Dear Parents and Carers,

As we near the end of a very strange week in College, and I am sure for you at home, I just wanted to give you a very quick update.

Firstly, the College will continue to be open across the Easter holidays including Good Friday and Easter Monday to allow us to continue to support our fantastic key worker colleagues and vulnerable students. To minimise the risk of infection many staff are working from home or self isolating for a variety of reasons and so over the next couple of weeks please bear with us if it takes us a little longer to respond to your queries online. 

However, there will be staff in College Monday to Friday for the next two weeks to look after students and make calls home and so if there is an urgent issue, especially if it involves anything connected to safeguarding, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us through the contacts on our website or over the phone during normal working hours.

Now that it seems the lockdown will continue for longer this week we have been trialling two new features on Class Charts. 

Firstly we have enabled "announcements" so that your teacher can send a message to all students at the same time. For some staff this has included a joke of the day, which you may wish to avoid since they are terrible, through to more work related comments so you may wish to have a look at this. 

Secondly, we have also been trialling allowing students to submit work back to their teachers through Class Charts and we will roll this out fully after Easter to all students. Obviously the marking will not be in the normal format, however, this system will at least allow for some assessment and feedback as well as allowing us to track who is completing work. 

Over the Easter period we have asked staff to set up some project based work for students to do that you may wish to dip into to keep them occupied. We won't be setting work as frequently since we are also conscious that this may cause arguments with students who consider this their holiday period. Obviously it also gives a chance for them to catch up on anything missed from this week. 

If nothing else though please encourage your children to continue reading for at least 30 minutes a day. If they have finished their school book they can visit arbookfind.co.uk to check books you already have at home or ones you have downloaded to tablets/kindles. 

In addition, at the moment Audible are offering free audible books for kids as well as there being many other sites such as:

• http://www.gutenberg.org - a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works.
• https://openlibrary.org - a wealth of modern and classic books for all ages – downloadable as PDF or to Kindle.
• The following website also have some great resources to help motivate students with reading:
• https://www.worldbookday.com/resources/secondary/
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/RFK3q4j6kj26mBV3Qs3s2G/literacy-and-reading-resources
• https://readinginspiration.com

We have given our Year 11, Year 12 and Year 13 students, who were due to sit examinations, a little bit of time to process and reflect on what has happened. We have also resisted contacting those students about how their grades might be decided until the situation became clearer from the examination boards. 

We will be contacting these students early next week since we think it is now right to give more information about what might possibly happen with regard to grades, the work they could now be doing to give them a head start in whatever their next steps are likely to be, and the position with regard to gaining places in the Sixth Form. We will issue more information shortly, however, in the meantime it would be a really good task for them, over the weekend, to sort out all their books and other materials to start to assemble it as evidence should it be required. We will have lots of work in school which is safe, however, if they could organise everything they have at home that could also be useful.

With regard to Free School Meals we have heard about some scams across the country with regard to this area. If you have any questions about how to apply for Free School Meals please follow this direct link from Devon County Council rather than any third party.

https://oneonline.devon.gov.uk/CCSCitizenPortal_LIVE/

Finally, and as ever, thanks very much for your ongoing support. 

All of the staff and Governors at the College wish you and your families a very safe and healthy Easter.

Regards,

Andrew Davis - Principal