St Ninian’s High School’s Year 9 students have been asked to study at home on Friday.

Head teacher Chris Coole has written to parents requesting they keep children in that year group home tomorrow because of ‘higher rates of staff absence than we would normally expect at this time of year’.

The letter continued: ‘Just to emphasise, whilst at home, students should continue to access their usual lessons via their Google Classrooms which should have key resources and assignments available for them to learn from during the day.

‘Please be assured that this decision has not been taken lightly and we have tried to do everything to avoid this scenario happening again, but we have no alternative.’