Notice regarding Open Events for September 2022 Entry

The original date of Thursday 16th September 2021 has been cancelled.

Traditionally, we are one of the first schools in the area to have an Open Evening, ready for parents to submit their choices for High School to the Local Authority by 31st October. However, we feel that after only a few days back in school we’re not in a position to see if the return to school nationally is going to cause a significant wave of extra cases. We can’t guarantee families will be afforded the personal space they may expect if cases do increase whilst also having a free-flow ‘open’ system around the school. There are several pinch points around the site that normally lead to significant congestion on Open Evening, especially if there is wet weather. We have a duty to the community to prevent transmission wherever we can and a fully ‘open’ Open Evening may not be compatible with that duty.

We have evaluated our capacity to do ticketed, guided tours in small groups, leaving at staggered times from multiple points across the site on the evening and across the rest of the school week. Despite a lot of ingenuity, we cannot get up to a good capacity.  We know that every family that may like a tour of the school would not be able to get one whilst remaining comfortable against a potential backdrop of rising infection rates in the local area.

Therefore, we have decided to take the opportunity to see what the coming few weeks bring. If, for example, cases remain low and the general public is seemingly more confident when in more densely populated (but well ventilated) spaces, we may run our evening in a traditional ‘open’ style. If the signs are that local transmission is still an issue we may run a ticketed, fixed capacity system with guides leaving at staggered times from multiple start points. If there are significant local concerns about transmission we may run all of our events digitally.

Our provisional date for rescheduling is: Tuesday 5th October (with tours during the school day that week also, dependent on the above).

We will confirm our decision regarding Open Events during week commencing 27th September.

In the meantime, we do encourage families to watch our introductory video and see the documents below.

Open Evening Video

As well as the video above we have also produced the two documents below (Introduction from Headteacher and School Handbook 2020).