Dear Parents/Carers,

As you may have read in the recent school newsletter, or spotted in the national press (!), we have been working hard behind the scenes to secure as many computing devices for our school as possible.

Miss Cooke has been liaising with the Department of Education, local charities and even the Daily Mail to access these devices. As a result of these efforts, we now have 30 laptops and 5 tablets (with a further 18 on order). Whilst this is a great result, we will be continuing to look for other avenues to access devices as this is nowhere near enough to match the need in our school.

It is important to note that these laptops and tablets have been given to the school on the understanding that they are the school’s property to be loaned out to families during periods of lockdown or year group/bubble closures. At the end of these periods, they will be returned to school and made use of in school by all children.

To identify where these devices are needed, school has undertaken a number of formal and informal consultations with parents and carers. During the first national lockdown, we started to create a list of need based on conversations with parents. We then conducted a whole-school parent/carer survey on Remote Learning in October of last year – unfortunately we only had 98 responses to this survey. We have also been collating information gathered from the weekly teacher phone calls, engagement in remote learning activities and Class Dojo messages with parents/carers in this current lockdown period to identify where there is a need for devices.

Using this information, we have identified children who: have no access to any device; are limited to using a phone to access work; have to share devices between children; are reliant on paper packs. We have then also prioritised year 5 and 6 children from this list, as they are the year groups that have access to fully remote on-line editable learning via Google Classroom.

Miss Cooke has started to contact families to loan devices to them for the remainder of this lockdown period. If you feel that your family would benefit from a device, and have not been contacted by Miss Cooke, then please contact your child’s class teacher through Class Dojo and we will add your child’s name to the list.

Many thanks for all your support with Remote Learning. We hope that these devices will help to make a difference to families and we will continue to work with external agencies to try and secure as many more devices as possible, as we understand the need is far greater than what has been allocated so far.

Kind Regards,

Stephen Shankland

Deputy Head