Castle Hill Castle Hill Blog, 09.07.2021
Covid update
The Government announced their plans for Stage 4 of its 'opening up' this week, which will mean changes for schools in September. Key points from the guidance are that:
- It will no longer be necessary to keep students in bubbles or to keep them apart as much as possible. This means that assemblies and larger group activities can resume.
- Face coverings will no longer be advised for pupils, staff and visitors either in classrooms or in communal areas.
- Face coverings will no longer be recommended to be worn on dedicated transport to school and will no longer be legally required on public transport.
- Schools will no longer be expected to trace close contacts of positive Covid cases. As with positive cases in any other setting, NHS Test and Trace will work with the positive case to identify close contacts. Students under the age of 18 years old will no longer be required to self-isolate if they are contacted by NHS Test and Trace as a close contact of a positive Covid case. Instead, children will be contacted by NHS Test and Trace, informed they have been in close contact with a positive case and advised to take a PCR test. This means that we won't have to send home large numbers of students in the event of a positive Covid case in school.
- Anyone who has symptoms of Covid, or has tested positive will still have to self-isolate.
The position on Covid testing in school and at home is a little unclear at the moment and we'll send out more details on this before the end of term.
We'll obviously continue to encourage sensible precautions such as handwashing and respiratory hygiene.
Transition
Year 6 students who will be joining us in September spent the morning with us yesterday and had a great time.
Our current pupils have now all met their new form teachers for September and we'll be sending home timetables for the new school year next week.
Mayor's visit
Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, visited us on Monday. He was originally scheduled to visit us back in March 2020, when all classes were involved in our tree-planting project on the school field, but this had to be postponed due to Covid. A group of Year 7 students showed Andy how our forest of trees are getting on. The trees are part of the City of Trees initiative to plant one tree for every person in Greater Manchester, that's 3 million trees! To mark his visit Andy planted an apple tree, which he suggested we call Andy's Apple Tree!
School uniform
If you're planning to buy school uniform over the summer, full details of our uniform can be found here:
You can buy sweatshirts and polo shirts with the school logo on, from our supplier, Warrens, via their website, but we stress that items do not have to be purchased from this supplier.
Wrecking ball!
Contractors have been busy demolishing the old Offerton High School, Woodbank Building, nextdoor to us this week. Once the site is cleared, work will begin on building Lisburne School's new home.
The demolition contractor has offered to show a few of our students round the site next week.... just so long as they don't give the students keys to those diggers!
Enjoy the weekend.... there's not much going on that I can think of! #IsFootballReallyComingHome?
