On Wednesday of this week, as part of our ongoing work to ensure the safety of all staff and students at the school in these challenging times, we welcomed Michaelene Holder-March to Bushey Meads to look at all our Covid-19 Risk Assessments and conduct a full site walk

Michaelene is one of the highly trained Infection Protection Control Nurses working as a manager within Public Health as part of the Health and Safety Management Team at Hertfordshire County Council.

She was incredibly impressed with how all staff at Bushey Meads were ensuring that the school site was as Covid-secure as possible. She stated that the school was an example of best practice.

She informed me that our embedded practice and protocols were exemplary and that she had rarely been in such a well maintained, clean and safely managed school. She was incredibly impressed with the following things:

• Cleanliness of the building and facilities
• Numerous hand sanitiser stations around the school building
• Outdoor sinks with hot and cold water and access to sanitiser soap and paper towels for all stakeholders to use when necessary
• Excellent clear signage all around our expansive site classroom layouts with separated tables and access to tissues, hand sanitiser and
• Hygiene wipes
• Clear taped-out squares in practical subjects
• Organisation of Year Group Zones
• Specific Year Group eating areas
• Embedded routines of students wiping their areas at the start of lessons and wiping down Chromebooks and sanitising their hands at the end of lessons as they leave the learning environment
• Behaviour and thoughtful attitudes of the students she met and how engaging they were with all the new routines in place
• Excellent well thought out systems in the Learning Resource Centre

It was a big endorsement of everyone’s hard work over many months to get to this place which is providing as safe and secure an environment as possible for all the students in our care.

I would like to congratulate everyone involved – students, parents and carers, Governors and the extremely hard working staff who thoroughly deserve this recognition from such an experienced practitioner in this field.