Dear Parents and Carers,

• First week back with all the P4 -P7 children has been wonderful, I do believe they are all taller. The sunshine and blue sky welcomed them back too!
• We did, however, have our first positive Covid19 case in school. To help us reduce the risk of another positive case, please, if you have any symptoms at all, or are worried, please contact the NHS to book a test. Better to have an early test with a negative result than wondering or worrying. For families who are isolating, the children are entitled to a test, this is recommended to keep you and your family safe, especially as you are now able to meet family and friends outside, albeit in very small groups.
• Text messages from school: if we ever have to send you a text, we are limited to 120 characters, so apologies if they seem very short!
• As we cannot have our usual books for sale during Parent Consolations, our new ‘online’ Scholastic Book Club is up and running! If you would like to support this, please go to https://schools.scholastic.co.uk/bruntsfield-primary/digital-book-club to browse the latest books and order online. For every £1 you spend on this month’s Book Club, our school will earn 20p in Scholastic Rewards which go towards more books for the school. Please place your order online by March 31st, 2021. 
• Parent and Pupil Questionnaires on Online Learning: Thank you for sharing you throughs, experiences, suggestions and compliments in our recent survey  and  on ‘Learning Together at Home’ to you. I have emailed the summary points to each year group. As the comments were personal to each family, we are using them to provide the best support and advice for the teachers to help us continue to develop our skills in online learning. Teachers will discuss points raised by the children in the pupil questionnaires with their classes. To help the children build their skills, teachers will continue to use Teams for homework with the children. Thank you again for all your support and work you have done to keep the children safe and learning valuable life skills during this period of lockdown. You have done very well indeed!
• If you have borrowed an i pad or PC from the school, please return them. Mrs Ramsay is going to check all the updates before they are returned to classrooms. This will help them run quicker, and if you need them again, they will be ready for you.
• Youth Music will be starting work with P3 classes on Teams from next week. This is always such a lovely event, good to see we can do this via Teams in class too. It will be a great opportunity to continue to build our own skills in learning and teaching via Teams.
• Discover: is a holiday programme for all the family, if you would like more information, or to join up, please see discover@edinburgh.gov.uk
• Free School Meals payments and the Spring Hardship Payment. Information is available from https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/schoolgrants If you meet the conditions for free school meals you may be entitled to other payments to help with meals during school holidays, closures or if your child has to isolate. The Scottish Government’s Spring Hardship Payment (https://www.gov.scot/news/funding-to-tackle-poverty-and-inequality/) includes a one-off payment of £100 per child for all children in receipt of Free School Meals before the Easter holiday. Parents of children already in receipt of Free School Meals DO NOT need to complete an application in order to receive the Spring Hardship Payment, it will be paid automatically using the bank/payment details already given.
• The ‘Sick Kids Hospital is moving: As you may already be aware, NHS Lothian recently announced that the new Royal Hospital for Children and Young People will fully open on Tuesday 23 March 2021. From this date, the remaining Children’s services presently located at Sciennes, including A&E, will move to the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People located next to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh at Little France. The new facilities are already home to the majority of the Children’s Outpatient services and the Department of Clinical Neurosciences (DCN), which both migrated to the Little France site in July 2020. Earlier this year, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) inpatient facilities and some outpatient services also moved to the new hospital. The Royal Hospital for Children and Young People will deliver local, regional and national services in some of the most modern and best-designed healthcare facilities in the world. With the new facilities connected to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, paediatric care, specialist neonatal care, neurosciences and both Emergency Departments are now all on the same site. This reduces the need for emergency transfers between hospitals, and ensures that the NHS Lothian teams can share skills and expertise for the benefit of all patients. The remaining Children’s Services that are presently located at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children at Sciennes will move to the new hospital by Tuesday 23 March.  From 8am on Tuesday 23 March, all patients and any child or young person up to the age of 16 requiring access to A&E, must go to the new Royal Hospital for Children and Young People at Little France.

As always, if there is anything I, or another member of our team can do to help, please let us know via admin@bruntsfield.edin.sch.uk.

Enjoy the weekend, stay safe and look after yourselves.

Kind regards,

Carol Kyle