Letter to Parents – 12th June 2020

12th June 2020

Dear Parents and Carers,

I hope you and your family are keeping well. I am writing to keep you informed of our plans for wider opening, and also to share with you some very important information regarding the Black Lives Matter movement.

As you will know the academy has been open for the students of key workers and other high priority families since lockdown started in March. Up until the end of May we also hosted 4 other schools from across the Cabot Learning Federation; Bristol Brunel Academy, Bristol Metropolitan Academy, Evergreen Primary Academy and Summerhill Academy. This provision for the 5 schools continued across the school holidays to ensure that key workers could continue to work. The academy was also a delivery hub for food boxes that went out across Bristol. During the Easter holiday 1800 boxes were delivered to families across the Cabot Learning Federation. In half term we worked with a wider group of schools and 1200 were delivered across the City. Staff have also been making work available through our website on a weekly basis and this has been followed up with telephone calls if necessary.

Following the government’s announcement that it expected schools to work with year 10 students for some face to face meetings we have been planning how this will take place whilst maintaining social distancing and ensuring that everyone is kept safe. I have outlined below, the provision that we are planning to offer each year group until the end of term.

High Priority Group.

This is the group of students that have been coming in since lockdown started. Please contact the academy if you feel that your child should be in this group. These students are here all day and are now placed in “bubbles” where they spend the day with the same small group of students, typically no more than 10 and the same set of adults for a week. Each bubble will have break and lunch at different times. If your child is in this group please can we ask that you make sure that they:

• Bring their own water bottle
• Bring their own equipment
• Are wearing clean school uniform each day if possible

If they or anyone in their household have shown any symptoms of Covid 19 then you must keep them at home and inform us immediately.

Year 10 Face to Face mentoring

We have been contacting year 10 students and families during the course of this week to invite them in for socially distanced one to one meetings. We have asked which adult the student would like to meet and from next week, the face to face meetings will happen in the Theatre. The purpose of these meetings will be talk to the students about the distance learning that they have been doing and how well they are coping with lockdown and what we can do to support them. We will write separately to the year 10 students families with details of appointment times and dates but I would like to stress that it is appointment only and again if the students or anyone in their household have symptoms of Covid 19 they must stay at home.

Year 10 Live learning

Following the face to face meetings we will look to invite some year 10 students in for live learning in the academy. For those students that are invited in this will be for planned sessions and the students will be in bubbles to reduce the risk of infection. Again we will contact those families directly with more details nearer the time about how we intend to organise the live learning and ensure that we have social distancing in place and keep everyone safe.

Distance Learning – Years 7, 8 9 and 10

As you will know, staff at the Academy have continued to support the learning of your child through a carefully planned distance learning curriculum. As we await further announcements about when it will be safe for us to open to a larger cohort of students, this curriculum will continue to evolve to include a combination of lessons in the current format as well as some live teaching episodes for some year groups, where students will be guided through their learning by City Academy teachers via pre-recorded sessions. We aim to have some of these in place for our exam groups during the early stages of next week. We will continue to set three English, four Science, one Humanities, one RE and one Expressive Arts lesson in each subject a week, as well as approximately four hours of Maths Watch tasks to ensure all students have access to a full curriculum.

As always, we welcome your support in encouraging your child to complete all of the lessons and to share their work with their teacher to receive individual feedback. Please continue to ensure your child engages with this work as much as possible to ensure their academic progress continues. This work can be accessed through our website at https://cityacademybristol.clf.uk/ or please contact the school if you need a paper copy of the work.

Black Lives Matter

As you will know one of the statements in our vision is to “educate everyone in our local community”. The murder of George Floyd in the United States and the disproportionate number of deaths of BAME people due to Covid 19 has meant that we have prepared specific resources to help teach our students about these issues and also to help them cope with the traumatic images and experiences that some of them are seeing and experiencing.

We know that unfortunately a number of our students and families experience racism and discrimination. When it is reported in school we educate and sanction appropriately and we also try and support our students and families when this occurs in the community by using organisations such as SARI. If your child has not shown you the resources sent out by Ms Thomas and Mr Pearce last week, then I would encourage you to sit down with them and talk about it. However, the academy and the Cabot Learning Federation are committed to the concept of equity, providing our communities with what they need, when they need it. It is very clear that our Black community experience a very particular type of racism and that is an issue that we will tackle, not just now but in the future too. At the Academy, we also have the value of #teamspirit, which means we value all of our staff and students and we are committed to doing this together.

As an academy we acknowledge that in the past we have got it badly wrong and there is still a lot more we need to do to make sure that we continue to improve. We now have an academy council that better represents the diversity of the community. The staff of the academy and particularly the teaching staff are more diverse too. We have also taken deliberate action to diversify our curriculum including piloting the ‘What is in a name?’ project, which Miss Thomas designed for the Bristol One Curriculum. We are also striving to improve the role models and examples that are being used in every day teaching to reflect the diversity of our community. There is more work being done on this and we continue to review all our subjects.

As a middle-aged white man, I know I have a lot to learn but I am determined that as an academy we will do all we can to challenge racism, educate ourselves and our communities and condemn racism and discrimination. As a gesture of support, I #TakeTheKnee.

Yours faithfully
Jon Angell
Principal of City Academy