Virus will further highlight the education gap between middle class & others....

[peppersneezes000]

Read an article that said the middle class children will not suffer during the extended school break at all & would continue to thrive at home. Disadvantaged children will suffer more both socially & educationally especially those in receipt of free school meals.
Dh argues many middle class parents will be working from home with deadlines to meet etc so the middle class children are also at a disadvantage.
I'll try to find the link.

@x2boys, yes of course but I certainly wouldn’t call two parents earning 30-35k each, wealthy. So one parent is a nurse and the other, a teacher. Not living on the breadline doesn’t mean you’re wealthy. I imagine most ordinary families in the country are neither wealthy nor desperately poor but fit somewhere between.

The existing gap will widen, for sure. We are incredibly lucky to be in the situation we're in right now - DH working from home, no pay cut. I was a SAHM already, but ex teacher. She's got resources, attention, no real worries (though obviously she misses her friends and her teachers). She has a garden to play in and a dog & baby sister to play with. She is very unlikely to slip behind where she would have been at the end of year 1, and to be honest, may even make more progress while she's home.

I don't know that schools will ever be able to bridge the gaps that this create. It's hard enough already, hence the pupil premium funding. This is going to have a lasting impact.

Yes I think this is inevitable. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds may not have access to the internet or to a computer/printer. Probably no access to books or workbooks of any sort either. My DC’s school only provided online packs to the children so if you can’t access that then I’m unsure what you’re supposed to do.

I teach but I’m a FE English tutor and I’m utterly shit at maths . Luckily my DH is an engineer so maths is his forte, if it wasn’t though my eldest in particular would suffer because he’s an excellent mathematician.

As a low earning working class single mum I find these threads a bit patronising. There's some kind of insinuation that only the middle class care about their children's schoolwork and do activities and read to their children.

I have no qualifications, not because I don't care about schoolwork but because I found the learning environment in school very difficult. I can't learn from textbooks and am not very academically minded. Luckily DS is only 6 so I can just about manage to help him out with his work if he were secondary age I would admittedly struggle.

But the world isn't split into "middle class" and "disadvantaged". I do plenty of activities with DS, just because I don't have formal qualifications doesn't mean I don't give a shit and just leave him in front of a screen all day.

Well exactly Waxon!

And surely schools should be providing work books as Well as online work ,my sons school.has ,we do have Wi-Fi obviously otherwise I wouldn't be on here but ds, broke his laptop and whilst he has a smart phone it's not easy to.do work on it so I requested the work books

Homeschoolers claim to get by doing just an hour or two of academic work here and there, alongside a lot of playing (and admittedly playing outdoors and visiting NT places etc which isnt possible the moment)

Surely for most primary kids a bit of maths and some reading will be enough to get by.

wax of course there will be lots of individual exceptions. But statistically, the best predictor of a child's educational attainment is the parents' level of education. Children from low income families attract pupil premium funding because of the gap in attainment between them and their more affluent peers. This situation will make things worse for a lot of those children.

Surely for most primary kids a bit of maths and some reading will be enough to get by.

A bit of maths and some reading should be what they were doing for homework on top of 5 hours of schooling. It will keep them standing still at best.

Surely for most primary kids a bit of maths and some reading will be enough to get by.

A bit of maths and some reading should be what they were doing for homework on top of 5 hours of schooling. It will keep them standing still at best.

Not to mention the fact that I can't remember how to do much of the year 6 maths curriculum, and that even as a secondary English teacher with a degree in English Language and Literature, the only reason I know half the grammatical stuff they get taught for the year 6 SATs is because I had to teach myself to stop the incoming year 7s knowing more than me. It does primary teachers a massive disservice to assume that all the kids need is 'a bit of maths and some reading'.

Surely your son will be.in the same position as every other child in his age group though Downstairs?We have,nt had Grammar schools in my town for over 30;years so I don't know how it works ,but surely all the children will ,similarly disadvantaged and i no child with b e having tutoring etc .

Clearly that can’t be the case for some if you are able to devote so much time and planning to your own children that you feel they have a major advantage.

I’m finding working at home very demanding and harder than working normally, and I made it clear that my children are working on the own from workbooks for a lot of the day so I can only assume you’ve wilfully misread my post. My children aren’t at an advantage because I’m lovingly tutoring them. They’re intrinsically at an advantage anyway and that’s compounded by the fact I’ve had access to more resources. Instead of sticking them in front of the TV I set things up for them to do but I’m working for the most part while they’re doing them.

But never let anything get in the way of claiming teachers are lazing around and overpaid!

What waxon said.

It's not only the middle classes who care about education or have the resources and forethought to buy books etc.

Plenty of working class people also value education and want their DC to do well at school.

There's a huge swathe of society that are neither middle class nor look like they belong on the jeremy kyle show.

Some children will be getting high quality 1:1 tuition delivered by an educated person and carefully planned by a professional teacher. Others will be getting nothing at all - not even a bedtime story.
There will be gaps - but i am sure schools are expecting this.

I think it will highlight inequalities too. I'm concerned for my dcs as multiple serious health problems over the last number of years has taken its toll on me and my ability to be a proactive and patient home educator.

