Covid-19 Safe Measures
Dear parents and carers
Throughout the pandemic, Western Australian public, Catholic and Independent schools have worked together to provide COVID-safe measures across our schools to help keep our students, staff and community safe.
As Western Australian COVID-19 infections are rising and new sub-variants are leading to reinfections for people who have already had COVID-19, we are
asking for your support to ensure we keep our schools open and minimise disruption to student learning.
It is vital we continue to keep ourselves and our school community safe.
As endorsed by National Cabinet as part of a nationally consistent approach, wearing masks indoors is strongly encouraged and we fully support this across our
three school systems. We ask that your child wears a mask to school to keep our schools as safe as possible. Staff have also been strongly encouraged to wear a mask while at school.
We ask for your support to please explain to your child the importance of wearing a mask to reduce the risk of transmission in schools and the community.
You can support your school community to be COVID-19 safe by:
·wearing a mask indoors when visiting the school
·ensuring your family stays up-to-date with COVID-19 and flu vaccines
·testing your child for COVID-19 if they have symptoms or are a
household close contact
·keeping your child home if they are unwell
·maintaining good hand hygiene.
To further support face-to-face learning and minimise disruption to students’ schooling, the WA Government will again be providing 20 free Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) for each student. Your school will be able to provide you with further information in the coming weeks on how you can collect these
once they receive their allocation.
Testing for COVID-19 remains an important step in keeping our more vulnerable community members
safe. If your child is a close contact and does not have symptoms, they must return daily negative RATs to leave isolation and attend school, and must also wear a mask when outside their home (usual exemptions apply), as per the testing and isolation protocols. Close contacts who have symptoms
should not attend school.
For more information on testing and isolation requirements, go to the HealthyWA website.
Thank you for your continued efforts in working together to keeping all Western Australian schools COVID-19 safe.
Kind regards
Jim Bell
Acting Director General
Department of Education
20 July 2022