To think no other primary year groups will be going back this year?

[bedspreadwithflowers]

I’ve just read the government guidance for the first time and it explicitly states that all children returning should be offered a full time place. So... if classes can only be 15 pupils they won’t be able to open up to the rest of the school (beyond year R,1 and 6) before Sept will they (or even then)?

Schools are pushed for classroom space at the best of times, no state school has the amount of space available to make this work as far I’m aware.

Personally I’m relieved about this but it’s just another example of the government not thinking things through... why say they had an ambition to get other primary groups back in June if it was obviously unworkable?

That's the guidance. It's not mandatory.
Many schools have already said they cannot follow it so will either do rotas of staff - increasing risks and most I have heard of part-time timetables.
So that's possible to replicate with other years groups. So for example, one school has suggested they'll get 2 hours in the morning for 1 half the class and 2 hours in the afternoon for the rest.

There are about 17,000 primary and infant schools in England. If each school needs 2, 4, 6, more mobile classrooms ? The supply isn't there never mind the money to pay for it.

Narrow minded solutions to solve an impossible task.

My Dc are at prep school. DC is in a big year and they have 16 per class. DD only 10 per class. But they are y3 and 5 so not scheduled for 1 June return. But certainly the head is planning a phased return. But they break up end June anyway so unlikely they will get more than a week or two. They also have huge grounds so could do lots of teaching outside (it's summer after all).

It's MUCH easier for small
Private schools to manage this return. I have no idea how the local state primary with 4 classes of 35 in a year will do. They do have lots of grounds so maybe outdoor lessons?

The government guidelines are pretty impossible to follow to be honest.
Things like, loos cleaned after each bubble has used them ( by the teacher, who cannot do this and be back with her class at the same time), teacher to stay with their bubble for lunch in classroom ( who supervises the class while the teacher goes to the loo? If you use another member of staff going around each group then you break the security of each bubble and virus could be spread from group to group).
The problem with the government saying 'of course you don't have to follow these guidelines' is that if schools don't and something bad happens they make themselves liable and might be sued, which is an awful responsibility for a headteacher to take.
The guidelines are pretty unworkable.
My mum is 82 and used to be a primary teacher. She phoned me last night asking what the plans were. Her immediate reaction was " but with reception, you just spend the entire day taking them to the toilet and making sure they washed their hands".
When teachers complain ( and I am not a teacher in a school but work as a private tutor), it really isn't because they are workshy. They can see that this just isn't feasible.

If only Year 6 and Year 1 go back, presumably there will be plenty of classrooms to accommodate them with social distancing?

caperberries - yes initially a primary school would have enough classrooms. However, a the goverment said ' aim to have all classess back for a month before the summer'. So within a few weeks there are not enough classrooms to follow the guidance.

We are doing a 2 day rota. With 93% of parents indicating their children will be coming back and a number of self isolating staff we have no other choice.
The guidance is not statutory and it says heads do not have to adhere to it.

Also our ks2 classes have 34-36 children in so makes the groups of 15 even trickier to manage.

^*
Anyway, if this is going to be a semi permanent state of affairs, I'm sure mobile classrooms can be obtained relatively easily before September, so it's hardly an enormous stumbling block.*^

We had a double one of these installed a few years back. It's not quite as simple as you suggest, not even taking into account the cost of purchase or rent.

It took days of ground prep - it's a fairly large area of level flooring needed underneath, so may include remove of trees and plants, re;excelling of the yards. Our school yard is in a slope - most of it is not suitable for cabin rooms. The bit that is would need a lot of ground prep including the removal of some old established trees, which I'm not sure is even allowed.

Installing it meant closing the local roads for most of the day.

They then need to be fixed for actual use - you don't just plonk them down and that's it.. stairs and fire exits need to be installed, with disabled access if needed. Then you need to have them kitted our with furniture and it equipment, and have them attached to the mains electricity and/or gas, heating and lighting, wired for broadband and other technology, etc.

Most schools wouldn't have enough tables or spare computers and white boards so will need to order these and have them installed where appropriate.

It's not quite the easy fix as some posters suggest - I've seen it mentioned in other threads.

IF schools go ahead I am guessing it will be 50% in , 50% at home

So that’s the feasible future I guess

We have 75% said their children will be back in R/1/6. As more year groups are added the percentage will increase ( some parents are keeping the younger children at home because elder siblings are not in yet.)

My kids’ school is now 4-form intake so splitting every reception and yr 1 class into 2 means that 16 classrooms will be needed. Just for those 2 years!
Add another 6 classrooms for yr 6 (only 3-form intake).
If the whole school opened and needed twice the space you’d be looking at over 50 classrooms. Currently have probably an absolute maximum of 30 rooms (if you used the dining halls as extra classrooms). So 20 classes still need to be accommodated....!

The government guidance is just that - guidance only. It makes them look good and schools look bad, to issue guidance saying that school should be offered full time. They know this isn’t really possible. And it certainly won’t be possible to return all children to school under the bubble guidelines. Our youngest is year 5. If offered, we will probably keep him at home, partly because of the risk to him/us (I am higher risk) and partly to help the school prioritise key worker families.

As an infant school, if we do have to offer full time and assume all/most will return form reception and year 1, we simply don't have the room at all.

181 children in reception and year 1 plus approx 10 year 2 KW children though probably more as we have a few teacher parents who will need it.

Half classes = 13 groups.

We have 9 classrooms and 1 spare computer room. We don't have a library, etc in their own rooms to use - these are built into corridors. We already have cabin classrooms on the yard as part of those 9 classes, and no room for more.

We have approx 12 toilets across school for pupils to use - half upstairs, half down.

The hall is also the dining room so would be out of action for at least 2 hours a day to allow for staggered lunch and cleaning.

