As mentioned in the Newsletter, we have been approached by the ZOE COVID Symptom Study team, led by Professor Tim Spector, and have decided to join their School Community programme. The School Community programme is designed to help keep children, families and staff safe through lockdown and beyond.

The programme gathers anonymous data about COVID-19 in children and how transmission of the virus among schoolchildren affects the wider population.

Schools that use the School Community feature will be contributing to national research investigating how the disease presents in children of different ages and how it spreads in schools. The programme needs as many schools and parents to sign up as possible because more data means more robust analysis and more powerful insights.

We have signed Prince Henry’s up to the programme on the COVID Symptom Study App, which is available to download from the App Store or Google Play.

If you would like your family to take part, you need to download the app or use your app’s existing account to add your child/children as additional profiles. You can then link your child’s profile to their school network and their specific Bubble, using our unique code for Prince Henry’s A4KWRHD.

Each day, every parent and carer takes a minute to answer a few short questions about how each child is feeling, any symptoms they are experiencing, and whether they have taken a COVID-19 test. Children do not use the app themselves.

The research company, Zoe, takes anonymous symptom and test data from each school and Bubble, then share insights back to the school leadership on a daily basis, including:

• The number of children’s health reports submitted for that day
• The number of children in each Bubble that are feeling unwell
• The profile of symptoms that children are experiencing
• The number of children who have tested positive for COVID-19

Parents and carers will also receive updates on how many parents are currently part of their child’s in-app Bubble, and how many children are feeling well or unwell in their child’s Bubble and in the school overall.

To protect privacy, the company never passes on individual personal data or identities to schools or other parents/carers. They only provide these insights when enough students in a school are taking part to ensure anonymity of the children and enable robust statistical analysis.

There is a lot more information about the app, and the process, on the COVID Symptom Study website here, which you may wish to look at before joining in the study.

If you have any questions or concerns about the study which are not answered by this website, you can contact school and speak to Mrs McPherson.