Dear parents/carers,

We hope you are well.

We wanted to give you a brief update on the critical IT failures that led to the closure of the school today. The safety of our students and staff will always be our top priority and we believe that we have made the right decision in closing the school today as many school systems have been down for the majority of the day.

School staff have worked tirelessly today to try to resolve these matters. We believe that we have potentially identified where the system failure occurred and we are currently working to try to prevent this from occurring again.

In the meantime, we currently have most systems back up and running including the fire alarm system, doors and gates, SIMS so we can take registers, and telephone lines. However, we will need to continue to test these to ensure that they are reliable.

We are pleased with these positive signs and we hope that we will be able to open tomorrow. We would like to thank our wonderful IT staff here at HLS and the external specialists who are supporting us for their excellent work today.

We would also like to thank our exams team for all of their sterling work today to ensure that the public examinations have continued today in spite of all the technical issues that we have encountered.

We will keep you posted and come back to you once we are able to confirm whether the systems are working well and what the plans are for tomorrow.

Kind regards,
Mr Gannon
Headteacher