Dear Parents/Carers

Today marks the end of the Government’s Plan B for managing Covid-19 and whilst it is good to hear that nationally the picture is improving, sadly we are seeing growing numbers of cases in school-aged children. This is reflected across the country and is definitely our experience at The Ridge.

Up until Christmas, we had very few cases in our school community but since we have returned for the Spring term, we have experienced a number of significant outbreaks in different year groups, affecting both staff and children. Many of these cases are asymptomatic or see children with more general ailments such as a headache or sore throat. These cases have sometimes only been picked up because of your vigilance and commitment to regular testing or in response to our outbreak notification. Thank you for your support.

Today we have 44 active cases and classes where a third or even in one case, half of the year group are absent because of Covid-19. We are also managing high staff absence from both classroom based staff and support staff, which means there has been some unavoidable inconsistency in staffing some classes.  As it stands, we have managed to cover classes and have not had to resort to remote learning and we have been able to provide adequate supervision at lunchtime and in OSCAR Club. Unfortunately, however, we have had to close Kindergarten on a number of occasions since the start of January.  It appears that this situation is not unusual in schools at the current time.

As you know, before Christmas we had plans to relax some of our mitigations in school but had to scale back from this with the emergence of Omicron. We are keeping the situation under regular review and are keen to move forward as soon as soon as this current wave of infection has passed from The Ridge. However, whilst we are still in a large outbreak situation we need to continue to reduce mixing, to ask you to wear a face covering when visiting and keep our enhanced hygiene measures in place.

We are keeping everything crossed that brighter days are on the horizon. Thank you for your ongoing support.

Kind regards
Mrs D Hudson
Headteacher