It was with utter dismay that I received the letter from RBWM’s leads in Public Health (Anna Richard) and Schools (Clive Haines) forcing the cancellation of almost all of our ‘public’ events for the rest of this term. In particular, we were looking forward to inviting parents back into school, to meet with teachers and discuss in person progress being made through the year. Parents and guardians will be directly contacted by their son’s form teacher to pick up the conversation by phone or meet, but that really is not good enough and I can only apologise for not being able to welcome you in. One of the few tools missing in our digital armoury is the linking of our school database to MEET conferencing and aligned to parent-teacher conferences. Quite a few teachers in the school teach two classes in a year group, requiring 36 interviews at an event - that makes for a six hour parent evening across which appointments need to be scheduled. We are working on a better solution for the Autumn term, though of course we are definitely hoping the 19 July will indeed be our liberation day to be able to return to in-school conferencing!

For parents evenings now cancelled, I will be running ‘live’ presentation events (supported by Mrs Seltzer) via MEET (please see InfoMEET schedules in the bulletin) to bring parents up to speed with how the landscape looks like at the close of this academic year, arrangements ahead for 2021-22 and other matters of educational interest.

And finally, I am delighted to confirm that our end of term assemblies for each of our year groups will be broadcast live so that parents can watch those events, see the various awards for the term and year be presented and enjoy that fly-on-the-wall experience of seeing school ‘LIVE’. If we can do more, please let me know!