We are delighted that you child will be joining us
Welcome Meeting for Parents
Our Welcome Meeting for parents will be held at 5.30 pm on Wednesday 11th June 2025 in the Upper School Hall. This is mainly for parents to attend. We ask that due to the content of the meeting (boring grownup stuff), if it is possible for you to attend without bringing your children that this would be preferable. The children will not find the adult meeting as interesting as the separate stay and play sessions specifically designed for them. We recognise however that this may not be possible for some parents and would prefer to welcome you with children rather than not at all.
Stay and Play Sessions
We have organised separate ‘Stay and Play’ sessions (further details to follow) for you to bring your children to play at 3.45 pm on either Monday 23 June or Thursday 26 June 2025.
Details about Parent Hub (our app for home/school communication)
Parent Hub is a FREE messaging app that you can download on your phone (look for the logo) and is our main way of communicating with families.
This can be found downloaded from both the Apple iStore and Googleplay and will help keep you up to date with what’s going on at school. You’ll receive messages, pictures, documents and newsletters all in one handy place.
Instructions for parents
1. Download the Parent Hub app from your app store (iPhone or Android)
2. Create yourself an account
3. Choose “add a school” and enter the school handle @HorncastlePS to add our school
4. Verify your phone number then add your children to auto-populate with your child’s class and year group streams
Parent Hub help and support is available here.
School Uniform
Please see our school uniform website page for more information which can be found here.
We have secured funding to offer a voucher worth upto £20 from our uniform provider to the parents of every child starting in Reception this year.
Further information and the vouchers will be emailed separately.
Free School Meals/Pupil Premium
Families who receive certain benefits or have low income may be eligible for free school meals. Further details are available from LCC here.
More importantly for school: eligibility also delivers an additional £1,480 funding per pupil per year for 6 years to fund valuable support like extra tuition, additional teaching staff or after school activities. Without wishing to sound money grabbing – this is important as it can deliver more than a third of our annual budget. We are therefore very keen that all new admissions are checked for eligibility to ensure that the maximum funding is secured. This is done via the Lincolnshire County Council Parent Portal (where you made your application for a reception place) by simply ensuring that all your children are listed, adding the National Insurance Number and date of birth for the parent named in the account and clicking the submit a Free School Meal check.
The information is retained securely by LCC and is used to check against the DWP information to determine eligibility for FSM and PPG funding. This information is resubmitted periodically to determine changes in eligibility. It is therefore possible that data entered today will generate an eligibility without any further parental or school attention many years later and it is for this reason that we ask that you apply even if you consider that you may not currently be eligible. Nobody knows the future and we have found that this eligibility and the entitlement to free school meals materialising at an unexpected time of need has been of great assistance to many families in the past. And we’ll be honest – the £1,480 per year is a very welcome addition to the school budget to spend on your children.
Cool Milk
Free milk is available to children under 5. Milk is also available for children over 5 to be purchased by parents at a subsidised rate. Both are delivered to school by Cook Milk the provider of our milk scheme. Please register directly through the Coolmilk website: www.coolmilk.com
