Charlton School

Dear Parents and Carers, 

I hope you and your family are well. It has been a couple of weeks since I wrote to you and felt it was important to update you on our progress and current issues. 

As I am sure you are aware there have been some announcements regarding Covid measures over the weekend, so I just wanted to bring these to your attention. 

Face coverings – all staff, visitors and students from Y7- Y11, must wear face coverings/masks from today in all communal areas. We have had all our staff in all our schools in masks for the last few weeks, but we now need secondary students to return to mask wearing in all community areas. The Department of Education will review this situation over the next two weeks so we will keep you informed. 

Twice - weekly LFTs – I do urge you that if your child is in Y7-Y11 that you continue to do LFTs twice weekly at home, this really helps identify asymptomatic cases and helps us keep children in school as it controls the spread of infection. 

Testing of secondary age students – we have also been informed that we will need to test every secondary age student as they return from the Christmas holidays. You will receive details of this before we break up from your child’s school. 

Unwell children – we know this is the season of the normal winter bugs, not just Covid, but if your child is unwell please keep them at home and take them for a PCR test if they have any Covid symptoms, again this really helps control infection. 

Vaccinations - this is still the key method of really dealing with this virus and I urge you to get your child vaccinated if they are aged 12 or over. They may have missed this when we did these in school or you may need a booster so please follow the link for more information in Telford: 

https://stwics.org.uk/our-priorities/covid-19-vaccination-programme/walk-in-clinic-times . If your child attends Severndale then the school can give you up to date information on vaccinations in Shropshire. 

We are determined to keep school as normal as possible over the next three weeks for all our children and young people and to have some Christmas celebrations. We have some challenging staffing issues in our schools because staff themselves have Covid or family at home are unwell or awaiting PCR test results, again this is in addition to normal illnesses at this time of year. 

The attendance in all our schools has been excellent, well above national figures, so thank you for all you are doing to make sure we keep children in school each day. It is so important they attend as we do not want them to miss any more time from school. We are doing lots of catch-up programmes and interventions to make sure they are where they need to be not just academically but also looking after them and making sure they are well emotionally and coping with all that is happening around them. 

I will write again before the Christmas holidays. 

My best wishes to you and your family. 

Kind Regards, 

Dr. Gill Eatough 

CEO LCT