Dear all,

As we draw to the end of what has been an incredibly strange term, I wanted to thank you for your support with home learning.

Since Easter, we’ve put a huge amount of work into Google Classroom, and I hope that you’ve found it helpful. In particular, I hope the videos which our staff at HP and across other Greenshaw Schools have produced are proving helpful. I’m pleased to report that, following requests from other schools, we’ve partnered with BeReady to make our lessons available more widely, and over 700 schools across the country have now signed up to use these videos as the basis of their curriculum. They’ve also created a very helpful archive; every lesson we’ve produced can be found here. 

In the next few days, parents of Year 7-10 will receive a letter in the post, with some feedback on how your child is getting on with online learning. This isn’t to pass any judgement – we know that times are difficult and we appreciate whatever learning our students can complete. But many of you have asked for feedback on how much work your child is doing, and we wanted to share this with you.

I will also be sending separate emails to parents of Year 10 and 12 later today. Frustratingly, the government have still not released their guidance on what they want secondary schools to do to reopen on the 1^st of June. I am absolutely committed to increasing our provision, but I will only do so when I am confident that we can do so safely, and in full accordance with the government guidance, whenever it is released. As a result, we have pushed back the date from which we intend to offer some face to face teaching to the 8^th June.

What we know for certain is that online learning will remain of paramount importance. Even in Year 10 and 12, the majority of lessons will remain online after the 8^th June. In all other years, we expect online learning to last until 1^st September at the very earliest.

It’s therefore vital that students put as much effort into their home learning as possible. I know this isn’t easy, both for them and for you. As always, if you need technical support, please email [email protected], or if you need more general help, please let us know at [email protected]. I also know that we are asking a lot of you by setting five full lessons a day – and that this is perhaps more than some other schools. Rest assured, this will pay off when students return to school, and it will give them a huge advantage over students who have not made good progress in this period.

Once again, thank you for your support in this difficult time. I hope you have a very restful half term.

Yours sincerely,

Patrick Farmbrough

Headteacher

PS – I’ve been asked by Gloucestershire Police to pass on that there have been reports of large gatherings of school age children on and around Robinswood Hill. There is no particular reason to think that they are Holmleigh Park students, but they have asked all Headteachers to remind parents to impress upon their children the importance of social distance.