Coronavirus response update 3rd June 2020

I hope this finds you and your family healthy and safe.

I have received a number of emails from our students with respect to the appalling events in the United States. The death of George Floyd is unforgivable and the protest which followed are hard to watch; conflict is never the answer. Part of our responsibility is to guide students so they make the right choices and reject prejudice and intolerance. Racism will never be tolerated and we will challenge anyone who holds racist views. As your children work from home, it is more difficult to support them and assuage their concerns, but we need to try. If you have concerns about your son or daughter who may have been affected by recent events, please contact your son or daughter’s senior tutor so we can follow up on any concerns.

We receive a number of queries about university admission every day. It is very difficult to answer many of these questions as individual universities are working in their own ways. The best place to start is https://www.ucas.com/coronavirus-updates-hub. This has a lot of useful information for students and their parents. It is also worth looking periodically on the university websites as updates tend to appear there. Your sons and daughters can access careers and progression support from our careers team via careers@asfc.ac.uk or they can discuss this with their senior tutor.

As mentioned yesterday, teachers will begin online, live teaching sessions for 50% of the curriculum programme. These will begin from the 8th June for some departments, with all departments running online session from the 15th June 2020. This will form part of our plan for offering some level of face to face support and teaching before the end of the academic year. Your sons and daughters will be receiving an information sheet via email outlining the dos and don’ts of working in lessons online. It is important that all students abide by these guidelines; failure to do so may lead to their removal from online ‘live’ teaching. A copy of this information sheet will be sent to you for your awareness. We will also begin registering student attendance at these sessions in the usual way as well as continuing with our engagement measure for all students. Please could you reiterate the importance of attendance at these live online lessons? We understand that there may be some students who will find accessing a laptop of tablet difficult at the time of the lesson and may not be able to participate. If this is going to be an issue, please ask your son or daughter to make their senior tutor aware so we do not chase students with valid reasons for non-attendance. We would expect all students to make sure that they are up to date with their live lessons by the end of each week.

That’s all for today

Take care, look after yourself, your families and each other; be patient and stay positive.

Anton