Dear Parents and Carers,
Welcome to St Pauls for those of you who are new to us, and a hello to all of you who are already settled here.
This year I seem to be reconnecting with families who have had children with us years ago, and are back with their grandchildren or their next round of babies! It’s so lovely to hear about our previous St Pauls children all grown up and doing so well. It also makes me feel very old!
So, this is a LONG newsletter – which we will write to you every term to keep you informed of our priorities and to provide further information. It’s complemented with termly News from the Rooms which is produced by our teams and is available on the website for you all to access. This gives a flavour of what the children have been doing in each room, and will be ready for you by the end of the week.
Settling
Thank you for supporting the settling of your children into nursery. We know it takes time, but we have to get it right. Having purchased lots of wonderful new resources over the summer we are really trying to refocus the children’s attention to noticing and caring for their nursery environment – loving it as their nursery home. It would be great if you could help us by talking about this with them please.
Our headline priorities for continued development at St Pauls:
Every year our teams ‘turn up the burner’ on things that we want to enrich, and these things inform our improvement plan. This year our priorities are:
- The learning environment
- The curriculum and assessment
- Communication with parents
- Equalities
- Recruitment, Staff team wellbeing
- Applying to be a regional EYs, DFE designated Stronger Practice HUB
- Sustainability
The Leadership team and governors will be asking for feedback, and sharing information with you about these priorities over the next couple of years as we learn together to continuously improve our service.
Our Post-Covid Learners
I think many of us are still living with an element of trauma and/or responding to change due to our experience of the pandemic. Lots of national research has now been conducted looking at the impact of living through Covid on our youngest learners. What we see here with our children, mirrors the national finding. Children are less resilient, less able to be alongside and collaborate with others, less able to self-regulate. There is more delay in language development and many more children are not toilet trained as they hit nursery school, aged 3yrs +
Because of this we are really prioritising our teaching of communication and language, developing emotional resilience and wanting to work with you around toilet training.
Family Support Drop Ins
To help support you with this, and to offer support other tricky things that come along with being a parent (e.g.: sleep, eating habits, weaning, behaviour, dental hygiene, supporting language, your own economic, physical and emotional well-being) our Central Bristol Family Support Team will be now on site to provide a weekly drop in after half term.
Family Drop In Sessions are: EVERY TUESDAY, 9am – 11am, in our Family Room, with Sammy.
Come on down!
Attendance and Punctuality
Please can we ask you to arrive at nursery ON TIME at the start of the day.
Arriving late means your child will miss their planned warm and loving welcome time with their key person, where we talk about feeling and get ready to learn together. In nursery school they will also miss the teacher planned learning activity – that informs learning throughout the day.
Late arrivals are inconvenient for ALL staff and children – as staff who should be teaching have to get up and leave their group to answer the door. Everyone loses out!
Please do try to fully ATTEND Nursery, unless your child is ill.
Nursery education is invaluable to young children’s cognitive, emotional, social and physical development. We are now starting to record our attendance levels, which are far too low, and as you know we will be following up with a call if your child doesn’t show without previous arrangement or information.
NB. Please DO NOT use FAMLY to email in information about attendance etc – the admin team do not continuously check FAMLY, and staff in the rooms cannot receive messages via FAMLY in a timely way. Please tell your key person, or ring nursery to leave a message.
Creative Partnerships
We have an established and brilliant ongoing partnership with the Bristol Old Vic, who quite often have come along and worked with our children.
Because of this, we are really excited to share with you that we are to be given FREE TICKETS for our 3-4year olds for the children’s performance of BELLE and SEBASTIAN, what this space for more information!
Music helps to keep the heartbeat of St Pauls alive – and we are always putting a call out to parents who might want to come and join us and play instruments alongside out children.
If you fancy joining us and sharing your musicality just email Robin at robin.taylor@bristol-schools.uk.
We are also setting up a new music room – so if you have any musical instruments that you would like to donate to our collection just bring them on it!
More Help
As ever we need MINI BUS drivers! We are happy to put you through the mini bus drivers’ test, if in return you are able to offer some time each week or month that you could come along and help to get our children out and about – to the woods, or the park, of the docks or museums etc. Please contact eva.gossan@bristol-schools.uk if you are interested in getting trained up.
We also need GARDENERS! We have plenty of borders to plant up with the children, and are really keen to systematically grow our own veggies, and then cook them on our fire. Again -if you have time to spare and green fingers, please get in touch.
Primary School Places
If your child will be 4yrs old by September 1st 2023, you must apply for a Primary School Place. The deadline for school applications is January 15th 2023.
You can apply ONLINE at
Please feel free to talk to your key person about your school choices, and Robin is also available to work through your decision with you. We will soon be putting Primary School information out in the Nursery entrance to support you through the process.
We know this is a big decision to make, but please rest assured we work very closely with all our local Primary schools and have great transition systems in place to support your child out of nursery and onto schools during the summer months.
Inset Closures
Over the course of the year we have regular nursery closures in order to learn together as a staff team. It’s a hugely important time, when we bring everyone together, revisit our values and focus on our developmental priorities.
These closure dates are available on our website to enable you to plan ahead. If we have to change dates for some reason we will give you as much notice as possible.
Staff Well-being
Our St Pauls staff team are our most treasured asset. They are a wonderful bunch, who continue to grow and learn together to make sure St Pauls is a great place for your children to be.
They work really hard, give their all, and most are paid very little for their significant level of responsibility and expertise, despite our continuous lobbying for decent pay for the sector.
As times get harder, our team area also affected, so we are trying to pour in some love with some basics like staff breakfast, free period products, mindfulness etc.
Please help us to show the love – appreciate how hard they work, that they will sometimes be ill and vulnerable, and that they need to go home on time at the end of the day! (Although I have to remind everyone that sharing phone numbers or offering financial gifts is not allowed as part of our code of conduct).
Despite the love, recognition and commitment, we are still all human. It’s frustrating to share that already some of our nursery teams are struggling with a high proportion of staff getting ill again with covid, and dealing with long covid complications. There is also a very limited supply of ‘cover’ early years practitioners in Bristol to fill our gaps when this happens.
Even with the greatest planning, thinking and problem solving, I must warn you there may be times when we have to respond to keeping ratios safe on the ground – so I ask you in advance to please bear with us. Let’s hope not though!
Thankyou
Thankyou again so much for choosing St Pauls, investing in St Pauls, and coming on our learning journey with us.
I think all of us here, consider it an incredible honour to still be serving a community as fantastic and diverse as St Pauls.
With respect and appreciation
Lucy Driver
Headteacher and National Leader of Education
