To feel I can't cope with schools only going back part time in August?

[jbonsor]

Just that. I was coping OK with lockdown, and trying to keep positive about juggling kids and working from home til June, then take a few weeks holiday over the summer just to do things with the kids even if still restricted. This week I have received a letter from my son's nursery to say he has a space for the 2020-2021 school year but that due to covid 19 they can't confirm pattern of attendance, as in, they can't confirm if he will have the 30 hours he was having since August. I also have read a lot that primary school might be 2 days only a week or a very day but only morning or afternoon session.. This has really tipped me over the edge as I am dreading having to keep juggling all this for over a year. This really puts a strain in family life and finances because now we have to basically decide on one income only, and not onky that but I don't feel I am that good at home schooling and feel like my kids are going to fall behind. Sometimes I can't believe how everything fell apart so spectacularly and how is the Scottish government deciding this is the best course of action without any regard for the mountain of problems this will bring to a huge amount of families.

@GoldenOmber This is what I'm getting- replicating school at home isn't the only way tor even the best way to teach your child something. learn something else! Let them learn how to play even !

BTW if your child is doing higher chemistry then they are able to learn independently.

Maybe we will be going back to a time when men worked, women stayed at home and looked after the kids and taught them basic skills before going to school at 5 - not 1 or 2 or 3. I like the sound of that.

Fucking hell.

They already know how to play, FreakStar. That’s not what a state education is supposed to provide them. ‘Blended learning’ means part-time learning for children whose parents need to work, and children whose parents can’t support their learning for other reasons.

If I was homeschooling I would not be trying to replicate school. I would be building our own ‘curriculum’, doing loads of creative stuff, letting them follow their own interests and shaping those into learning, working with them to find new ways to learn about the world. But I wouldn’t be expecting to combine that with a full-time job because it is fairly obviously not doable.

Children who are abused and neglected are still going to school- they are the "vulnerable' children who school didn't close to and are continuing to get support- they are the reasons schools were never fully closed.

They’re mostly not going. Because if you’re an addict, an abuser, or just plain neglectful you’re not going to bother your arse getting your kids to school unless it’s compulsory. And you’re sure as shit not going to spend the day baking banana bread and teaching the kids Mandarin.

The official guidance says that the priority is to get nursery, reception year 1 and year 6 back into school. It was also clearly said that all of the year group should be in full time, not on a part time basis. A lot of schools do however appear to have gone for some kind of part-time attendance, which we believe has greater risk then full-time attendance.
As a school where i am chair of governors the intention is to follow the guidance as published. So we will start back up in a calculated, careful manner firstly reintroducing year 6, then year 1, reception and lastly nursery. This is based on our belief that it is best to do this slowly in phases, with a week between each year group returning.
We are intending to have classes of 15, which whilst not meeting the 2 metre guidance is the best that is realistically possible. With these year groups back in school, along with the vulnerable children /key worker children that have been in school all the time, we will then be using all the available classrooms and the available staffing, with some concentrating on "homework" for those not in school.

It does not take a genius to work out that not all children can return in every year group. So the question that as a school we have, is what is going to happen in September? If we have not got to the point of being back in classes of 30, then how do we cater for all pupils? Even if we can find available local halls etc, there is a massive staffing issue which is not affordable but also is not realistic because enough trained staff are not simply available for classes of 15. Volunteers are no substitute for trained teachers and TAs.
I know that the DfE know they have to face up to this problem but they appear to be soft peddling coming up with an answer anytime in the near future.

@jbonsor I feel outraged at the scottish government as well, and as a previous supporter I'm a bit surprised at how my estimation has fallen. I really don't feel that the costs these measures have been sufficiently taken into account. It seems that the approach is very over cautious considering a lot of new evidence that has been amassed at this and I struggle to explain it.

This is ridiculous and I hope England does not follow suit. 22 European countries have reopened schools and their teachers are fine to go in. Sweden has had all children up to 16 in school as normal throughout and there have been no reported problems.

There will be plenty of evidence by August to reopen schools full-time as normal. A the consequences of keeping them closed for this generation will be catastrophic. Particularly for teenagers who will miss a major developmental stage socially as well as academically.

Headteacher at my ds primary said it would be part time until end of the year due to social distancing

modgepodge Children go backwards over the 6 week summer holiday

For a minority of children perhaps. Any teacher I have ever spoken to has always said children come on in leaps and bounds after a school holiday. This is very apparent in young children when their speech, sentence construction and confidence soars after spending an extended period of time with adults. I realise in this pandemic, that adults cannot spend as much quality time with the children as they can during a break away, but to say that children go backwards during the six week summer holiday is simply untrue for the vast majority of children.

