Dear parents and carers,
Thank you for your ongoing support throughout this new period of lockdown. We appreciate that this is an uncertain time and are doing all we can to ensure that students are safe within College. To support us in that please can you remind students of our key expectations when they are in school:
- Always wear a face covering when not in a classroom.
- Maintain social distance from one another and avoid unnecessary contact like hugging.
- Wash your hands regularly and thoroughly and use hand sanitiser when going in or out of classrooms and the college building.
We continue to be open to all year groups and your son or daughter should continue to attend school unless they or your family have been directed to self-isolate or they are clinically extremely vulnerable. If your son or daughter is in clinically extremely vulnerable, please provide us with a letter from a medical professional to support them shielding so that we can support you effectively.
Attached to this letter and available on our website and via Twitter is our Guidance to Parents and Carers to Support Remote Learning. We have worked to put key information in one place for you to access. The guidance includes what we will do to support your son or daughter if they need to work from home. We would ask that all parents, carers and students,
- Do all they reasonably can to access our online curriculum, including downloading the Microsoft Teams smart phone app.
- Contact College if the online curriculum cannot be accessed so that lesson materials can be provided in hard copy.
- Contact teaching staff via email if there is an issue with accessing lesson materials and return any work completed in hard copy for feedback.
If you do not have a stable internet connection or internet enabled device at home like a tablet or laptop please contact the Lower or Upper School Team in College so that we can discuss how to support your son or daughter learning from home. We will also be providing all students in the Lower School with revision guides for English, Mathematics and Science that include key information from our curriculum to support their learning at home.
This is a difficult time for all our community. However, if we work together to serve one another and to strive to achieve our personal best we can continue to learn deeply and grow in character.
Yours sincerely,
Mr M Hall
Principal
Student Guides
With the current situation we find ourselves in, we have made it easy for you to access the curriculum. We have put together some easy to follow guides so you can access learning at home.
click the links below
Grace College – Guidance for Parents & Carers to Support Remote Learning
We want to support you to make sure that your son or daughter can learn effectively whether they are in school or having to work from home. This short document explains what we are asking our teachers to do, our students to do and you as a parent or carer for a student at Grace College.
You can explore the planned curriculum for all of our subjects via the College website here.
Engaging with Lessons Online
The main way that we can help your son or daughter to continue to learn when working from home is via Microsoft Teams. All students should know how to log on to Office 365. Their username is ‘student ID number’ followed by ‘@esf-schools.org.uk’ and their password is the same one that they would use to log on to a computer in school. If your son or daughter is unable to access Office 365 at home please contact College by telephone during school hours.
We expect all of our teachers to make sure that within Microsoft Teams;
- Lesson materials can be found quickly and easily by students and parents who are working from home. Files in Microsoft Teams are clearly labelled and dated.
- Lesson materials will include the knowledge the student must gain in the lesson.
- Lesson materials will include tasks that students should complete while working at home and a clear instruction if a task is to be submitted as an Assignment in Teams.
- Tasks may well be checked to keep a record of submission and/or be subject to an assessment, in which case feedback will be provided to inform improvements.
To help students learn effectively at home requires teachers, parents and students to work together as a team. So, we expect that our parents, carers and students will;
- Do all they reasonably can to access our online curriculum, including downloading the Microsoft Teams smart phone app.
- Contact teaching staff via email if there is an issue with accessing lesson materials.
Teachers email addresses are their first initial and surname @gracecollege.org.uk. So, if the teacher was Mr J Jones the teacher email address would be jjones@gracecollege.org.uk.
Engaging with Lessons Offline
If your son or daughter is unable to regularly access Office 365 and Microsoft Teams because you do not have a stable internet connection or an internet enabled device please contact College immediately and ask to speak to a Progress Leader for your son or daughter’s year group. We will ensure that you are provided with materials in hard copy for students to complete at home and explore how we can support you further.
All students in the Lower School will also be provided with revision resources for English, Maths and Science to support their learning from home.
“We know that helping our children to learn at home is challenging. To support you while you are at home with your child we have created this support hub where you will find links to the best educational materials available outside of Grace College for their subjects and their emotional and physical well-being. Please keep coming back to this page as we will update it weekly.”
