At the start of the 2020-21 academic year, we made the decision to continue to have our Reception and Year 1 classes at the main school site. This had worked well during the summer term when we had the younger boys in full time, allowing us to staff the school more effectively and ensure the boys had a hot meal at lunchtime and access to outside space and resources that are best suited to the current conditions.

Our priority is to minimise disruption to the boys’ education as far as possible while continuing to operate within government guidelines for schools. We will not be able to move back to the pre-prep site until it is both practical and safe to do so and the threat of possible localised and/or national closure periods has been removed.

We do believe that the only difference to the fantastic start boys receive at The Mall is a physical one and our current Reception class have settled just as well into life on the main site as they would have at the pre-prep site.

In periods of lockdown, the government closes schools to the majority of pupils. Apart from the children of key workers or boys who are deemed to fall into the vulnerable category (including those with special educational needs or who are finding it difficult to access remote learning provision).

We are able to offer wraparound care from 8.00am to 5.00pm each day but unfortunately external providers are not able to come into school for extra-curricular activities, and due to the smaller number of boys on site we also do not run any minibus services during lockdown.

The boys in school are in groups of up to 8 boys from their own year group. They are supervised by staff on site and will follow their lessons online on Teams alongside the boys following the remote learning programme from home. Sometimes they will be taught by the teacher giving the lesson or they will watch the teacher give a live online lesson on a laptop. All the boys in school have access to a laptop if they need it to access the lessons.  There are twice daily registration periods when they can see one another.

Unless you are registering your son to join us at the start of Reception, we will want to assess him. Usually we do this by inviting him for a day to join one of his year group classes and also to take short tests in maths and English. Unfortunately, we are unable currently to hold assessments in school.

We have been running online assessments since the summer term and they have worked well. Depending on your son’s age, we will send some tasks for him to complete on his own at home which he will then discuss during an online meeting, usually with our Assistant Head (Academic) and Assistant Head (Pastoral). They may ask you son some other questions, for example some mental maths but again these will be entirely age appropriate. You might also meet the Headmaster if you have not already done so. We will ask you to email us the same documentation we usually do for an assessment taking place in school, including your son’s most recent school report. We will be in touch within a few days following the online assessment to let you know if we are able to offer your son a place. If you accept the place and your son is not due to start until September 2021, we are hopeful we will be able to invite new boys in as usual during the summer term to meet their new teacher and classmates.

If you want your son to join during lockdown, or if we are in lockdown at the time he is due to start with us, we will do everything we can to make the process as smooth and unsettling as possible. We will arrange for him to meet his new teacher online before he joins so he can ask her or him any questions he might have and he or she has a chance to get to know him. If he is eligible to come into school he will be in a group with boys in his year group, though not necessarily all from his normal class. If he is working remotely from home his class teacher meets all boys twice daily to make sure they are all right and talk through any concerns.

During lockdown, most of the boys are learning remotely and they continue to have PE lessons as part of their timetable. Our PE teachers take the boys on site to the sports hall for the lesson where boys from home join them online. The content of the lessons is very much geared to the constraints of most of the boys being at home to deliver the optimum workout but without needing lots of equipment or space. Feedback from boys and parents to our online PE lessons has been great and you can follow the departmental twitter account to keep up to date with what they are up to: https://twitter.com/MallSchoolSport

Once the school reopens to all boys, games lessons at Sunbury Cricket Club will resume and, if government guidelines permit, weekly swimming lessons in our pool will also restart.