AIBU to expect a bit more from school

[MuminMama]

The work the school is setting my year six child is dire. It's not nearly enough to fill the four school hours we are aiming for. It takes me half an hour to work out what they want us to do. Half the downloads are empty files. So little care has gone into it, and there's so little appreciation that working parents may need something that's fairly easy for them to administer. I feel that I'm supposed to be immensely grateful to these teachers but really they are hardly breaking their butts. This is ten minutes of work for someone to throw together. To an extent I'm just venting, but I'd love to know how much help others are getting.

@snowballer
My multi-academy trust has made a blanket decision that we are not allowed to record our Teams sessions, and that we are also not supposed to pre-record them to play out, as their value lies in the "live" element. This leaves no room for us to actually assess the situation or adapt properly, but is a Trust-wide directive, so that's that!

This is why we need it centralising I suppose, because that's why the offers differ wildly.

@listsandbudgets

I agree that 6 hours is too much in this instance (and at such short notice) but I think they're covering their backs- it was 3 lots of training and much of it was repeated - 1 hour of it was watching a walk-through of the site! It's literally walk here, go through this open door, go here - a whole hour of flannel. But the people that are putting this training together aren't trainers - they're just people that have been given the job, form somewhere higher up in the academy hierarchy (it makes me realise how nuanced the job of training facilitator actually is!)

In other news :)
After I posted this morning, I received an email from one of my SLT (to all teaching staff) advising that our inset programme is still on, and is scheduled for the last week of term
Originally, at the start of the academic year back in September, we had the option to have a week of inset in July (tacked onto the front end of the summer break), or to do the inset training during the evenings throughout term. The decision was to do the evening insets (Twilights) and then still have the inset days as closed to school in July - so effectively the kids get the extra week off, and the staff have pre-worked those inset hours, so can also have them off.

Covid put paid to about half of those evening sessions, so now we are still required to do that inset training

• so once the term is over for our kids, we have the following options:

5 days x 3 hours a day (4 hours on the first day)
4 days x 4 hours a day

3 days x 5 hours a day (6 hours on the first day)

Literally, when term is over we have to be available for a combination of Teams and online training modules for that many hours.

Seriously!!

Boris Johnson at the podium yesterday actively encouraging parents to send their children to school pfft I would if I could there's no place!

When are the Govt going to make their statement on schools?Action is needed to sort this growing mess out. There are a LOT of increasingly stressed parents and teachers waiting....

I sympathise, OP. I think the main gripe I would have is the disparity between provisions between schools. So you have a school who is providing high quality work, remote learning with online classes and regular calls with the teacher to keep them engaged with their learning. And you have another which provides next to nothing. It’s easy to see why a parent would fee embittered if her child is in a latterly described school.
Our provision is pretty good, if it wasn’t, even allowing for the current difficulties schools find themselves in, I might be complaining too. I’m from a background of teachers and it’s a hugely respected profession in my home country (much more so than the UK frankly) so I’m not one to complain unless necessary. The reality is, the provision isn’t down to individual teachers, it’s more the head or The trust, so really if anyone should be in the firing line for shoddy provision, it should be the head or the governors. Teachers Are bound by so much red tape and can only follow guidelines set by the school or the trust.

@CallmeAngelina cancer treatment hasn't stopped altogether, patients have been able to access treatment and care throughout COVID (although it may be in a different way to before). Garages are essential businesses and have also remained open. You can check your tyres all you like but it doesn't qualify you to conduct an MOT.

I don't have a horse in this race however I think its very disingenuous to say that people should just teach their own children because of coronavirus, regardless of how temporary that is.

Of course I wouldn't do my own MOT, but I would do what little I could to make sure it remains roadworthy as far as possible; you know, being pro-active.
Maybe cancer treatments are ongoing, but there are issues with initial diagnoses being missed.
And I didn't say for parents to "just" teach their own children. But they can certainly do some basics and help ensure their kids stay on track. I've read of kids of parents just shrugging and letting their kids give up altogether. You can blame teachers/schools/unions/Boris all you like, but who's going to suffer in the long run?
Who's going to s

I can understand the frustration of parents who are WFH full time and being made to feel they have to teach their child themselves , it's your child , chase the teacher yourself etc. Fortunately I'm available most of the time to support DS, but on the few occasions I haven't been around, DH has had to step in then work into the evening to catch up on his own work. His work wouldn't be too impressed if he only did a portion of his job to do school work with DS.