But statistically children from lower socio-economic groups are already at a disadvantage, even when attending school. The likelihood is that that disadvantage will be compounded, not alleviated, by prolonged absence from school.

Stats just paint the bigger picture. As a baby boomer, I left school at 15 with no qualifications as did my DH. Both our children, now in their 40s, have worthwhile degrees, and good careers. It was obvious to us as parents that employment was changing, and that our children would need appropriate qualifications in whatever path they chose. One started out in a vocational role, then graduated much later whilst working.

I may be old fashioned, but how children speak, their vocabulary and grammar often reflect their parents attitude to education. Its not all about money, but then neither is class.

It is a worry.

We aren’t particularly middle class or well off (well not compared to most of the kids friends families who are surgeons and lawyers and high up management etc) but we were able with some help from MIL and SIL to buy 2 laptops as soon as schools shut so that the kids now all have a device each to access thier school set work (DS2 uses our PC), we have 100s and 100s of books, a mountain of board games (which are good for logic, and maths and other skills), loads of science and craft kits, a ton of Lego, a garden with a trampoline and I was able to afford to go out and buy some fruit plants and veg seeds to do some gardening with the kids, I could afford to buy some stuff online like a table top table tennis set, craft & art supplies, maths books, white board, Lego movie maker set etc.
We have access to the internet and various streaming services on a variety of devices
We have a fully stocked pantry - I am an avid baker so we have a ton of such supplies, so I am able to make pizzas and cakes with the kids as well as have them help me or DH make dinner and so teCh them cooking skills. People with a very limited amount of money or lack of cooking skills will be unable to do that.
We are also lucky that although I’m furloughed on 80% it hasn’t affected our finances to the point that we can not afford bills or food so there is no stress in the household due to that. DH can work from home in a fairly secure sector/job.

But there will be so many children who’s parents either don’t care, don’t have the ability to care or help (learning difficulties or mental illness) or don’t have the resources to help eg no computer at home or 1 computer between 5 etc. I’m not sure what can be done about those children and it’s not always the ‘poor’ families who are unable to cope. There will be well off families where the parents don’t put in what is needed.

And plenty of ‘poor’ families who will be putting in all the time and effort to thier children’s schooling

There's definitely a resources gap.

We live in Germany and German isn't my first language - in fact although I work in German and pass as fluent in everyday life, my spelling and grammar is about the same as my 8 year old's so my children should be disadvantaged.

I'm pretty sure they aren't because they have a PC each, we have a printer and plentiful paper and toner and a scanner, we have fiber optic broadband and I switched to late and night shift so as to be present during the day to supervise their home learning. I've been sitting with my dreamy unfocussed 8 year old and structuring his days, downloading his timetable, finding learning videos to explain the German spelling rules around long and short vowels which I didn't know myself, learning to conjugate verbs in the different past tenses with him, testing him on his spellings, listening to him read, doing the reading comprehension with him etc. etc.

I've been helping my 12 year old structure the project style work and discussing with my nearly 15 year old how the constitution of the Weimar Republic was flawed and how far it contributed to the rise of national socialism...

I used to teach in the UK and some of my most successful students were second generation Chinese or Indian British or Eastern European with parents who didn't speak fluent English... Having the community language as a first language isn't always the advantage some people hope it is!

Parental education and expectations and resources at home make the difference.

The bigger picture is what I'm talking about. Obviously there will be many exceptions. But there will also be many more examples that mirror the statistics. There's a little boy in my dd's class whose mum is near enough illiterate. She can't read and understand school communications or newsletters. The workpacks the school sent home the day before closing, with details of how to access the online learning - she couldn't understand them. I know because she was in the classroom loudly telling the teacher that she 'dont get it'. She has no internet at home, no computer. She's a single parent on benefits, so in lockdown it's just her and her son. Her son's learning is going to be dramatically disadvantaged in comparison to my daughter's during this time.

Looking at individual cases isn't helpful. Education is one of the areas where we have sufficiently large numbers to create meaningful statistics. At a statistical level, this will widen the gap between ecominally advantaged and disadvantaged children.

(Personally I think 'class' is a bit nebulous to be a massively helpful term, but there is obviously a fairly level of crossover between social class and economic advantage, and level of education.)

There will be gaps - but i am sure schools are expecting this.

Expecting, yes. Able to do much about it is a different matter.

My school, for example, is only setting revision at KS3, no new content. We will have to rewrite schemes of learning to cover the new content that they should have been taught. With the best will in the world we will not be able to teach that same content with far less teaching time.

Other schools who are teaching new content will have to decide what to do about the kids who have accessed it versus those who haven’t. Teacher Tapp data suggests that there are lots of children who are meant to be submitting work who aren’t actually submitting it.

noblegiraffe - it sounds impossible. Would schools narrow the curriculumn to ensure that key subjects can be covered.

In our state in Germany the schools are saying nothing will be repeated and being very clear that the parents are 100% responsible for ensuring that children are up to speed.

The education system here barely pays lip service to equality of opportunity really though - children are separated into 3 different school systems by ability at age 9-10 and can fail a year at any point (with rules around when years can be repeated and when they have to change school type if they fail).

The UK system pays lip service... Not sure how much better it addresses the problem fundamentally though. It's certainly not something individual teachers can do much about.