Before and After School Clubs

17th July 2017

Breakfast and after school provision at Sacred Heart Primary School

Dear Families,

You may be aware that there are changes taking place to the Council’s Sure Start service across the city and the Sure Start Children’s Centre behind our school will be directly affected. One of those changes concerns ‘Chill Out’ and families who use that service will already know that it will stop running from the Children’s Centre this month. We know that this is a highly valued service for many families and want to provide an alternative to people who rely on it.

Therefore, we will be offering our own breakfast and after school care in school from September 2017 and we are pleased to say that Marie and Tracey from Chill Out will be employed by school to run the club. Families will be able to book and pay for the service on an ongoing basis, or with up to one week’s notice. Payments will have to be made in advance by cash or cheque, although we do hope to be able to offer payment by bank transfer in the near future.  

The club will be called ‘Sophie’s’ after our RSCJ founder St. Madeleine Sophie Barat and will start at 8am each day. Breakfast is included in the morning session, which will cost £3.50. After school, families will have two options;

  • Any child still in school after 3.20pm up to 4pm - £5 per session

  • Children in school until the club closes at 5.45pm - £8

Please read, important information regarding charges for children collected after 3.20pm

If you do not wish to take advantage of that service, we respectfully ask that you collect your children from school on time from their allocated exits, usually the classroom doors. Increasingly we are finding that children are not picked up from school at 3.15pm. We do appreciate that unforeseen circumstances mean that parents are sometimes late picking up their children; this is understandable and infrequent for the vast majority of families. However, many children are sitting waiting, sometimes for older sisters to collect them from the High School. The reality of this is that a number of children are regularly not picked up until after 3.30pm, which presents us with a number of serious safeguarding issues.

As of September 2017, at the end of the school day, children who are not picked up by 3.20pm will automatically be looked after by our after school club and a £5 charge will be issued for each child for each day. This will enable us to look after the children safely with appropriate staffing ratios. Prior arrangements should be made with the after school club to use this service. Children who are not picked up on time will no longer be allowed to wait in the school entrance area.

We hope that this will alleviate the pressure on families to pick children up at 3.15pm by giving you the flexibility to pay for childcare up to 4pm, or until 5.45pm if required. We are very aware of the demands of family life and are keen to support families in this area.

We would like to extend our deepest thanks to Chill Out for their dedicated service to our families over the last 13 years.

 

Please contact the school office if you have any queries.