Ide Hill Primary School

School Closure

Ide Hill Primary School Procedure for school closure.doc

We will always do our best to keep the school open and will only close the school in exceptional circumstances. Being one of the highest schools in Kent geographically brings with it many challenges. Our water is sometimes unexpectedly cut off, we often have different or more severe weather than other parts of Kent and the weather can deteriorate very suddenly in such a high rural location. It is crucial that we safeguard our children/ families and sometimes this means that we have to take the difficult decision to close the school. We also have to consider how we can best safeguard our staff, some of whom live up to 25 miles away from the school.

Closing the school is not a decision that we take lightly. It means that many staff have to 'down tools' and it also creates additional, quite unnecessary work. We know that many parents are grateful that we take children's safety so seriously. We also appreciate that closing the school may cause frustration for working parents, especially if the school is forced to close halfway through the day. During these times we ask for your support and ask that you respect that the decisions that we have taken are in the best interests of the children. Some parents may not agree with our decision however, our school staff should not be expected to deal with negative or abusive communications. All such communications will be referred to the Headteacher.

We will always endeavour to communicate school closures as early as possible, to allow parents to make their own arrangements. If we are able to close in the morning, we are mindful that parents and staff will need to know by 7am. It is however not always possible to do this- we can only work with the information that is available to us at the time and, for example, weather reports can vary or change suddenly - nothing about our weather is predictable in Ide Hill.

We will always ensure that children are supervised until they are collected by parents and we will not 'close' the school until all children have safely left the site. For more information re Severe Weather closure, please visit the following page https://idehill.eschools.co.uk/website/severe_weather_/345324

We ask parents to please assume that school is open unless we say otherwise. You can find out if the school is closed in the following ways:

An emergency message will be added to the homepage of our school website
Via the Kent School Closures website. http://www.kentclosures.co.uk/ which will send a text and email to all registered parents. Once the school is re opened we will indicate this via the Kent closures page.