A Caerphilly school is closing early for the school holidays so families don’t have to isolate over the Christmas period.

St Martin’s School will end term a week early on December 10 after headteacher Lee Jarvis said he’d received requests from parents to pull their children out of school in the build-up to the Christmas holidays so they would be able to isolate for a sufficient period of time to be able to spend Christmas itself with their wider family.

In a survey on parents’ views, Mr Jarvis said that, of those who responded, 68 per cent they intended to keep their children out of school for the last week of term.

Mr Jarvis wrote a letter to parents outlining the reasons for the decision.

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He said: “Over the last few weeks, I have had a great deal of parental requests to remove their children from school during the last week of term in order to undertake a ‘mini family fire break isolation’, in the hope that their families will remain virus free over the Christmas period and therefore they can be confident that when they meet up with grandparents and their extended family they will reduce the risk to them.

“By self isolating now the hope is that there will be less need to self isolate over the Christmas period and that there will be fewer cases of children identified as close contact with a positive case from school.”

The head teacher said he had been “hopefully that the Welsh Government would have taken a proactive approach to deliver distancing learning in the final week of school”.

However, first minister Mark Drakeford has said that schools should continue to stay open until the end of term.

St Martin’s currently has two year groups self isolating following positive cases and “a large number awaiting test results”.

Three options were discussed at St Martin’s with the governors, the head teacher and the county borough council, which included closing the school on health and safety grounds, moving the summer inset days to the end of term and closing the school to deliver lessons online.

Mr Jarvis said he had taken the decision to move the summer inset days to the second half of the autumn term meaning that the school will be closed to pupils from December 10.