@SuperMumTum
But my heart aches for the thousands of children living in poverty, in cramped conditions, with daily abuse and neglect

Please be careful how you word this kind of thing. Children living in poverty or cramped conditions are not all subjected to daily abuse and neglect. Just as children living in middle class homes are not all baking cup cakes and doing mini beast hunts in their extensive gardens. Abuse doesn’t recognise class, money in the bank or living conditions. All children are potential victims, not just poor ones.

@Doryhunky Headteacher at my ds primary said it would be part time until end of the year due to social distancing
I think he/she is talking rubbish. No one knows what's going to happen. Does social distancing stop at 31st December?

I feel like secondary school age children have been forgotten here.My dd is year 7 no mention of a return date and even then could be part time?
Teachers have been doing the best they can, but it's not anything like classroom learning and my dd is losing motivation as time goes on.
I try and help but a lot of the work goes over my head, she needs more input from teachers which you can't get with remote learning.
I can never understand why the government prioritised younger children's learning over older but I guess it's down to childcare as opposed to education.

I know that the DfE know they have to face up to this problem but they appear to be soft peddling coming up with an answer anytime in the near future.

Given they haven't even come up with any guidance for y10 /12 for post June 1st, despite saying it was coming "shortly" when the detailed primary guidance was issued on 14th May, I would be very surprised if any guidance on wider primary opening was issued for many weeks, possibly not until mid-August.

@eyewhiaker I do hope they actually look at the evidence at that point. Seems alld excision making is fueled by fear and not by analysing the data and evidence available.

Wonder how all the children evacuated during the war coped. They did by the way

MIL would disagree with you. Her education was completely wrecked by the war.

22 European countries have reopened schools and their teachers are fine to go in.

How many are fully open teaching as normal in classes of 30?

Almost all I've read about are phased return with restrictions, and many only opened AFTER gaining guidance from education representatives.

Even our government likes to tell us than schools in Denmark have returned and all is fine, but don't seem to realise that many English teachers would be quite happy with what their schools are going to look like and with their class sizes and facilities. What English schools have suggested initially is nothing like those danish schools!

Wonder how all the children evacuated during the war coped. They did by the way

Yeah, sure.

The children are not being evacuated.

I think some of you need to understand how teachers feel. In the supermarket we have to queue up 2m apart. We are meant to stay home as much as possible. We can’t see family. We should wear face masks in closed spaces.

But don’t worry about any of that in a school.

The messaging is all about staying safe and keeping a distance. Except in a school - don’t worry, schools have magic powers. That’s not ok.

When social distancing is over everywhere, then it can be over in schools. Lots of people keep saying schools must return, then they have to return with measures in place to keep school staff, and kids, safe.

I think you have to look not only at what the school is like in other countries, but also the new infection rate in the country.

If there are, say, 100 new infections in a whole country per day, that is inherently safer than when there are 3000 - and therefore high risk, low social distancing environments like schools can be opened with many fewer restrictions.

So i would love Denmark's model, not so much for how the schools are organised, but for the tiny number of overall deaths and the very low number of new cases each day at the point the schools were opened - indeed I would be DELIGHTED to return to school even in a very English classroom setup if our infections and deaths were at Danish levels on the day I returned.

Though, tbh, I would love some of those playground handwashing stations you see in pictures of Denmark. Those look fab. They might even have HOT WATER!! (A rare beast in sinks in primary schools IME)

"We were fully prepared to do that but it's looking like they will only go part time from Aug 2020 to Aug 2021"

@jbonsor Is that the nursery or the primary school that will be part time for the full academic year?

Wonder how all the children evacuated during the war coped. They did by the way

Literacy and numeracy levels fell significantly. Their wellbeing suffered. Evacuees still attended makeshift schools, so there was the socialisation. Lifelong effects when you look at studies of Syrian children etc

This is a vaguely relevant point, how?

We have known about this disease for 5 months, however the Scottish government are happy that in 2 months time we won’t know enough to say our kids can return to school full time. There has been little from the government for kids, it’s all about the older generation. Let’s get the golf clubs, garden centres and bowling greens reopened. The kids are least likely to be infected and least likely to suffer severe disease. Their education has been jeopardised, who knows the effects all this will have on them in the long term. Nobody even truly has an understanding of the effects of removing them from any virus exposure, I suspect we will find effects that we didn’t have any idea about become apparent in the weeks and months to come.

@mintcassis all kids in Scotland. Or that's what Nicola Sturgeon implied. So far a letter from Nursery but nothing yet from the primary.