The playground is concrete and on a slope so not suitable for teaching a class outside the whole time and no real way to secure a marquee. The English weather in Yorkshire is also not consistently dry and warm even in the summer.

Old Victorian schools have very little flexibility in their use especially when they are already overcrowded.

The guidance does tell us to prioritise R over year 1 but that's not been in the briefing highlights so so,e parents may well be surprised - and their work places (based on other threads here) not believing them.

And the government has said they'd like to have all primary back for a knots before summer. That gives us around 3 weeks with just years R, 1 and 6. Then them all. At that point, if it's still supposed to be full time, we will be totally abandoning any form of social distancing, bubbles or not.

Basically to meet this as a school we will have to pretty much ignore most of the guidelines. We will have to decide which of the guidance is most important - small groups or full time to start with.

Then it makes us look like the work shy lazy teachers and the government as the shining light - "well we told them to open, it's not our fault they didn't.' The government,ent have not helped schools at all and the DfE guidance seems to be changing daily. My HT has had 3 versions sent so far.

It's quite unlikely that a class of 30 will all be there. Parents I know with a reception or Y1 child aren't sending them back. So you may find in a class of 30 that only have attend.

Other year groups will probably be September now. They may do a transition day in July in small groups so the children meet their new teacher!

The whole ‘everyone back for a month’ thing has been troubling me from the start (even before they re-issued the guidance to state full time places only). It would mean every single primary child going back just 3 weeks after the start of the phased wider opening - surely not enough time to fully assess the impact of the initial return? Plus would have to be under completely different conditions anyway ie 30 in a class, goodbye bubbles.

When you read the sentence fully, it is incredibly conditional. My hope is it is just in there so the government can say ‘oh we tried’. And blame individual schools and lazy teachers of course

We were originally planning a rota. Without one my small primary won’t be able to have all the proposed year groups + keyworker / vulnerable children in, so y6 probably won’t be able to return. However, I do understand that full time places are better for infection control as otherwise you have 1 adult teaching different groups & therefore the bubble becomes 30+ instead of the original 15.

Though with primary aged children myself in their own bubbles, I’ll be exposing any class I teach to a bubble of at least 60 anyway. Once siblings of children in my bubble are factored in, the bubble probably extends to the whole school regardless.

I think this is a very cynical plan by the government. They are fully aware that most schools will struggle to adhere to the guidelines regarding bubbles of 15, social distancing etc and after a couple of weeks will announce that since schools have already 'broken' the rules, we might as well send everybody back to school as planned.
They know full well that schools do not have the physical space, staff, money to follow these rules. Many schools would need more than double the current number of classrooms as they are already working with class sizes of up to 37. Most school do not have spare teachers and many in this area so not have enough TAs to allocate one to each of the extra bubbles, let alone HLTAs. Our junior school has two classes in each year group, each class is around 35. We have a maximum of 14 rooms available as teaching rooms - hall not suitable as we have classrooms leading off it, so 'bubbling' not possible there. We have 18 toilets available for children. If all staff are in, we have a total of 13 teachers - but several of those are job share, so the bubble idea wouldn't work for them and once all children are back, if we have to use TAs, the situation becomes even more complicated because they are mostly part time hours with odd hours, days off etc to be factored in. As things stand, the guidelines will be impossible meet. And given that the guidance RE clinically vulnerable, not shielding, staff now says they should be allowed to work from home where possible, otherwise should be offered the 'safest' roles in school, where possible, I truly, believe this government is setting us up to take the blame for the failure of the return to school.

This isn't rocket science.

The government & the scientists they are relying on do not believe children/schools to be an area of particular risk.

The reality is they are not expecting schools to attempt to social distance, because the evidence seems to suggest they don't need to.

Over the next 2-3 weeks I expect to see a huge shift away from mass social distancing and towards much tighter protection on the really vulnerable areas - care homes etc, combined with a huge health drive to encourage weight loss as most of the people ending up very ill are overweight.

There is no way for all years to be back before the summer, unless we are back to 30+ to a class, OP.

We have 90 in reception, 90 in y1 and only 9 rooms. With 15 to a class, and full time, we will only be able to have YR back anyway as we don’t have enough staff.

And given that the guidance RE clinically vulnerable, not shielding, staff now says they should be allowed to work from home where possible, otherwise should be offered the 'safest' roles in school, where possible,

This group covers around 6 of our teaching staff and another 3 where it's their own in the very vulnerable group.

And that's before we start looking at lunch time staff etc.

NoIdon't

The most recent research suggests that children themselves do not statistically suffer badly from the virus but they are often asymptomatic spreaders. Asymptomatic spreaders are thought to contribute significantly to the transmission rate.

Noidontwatch - even the scientists aren't sure about the transmission from children. They say there is low confidence in the findings that children may not transmit it as much as adults, though clearly they can do to an extreme as this has been shown in real life cases.

So though the children themselves may not get really ill - though again some have and there is this other medical complication starting to be reported in children - they can pass it in and carry it to the adults around them - at school and at home.

I'm sure mobile classrooms can be obtained relatively easily before September, so it's hardly an enormous stumbling block. That is hilarious @Tfoot75

Just my school would need 14 new classrooms. That's a cost of around £700,000, almost certainly more given the ground works that would have to be done to prepare the site for them.

No stumbling block for every primary school in the country to have that sorted by September though.

If we bought all of the mobile classes we needed, we would have no money to pay teachers or any of our other expenses. We are already in a deficit budget, so we buy our own paper-the thought of being able to afford one mobile classroom-let alone the number we’d need, is laughable.

They would also completely fill up our already tiny playground (no field) so all this lovely ‘getting children put into the fresh air’ couldn’t happen anyway!

I expect people would say I’m being defeatist and bringing ‘problems, instead of solutions’ though .