed!

As a school we have to provide the amount of learning stated by the DFE, and it will feel, on some days, that we are throwing a mountain of learning at you.  We do understand this and all we ask is that your child tries to do as much as they can.  If, on some days, they only manage to do a couple of the lessons, that is okay.  If you need to leave the learning and go for a walk, or do something different for a little while – that is okay too.  We are tracking the home learning, ringing where there isn’t much learning shared but this is simply to see how we can support you at home.  It will also help us to understand which children might need a bit more of a boost from us at school when we can finally reopen.

Finally, and most importantly, we very much miss your child in our school and you and your family on our site.  We cannot wait until we can have our full Fordley Family back, safely, and to be able to leave COVID-19 behind as a memory and part of history.

Stay strong and stay safe.  We are with you and we are here if we can help with anything.

Kindest regards

Claire Withers

Headteacher