Communication
Our communication with families will be professional and courteous. We ask that families communicate with the same courtesy and only through the channels outlined below.
home to school:
Drop-off and pick up - Can be helpful for a very brief message to teaching staff. For a longer or private discussion, please make an appointment.
Appointments - All appointments are made via the office; we ask that parents and carers do not email staff directly which can delay replies. Phone or Email to request an appointment (face-to-face or by telephone) with who you wish to meet with. When emailing, it helps to put 'FAO and Name' in the subject line. Appointments are made in colleagues' working hours and it is helpful if families can avoid after 5pm. School staff have working hours and families too. We have found that face to face appointments can be more solution focussed and productive in a shared understanding than emails.
Emails - We appreciate that with busy families, people send and receive emails 24/7. We ask that when emailing school these are sent via admin@kingsmead.cheshire.sch.uk marked FAO with the staff members name. Office staff will ensure they get promptly to the recipient the next working day. If you are sending in confidential information, you may want you mark the subject line CONFIDENTIAL and/or attach a document to the email. We aim to reply to emails within five working days. We ask that parents and carers do not email staff directly and that ALL email correspondence is via the school office. Emailing staff direct will not result in a faster response. Sadly, a small minority of emails have been aggressive, discourteous or personal in tone. We do not want to impact on staff wellbeing by any inappropriate communication coming into their inbox.
Sometimes you might receive a reply direct from the headteacher or other senior leader. This is for one of two reasons. Your issue might have been so serious that the member of staff escalated it to us. Another reason is that the headteacher has responded because the tone of an email means it was not appropraite for the member of staff to reply.
Phone calls - If needing to speak to a teacher, please note this will have to be outside of teaching hours.
We also have feedback@kingsmead.cheshire.sch.uk which is monitored regularly for general feedback, compliments and areas we might improve.
school to home:
Emails - This is information that we think is important for families to know. From September 2022 we will send a Friday email with important information including a head's up for the week ahead. We ask staff to use the admin@kingsmead.cheshire.sch.uk email address for their communication with you if not using Google classroom (see below). Emails from admin will only have your child's initials, for GDPR reasons.
Website - All updates are noted from the homepage so a weekly look will keep every family informed. The school diary is linked on the homepage and can be synced to phones. The News page shares news and letters sent home so information lost at home can be found on the school website.
Google Classroom - Some information for families that we'd like people to notice (about school events and so on) is posted on Google classroom as well as the website. Home learning is posted on Google Classroom by class teachers. We can message individual families and children on Google classroom so messages might include some feedback or individual messages.
Phone - We may contact families by phone to inform them
Text - for short-notice messages such as the cancellation of a club or reminder.
We do not accept responsibility for information missed that has been shared and signposted on the website, by email, on Google Classroom or by text.
More on how we share information with families:
There is a wealth of information that we haven't e-mailed or put on Google Classroom on the website. All information on the website is open to everybody.
The school's other online space, one private to the school, is Google Classroom. Class teachers, phase and school leaders use this space to communicate with children, and families. Parents and carers can access their classrooms through their children's unique @kingsmead.cheshire.sch.uk email addresses and can sign up to receive notifications on their phone. Messages on Google Classroom may be sent to individual pupils (all accessible by adults at home but not visible to other children or families) as well as the whole school, year group, a class, or group of children. As a primary school, we expect that children don't have private spaces or passwords that parents and carers don't monitor, so there will be useful information for adults too. It is a space where pupils can message one another using hangouts and is a much safer online communication tool than others on the internet which have recommended ages far older than our children. Google Classroom teaches children from a young age that the online world is a public place (teachers and classmates can see their comments and posts) while ensuring that they are in a secure environment within the school. Teachers are not required to respond to posts on Google classroom, so if you would like to be sure we have seen and responded, please email either admin or feedback@kingsmead (see above).
We also use
Google forms to share and collect information, for example consent for school trips. will be communicated via your email address. We use these to gather parents' and carers' views either through formal surveys or a quick survey on an issue.
Newsletters are shared weekly, as well as three times a year at the end of term a longer celebration, with highlights and co-written by children, staff and other adults in school.
Communicating with us
Parents' and carers' first port of call would be the children's teacher. If this is not possible or appropriate please contact the phase leader.
If your issue remains or is not appropriate for the class teacher, please contact the headteacher or deputy headteacher. If your concern is related to your child's disability or special educational needs, please contact our SENCO via the office. Appointments can be face to face, via a Google Meet or by telephone.
Telephone us on 01606 800170. Teaching staff will not usually be available during teaching hours but will aim to call you back to you on the same day if possible.
When emailing a particular member of staff, please put FAO and the name of the person the message is for in the subject line and office staff will pass it on. If your communication is confidential and contains personal or sensitive information please mark it CONFIDENTIAL in the subject line and attach the information as a word document. Teachers aim to respond to emails within five working days (note this may be longer if your email is to a part time member of staff). Please remember not to email teachers directly and send all correspondence through the school office address.
social media
KMPSGallery on Instagram is a virtual gallery of children's artwork, music celebrating creative Arts in school. From 2022 we have published our own website page in the Cave Gallery which is a safe place for children to see their work in Art and Design shared with a wider audience.
KingsmeadPri on Twitter celebrates some of the special events that go on in school, in particular Sport and Eco news. It keeps us informed with what our friends and partners in CW&C, the DfE and Ofsted are up to.
Kingsmead Friends Association on Facebook keeps families up to date with the activities of the KFA.
If you have a question, concern or compliment, feedback@kingsmead.cheshire.sch is the most effective way to communicate with us. Communication is invariably more useful, kind and effective when speaking or communicating directly with us.