Dear all,

I hope you and your families remain well.

As we embark on increasing the capacity of the school from next week I wanted to give you a short update.

Three schools in one

Next week we enter a new phase for education at the College as we move to become three distinct schools in one.

Our traditional school with staff teaching face to face sessions for keyworker and priority students where students arrive in the morning and sit for lessons throughout the day. At the moment we are expecting at least 66 students on some days next week with 70 plus likely to attend. This is now resourced and timetabled daily with approximately 20 staff each day on site working with those students.

At the start of the pandemic, to make things easier for parents and carers, we offered free lunches for any keyworker or vulnerable student that wished to have them. Unfortunately as student numbers have grown we are no longer able to provide this service. From the 22nd June we would therefore ask that any student attending the keyworker or vulnerable child sessions provides a packed lunch for their child along with suncream, trainers, pen, pencil etc and a drinks bottle. 

Our online school which is providing blended education for over 1500 students through some face to face sessions, which I am sure will grow as Government restrictions allow and we become more confident in our delivery.  We are also providing online learning which we are moving from relatively static delivery through Class Charts to a far more dynamic delivery through MS Teams. This provision will also grow as staff, and more importantly but less obviously, students, become more confident with this new learning environment.

We are now ready to start accepting Year 10 and Year 12 students back on site and parents/carers should by now have received individual joining instructions. We have had to reduce our provision a little at the moment to meet Government guidelines about split days and only having a quarter of Year 10 and 12 on site, however, I hope we will be able to expand the provision over the coming weeks. As always though we will start small to ensure everyone is kept as safe as possible and then expand as we become more confident in our systems. To help show students how we have modified the site you can find a short video at https://www.exmouthcollege.devon.sch.uk/closure-info

Finally, we have our community hub which is providing additional welfare checks and pastoral support to a huge number of students and their families across Exmouth and beyond. This is very labour intensive with many phone calls being made every day to check in on students, attend multi-agency meetings remotely and our pastoral teams arranging everything from printing out work to food parcels to Free School Meal vouchers to laptops as well as providing hugely appreciated emotional support to many families and children to keep them as safe and engaged as they possibly can be.

At the same time we are continuing to work on all of the curriculum planning, timetabling, budget development, staff appointments, pay/HR issues, Year 6 transition virtual tours and blogs, campus developments including our two new huge builds and a new roof for Design Technology and many other things that we would normally be doing at this time in preparation for whatever September brings for schools and the country.

In the space of just a few weeks we have completely re-modelled the way in which we deliver education for our community. We haven't got everything perfect and I am sure we will further develop and expand our educational and pastoral provision over the coming weeks. 

However, we couldn't have done this without the fantastic support of our parents, carers, children and our community who have been so positive about our work over the past three months. 

Many thanks once again for being right behind everything we have tried to do. Your positivity and honest feedback has, and will continue, to help us provide the best education possible for our young people.

Have a lovely weekend.

Andrew Davis - Principal