FAQ Category: Testing Centre – FAQs

Your curriculum administrator – but please read the following FAQs before you do

Service Industry (plus carpentry, brick and electrics) toni.marsh@brooklands.ac.uk

SEND – tina.evans@brooklands.ac.uk

STEM – (not carpentry, brick or electrics) karen.griffiths@brooklands.ac.uk

All students who pre-registered for testing have been offered 3 timeslots via the email address used on their pre-registration form – so please check your College email but also your personal email and in some cases your parent’s email accounts (including junk / spam folders) for this communication – contact Curriculum Administrators if you still can’t find it – you will not have received timeslots if you did not complete the pre-registration form

Please contact your curriculum administrator to see if there are additional timeslots available

Don’t worry – please just attend the next ones that are scheduled

Schools and Colleges have been given less than 2 weeks to pre-register / gain consent for testing, use this data to plan and gather the resources to administrate and deliver mass rapid testing, establish and email out timeslots – in an ideal world we would have liked to have given students at least a fortnight’s notice of a test slot and to have given students more control over when their timeslot would be, but the time constraints described plus the government’s target to have the testing completed within the first week and a half, minimise our ability to give very much notice at all or to be flexible as to when timeslots are allocated or if they can be changed – please do all you can to try and attend them, taking time away from jobs if needed.

We cannot guarantee that we can reschedule – we have very limited resources – staff and building space – and would ask that you have a critical reason for rescheduling before asking us.  We cannot guarantee that we will be able to respond to requests to reschedule or that we will be able to find you an alternative – but in the first instance if you have a critical reason (and we would not be able to accept a work commitment as critical) please contact your curriculum administrator

The system in place reflects government expectations on the education sector and reflect a balance of the risks of travel with the benefits of testing for asymptomatic carriers. Travelling to College would originally have taken place during the first week of testing – which would have had to have been paid for – the College simply took the decision to extent remote learning for a week to reduce movement of students across campus to and from the testing centre

Government guidance states they must be between 3 to 5 days from each other

No – Testing is voluntary and you will still be able to return to on-campus learning 

Students who have tested positive will be contacted directly by the College within an hour of their test.  If you do not hear from the college your result will be negative – it may take up to 48 hours to receive an official notification of your result

All testing voluntary – but currently government’s expectation is that students undertake three supervised tests at College in order to then start receiving home test kits

Although the college would support the proposition of students being issued with home test kits regardless of whether they had been able to undertake three supervised tests within such a limited timeframe, we are awaiting clarification from government as to whether this will be allowed

Testing is voluntary and recommended by government regardless of vaccination – there are a few instances where it has been recognised that some vaccinated people have incorrectly tested positive but the government has stated for this current phase of on-campus testing, verifying PCR tests will not be used (it will be to validate home tests)