Update to Parents

20th March 2020

Dear parents & carers

Firstly, thank you for your continued support throughout what has been an interesting few weeks.

As you are aware, the government has made the decision to close all schools to the vast majority of children. Please refer to the recently published letters on the website regarding the government’s definition of key workers. It is now our priority to keep the children and staff as safe as possible as we fulfil our public duty. Thank you in advance for your understanding and support.

Please find below an outline of the initial plan and the information you are going to need to know over the next few weeks.

Firstly, as of Friday 3.30pm there will be no one answering the telephone during opening hours. We will be running on a skeleton staff and will only be taking emergency calls. We ask that all non-emergency contact is through the admin.ris@ebor.academy email address. Please bear with us and we will answer your queries as quickly as we can.

Chromebooks

The Academy Trust has taken the decision to offer Chromebooks to children in Years 5 and 6. As you are aware, children have already been given Chromebooks to take home. Could we ask all parent/carers who are in receipt of a school Chromebook to send an email to the email address admin.ris@ebor.academy acknowledging that they have a Chromebook at home. Please refer to the Google Classroom guidelines on how to keep information and children safe.  Click here for information about Google Classroom.

Sharing of Work

As you are aware, work for children is currently being added to SeeSaw, Tapestry or Google Classroom. This decision has been made as all of these systems allow for there to be an ongoing collaboration between the teacher and pupil. The teacher can monitor what each child is doing at home and can comment on the work, thus providing support for each child. Please bear in mind that on some day’s teachers will be in school working with children of key workers so their response may be delayed. Teachers are spending a lot of time, thought and consideration in to planning these activities that they are setting across the curriculum and I really hope that you find the tasks useful. Advantages of Google Classroom are that it is paperless, extremely accessible and as I have previously stated, interactive. I have been looking at the tasks, work and conversations that have been happening over the last few days and it seems that children are enjoying their learning! This is great to see in such unprecedented times.

Until we re-open, all work for all children will be shared through Google Classroom. Please contact us if you have problems in accessing any of the above platforms.

Access to School

From Monday, there will be no access to Riston School. Thank you to those parents who are key workers and who have agreed to drive their children to Sigglesthorne directly. We will ask parents to email school by the end of Thursday each week, to inform us if they will be bringing children in to school the following week. This will allow us to plan for staffing and ensure that we can maintain our child protection duty. Please note that if you sending your child to school, they will be required to bring a packed lunch for the day.

Free School Meals

For those children who are eligible for free school meals the Academy is currently working on plans to support them. Details will follow shortly.

These are unprecedented circumstances and as a team we are working to ensure that there is as little disruption as possible to your child’s education. During the closure, if you have any child protection concerns or feel that we can assist you in any way please contact us through the admin email and we will do our best to help. ‘The school day will run from 9am till 3.30pm, however if you would like provision before or after school please do get in touch. Again, please let us know by Thursday if you need this provision and when, so we can plan staffing accordingly.’

Stay safe and I hope to see you soon.

V.Tippett

Mrs V Tippett

Head of School