We want and need to work together with you as parents to make the best decisions for your child and the entire school community. Hopefully you will understand that in these challenging times, we have to take a risk averse stance when dealing with all student and staff illness. Having said that, we also need to be proportional in our response so that students are not missing large amounts of school unnecessarily. Ultimately, you know your children best and we need to be able to trust you in making the right decisions as to whether your child is just sick with a common cold or whether they may actually have COVID-19.
As a school we have to work within the current guidance when dealing with staff and student illness. The NHS website currently lists the main symptoms of coronavirus as:
- High temperature – a high temperature is usually considered to be 38 degrees or above
- New continuous cough – this means coughing a lot for more than an hour, or 3 or more coughing episodes in 24 hours (if you usually have a cough, it may be worse than usual)
- Loss or change in taste or smell – this means you’ve noticed you cannot smell or taste anything, or things smell or taste different to normal