Dear parents and carers,

You will recall that we asked for nominations for parent governors to join our board of governors. We were pleased to receive a number of nominations – five in fact and so we are now holding an election to determine who will be appointed to the Governing Board. You will see from the information on the ballot that the quality of our candidates is high and this will be a fantastic opportunity for us to engage some excellent people in setting the strategic direction for the school as well as supporting and challenging our school leaders.  Your votes are important, this is your chance to choose from these high quality candidates.

The ballot paper is attached and as indicated, you can vote for up to two candidates, but can only vote for each candidate once.  Due to COVID restrictions, we are asking for voting to be electronic where possible.

You can vote in one of two ways

1. Email to our clerk to governors, Hayley Cutchey at hcutchey@alamedamiddleschool.org.uk you can either attach the ballot paper, completed or can email the names of the (up to) two candidates you wish to vote for.
2. Collect a paper ballot paper from reception. If doing this, you should come to reception, our reception staff will sanitise their hands before passing you a ballot paper in a plastic wallet. They will also ask for your name and the name of your child. You would then sanitise your hands before making a mark on the ballot paper and placing it into the ballot box. Papers in the ballot box would be quarantined for 72 hours before the count is done. The papers will be printed by staff following COVID procedures – sanitising hands before touching any paper.

The deadline for voting will be Friday 20.11.2020 at 9am and the count will be done on Monday 23^rd November to allow 72 hours quarantine for paper votes. Candidates would be invited to this and the count will be done by two members of the admin team.

The emails to our clerk are on a centrally monitored system and the count of paper votes would be witnessed. The voting will, by this way, not be totally anonymous as our clerk will be collating the results, but as she is not part of the school staff, we hope you will be confident in this and also understand why we have chosen this method. Paper votes are, of course, anonymous, but we ask that everyone who can vote electronically does follow this to minimise visitors into school in line with our risk assessment.  The procedures are in line with advice from the National Governance Association and are in line with our articles of Association as an Academy.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish the very best of luck to all five of the excellent candidates

Yours sincerely

Maxine Warner                Simon Ratcliffe

Headteacher                     Chair of Governors

Alameda Ballot Paper November 2020

[pdf 493KB]