Please see below a message from Lucy Driver, the headteacher at St. Paul’s Nursery School and Children’s Centre.
Dear Parents/Carers,
I write with a heavy heart, but with the responsibility of having to keep children families and staff teams as well as possible at this unprecedented time.
Our leadership team and Governors have met today and have decided St Pauls Nursery School and Children’s Centre will now close all its usual services at 6:00pm tomorrow – Wednesday 18th March.
We already now have many staff self-isolating and are expecting many more over the next few days, so do not have capacity to continue, nor do we want to compromise our community’s health and wellbeing.
During this next phase of containment St Pauls will:
- Offer a VERY skeleton day-care service for families working for the NHS and emergency services, who cannot sort out childcare, and for other vulnerable families
- Keep in touch, share information and signposting for things to do at home on our website and Facebook page
- Offer limited family support by mainly telephone contact
If you feel you fall into a vulnerable category, or work for a frontline service without support for childcare, please let us know, although I’m sure your key person will contact you.
Please continue to check our websites and texts you may receive from us. We cannot yet plan for how we will move forwards from this, I can only speculate that we may stay closed until at least the end of April.
Please also note that this is our plan whilst our building remains open – should the government ban any social movement, or opening of community buildings things will change again.
Thank you for your support and understanding with this VERY difficult decision. St Pauls prides itself on always prioritising the wellbeing of children, families and practitioners and the needs of the most vulnerable in our communities.
Although this decision may cause some initial panic I hope it will also bring some clarity to our commitment to safeguarding everyone.
We all need to think COMMUNITY and be mindful of others.
I think the most sensible advice I have personally heard to date, is that we need to all behave as if we are already infected by Covid 19 – and try not to spread it to others.
Please stay safe, stay connected, and stay hopeful.
Kind Regards
Lucy Driver
