Tuesday 4^th January 2022

Dear families,

Happy New Year to all of our families!

This isn’t the way we want to start a new year but as I communicated to you when we broke up for the Christmas holidays, the COVID situation in Wales has escalated. As schools, we are keen to stay open and we are determined to keep our school community safe.

Tuesday 4^th and Wednesday 5^th have been assigned for planning days for schools. These two planning days will enable us to assess staffing capacity and put the necessary measures in place to support the return of all learners. They are also an opportunity to ensure that we have robust plans in place to move to remote learning; this could be for individual classes or possibly for the whole school if necessary. We will be working with the children on their return to ensure they have all they need if face to face learning is disrupted. Please support us in this and ensure that children keep all log-ins safe as well as following the safety measures identified below:

• We will continue with regular handwashing, good personal hygiene and social distancing will be followed as far as is possible. 

• Ensure you arrive at the correct time and socially distance at all times –we will be returning to calling children in a class at a time so that we can avoid any mixing or contact between bubbles.
• To avoid any cross contamination classes will eat lunch separately and some will return to eating in their classrooms – this will be rotated each half term so they all have the chance to eat in the hall.
• Limit the items the children bring into school.
• Ensure that the reading books are brought in on the correct day as they will still be quarantined and books returned late cannot be changed.

• All adults must wear masks in and around the school site when picking up and dropping off children, and if not able to, please display exemption badges. Adults not wearing masks will not be admitted to the school site.
• Our site is very restricted and whilst we do have an option to stagger start and ends times, we do not want to cause further disruption to the children’s education, so we must insist that parents do not gather around the school site and socially distance as much as possible. If we do not feel it is safe in and around the school with large numbers of parents gathering, we will look to re-introduce staggered start and end times.
• Access to the school office will be restricted – please phone or email if you have any queries.

Wednesday 5^th January a hub is available in school for key worker children from 8.50am until 3.20pm. If you have no other options for childcare please email the school at jospri@newport.gov.uk to request a place for this day by 3pm today (Tuesday 4^th) and a member of staff will get back to you. Please only contact us if your childcare needs are essential and you are a keyworker.

I apologise for yet another long letter of this nature, but as a team we want to reassure you that we will do all we can to keep our St. Joseph’s family safe and ensure any disruption to our children’s education is kept to a minimum and we appreciate your continued support in doing this.

Kind regards,

Mrs J. Beckett

Head Teacher