St Cecilia's News

We have almost completed our first half term of the school year and after our half term break teachers will have a chance to meet with you to discuss how your child has settled in along with information on attainment and progress.

We are unable to host our Parent Teacher Meetings in school due to Covid restrictions, we have therefore moved them online with our usual booking system provider.

To access your account, please login using the link below. From Thursday 22nd October at 7pm you will be able to book virtual appointments with your child's class teacher. You do not need any other software, all appointments are run through the system.

You will need a PC, Chromebook or phone with a camera and microphone.

Appointment times will be fixed, you will need to be online and ready for your appointment time so please chose a time when you can be somewhere quiet for the conversation. The system does allow you to enter specific questions when booking.

The system will send you a prompt to book an appointment. It's a terrible shame that we can't meet in person, but we look forward to seeing you online, facemasks are not required!

We are moving our paperwork for children with special educational needs online to a system called Provision Map. This website enables us to share information more easily with parents who have children on our special educational needs register. We will send out an invite just after half term, parents can then login to view and comment upon their child's support plan. Please make sure to view the plan before your parent teacher meeting in November.

Head Teacher's across all the schools in Sutton have agreed to use this same system so that we can communicate more easily between schools, share training and start to develop common systems and processes. We are off to a great start here with detailed training for SEND staff and all teachers have had initial training. Mrs Gallant and Mrs Foxen have set the system up to really meet the needs of our school, many thanks to them.

If you have any queries about the new system please contact Mrs Foxen directly at send@stcecilias.school

Since the start of lockdown we have placed special matting over the grass on the field. Whilst this prevents parents from slipping on wet grass, the matting itself can still become slippery at times. Please take care, by all means please walk on the grass if your footwear does not sufficiently support you.

We have contacted parents in Years 5 and 6 regarding the Clarkes Avenue entrance. Can we please ask all parents to:

• park considerately - not on the footpaths or across neighbours drives
• not block footpaths or the traffic lights when lining up
• not arrive too early for your child's drop off/collection.

We have to maintain a gap between year groups at our gates, we have to minimise the risk of cross infection between year groups, at child and parent level. Please maintain a distance at all times and thanks for working with us on this.

The Head Teacher of Brookways School, near GOALS has written to us requesting that parents do not use their car park at the start and end of the day as the school is undergoing development and expansion. As the children in this school have additional needs, many of them have to use transport services, it is becoming too difficult for them with so many of our parents using the car park. Please see her letter below, thanks for your understanding with this.

ClothesLine, our uniform provider, are having a sale over the coming three weeks with 30% off their school logo stock. Please contact them directly to enquire about opening hours or see their website for more information. They are open over the half term.

We have been quietly rolling out a new curriculum this term with teachers using a major new resource in French, Art, Design Technology, computing and well-being. The Kapow curriculum features lovely new ideas, lots of resources for teachers and children and bright colorful videos to teach skills and concepts. With a new curriculum we are ensuring that we stay current and that we continue to provide a framework of skills that build on prior learning. Our new computing curriculum is particularly challenging and works well with our teaching philosophy on Google GSuite and cloud learning. I've seen some beautiful art lessons this week, I hope that your children are enjoying the new experiences.

You can see a Kapow Curriculum video, primarily aimed at teachers, below.

We will be having our usual Puberty talks for children in Years 5 and 6 after the half term holiday. Before we meet with the children we send home a presentation from Mrs Martin and I which will tell you more about our chosen curriculum. "Things are Changing" is a lovely modern resource used by Catholic Schools across Australia, the link below gives you a good flavour of the videos that the children will see.

We will continue to have our Advent celebrations this year, in smaller groups and without parent audiences. Our Nativities and St Cecilia's Day play will be recorded and sent home as usual. We will not have our Carol Concert but Mrs Kolendo is working on an online concert that we will send out to you via Vimeo.Com.

You may want to plan for Christmas Jumper Day - this year it will take place on Wednesday 9th December, the same day as our Christmas Lunch.

Admissions are now open for Reception and Nursery Class in 2021. Please continue to see your Priest for a reference, the Governing Body made a clarification to admission procedures this year in light of parent's possible non-attendance at Mass during the pandemic, you can see more details of this on our policy and supplementary form. This clarification is common across many Catholic schools in our Diocese and has been notified to the Office of the School's Adjudicator.

Unfortunately, guided tours will not be possible this year, we will however have online events after the half term.

We have our usual assessment week in school next week, teachers will be assessing the children in reading, writing and maths across years 1-6. We will report the results to you via a data report just before the Parent Teacher Meetings in November. We will be using Puma and Pira assessments, more details can be found on our website.

Thanks for all your support for the school this past half term and your tremendous patience at the start and end of the school day. Have a lovely half term break when it arrives. A reminder that we are closed Monday 26th to Friday 30th October, I hope that you have a good break from school routines for the week and some lovely family time.

With best wishes,

Vince Burke

Head Teacher

London Road, Sutton, Surrey, SM3 9DL

Email: office@stcecilias.school
Website: www.stcecilias.school
Phone: 020 8337 4566