@CallmeAngelina to be clear I'm more talking about @heartsonacake 's post rather than yours.
Parents should support their children's learning regardless of whether there's a global pandemic or not, but teaching is the role of those trained to do so. Its difficult and shit, and will likely continue to be shit for some time, but professions have all had to learn to adapt and deliver efficiently. A lot of the time this is done well, some of the time it isn't, which is what OP is posting about.

LettyBriggs

Yeah, I don't blame the individual teachers at all. I'm assuming in our case, for example, that it was the head who decided to furlough my son's class teacher. It's presumably hard for the teachers to do their job if they have been sent home and told not to. It would have been good if he had a plan for how the class was going to be taught in her absence, though.

@toomanypillows is that during
The summer holiday?

@davincitoad no it's our normal inset - but as we've only done about half the inset days we normally would have in a year, they've decided to lump them all together at the end of this term so we make up the inset time.

I feel it strikes the wrong chord given the extra hours most of us have already worked. And I question the value of generic training during a very specific set of circumstances

Some are core sessions and then we have 3 where we get the choice.

One of the sessions we can sign up for is "mindfulness" another is "wellbeing" and another is "stress reduction"

I feel like not making us do tbise sessions would help with all three of those issues 😂

@toomanypillows isn’t the union guidance you don’t have to make up time lost during closure? Sounds dodgy

@davincitoad
The problem is we had the 5 inset days already in the calendar at the end of July - so effectively an extra week off for the kids.
In order to facilitate that, we had to work those inset hours across the terms during evening inset sessions.
But as we haven't done some of those sessions, we still have to make them up because otherwise that week should still technically be term time.

i. e we can only have that week off if we've already done that inset training and worked those hours because that summer holiday starts the week after.

@toomanypillows interesting! Our school also do twilights so we can have those days at home. No mention of making up the time...yet.

It seems a bit ridiculous when you have no doubt done so much extra work at home.

toomanypillows - bless your patience and still taking the time to explain the behind the scenes complexity.

Op you’re right a lot of what she described is labour intensive. When teachers complain about paperwork and admin that’s part of what they’re complaining about-things that could be streamlined and easier but aren’t because you have to do x,y and z in the right order and record what you did on system a and if that fails repeat all of it twice. In a reasonable world for example no she shouldn’t spend half her time chasing after parents who can’t be arsed to engage despite clear communications, reminders, second chances etc but we do have to. That’s part of what ‘supporting vulnerable students’ or ‘closing the attainment gap’ looks like.

We can’t ‘just call home’. We have to connect to our school servers, look up the phone number, open the database where all contact with home must be recorded, add time and dad and your name and student name and reason for calling, all so you can enter, no answer, in the outcome column. Probably you already knew that would happen because that parent never answers the phone or responds to communications but the onus is on us to repeatedly work through a set of steps for attempting contact.

So many things that should take 5 minutes become massive time-consuming ordeals of adhering to rules and procedures and recording processes.

Sorry this is long

@Butmiss I don't mind doing the inset, but I just want it to be relevant.
And maybe not 3 full days worth after the end of this term, because I'm not sure I'll take any of it in 😂

It's great HoneyBadger. Both sides need to understand a bit more I'd say and this sort of info is really helpful.

Trust me we’d love to be able to use our judgment and crack on and focus on teaching and learning but that is not what it’s like anymore.

[quote toomanypillows]@Butmiss I don't mind doing the inset, but I just want it to be relevant.
And maybe not 3 full days worth after the end of this term, because I'm not sure I'll take any of it in 😂[/quote]
It’s never relevant and it’s always when you’ve got a million more pressing and important things you could be doing. I have to work very hard at controlling my overly expressive face at inset sessions.

If you could be sacked for facial expressions I’d never make it past September inset in a new school

@MuminMama

It's great HoneyBadger. Both sides need to understand a bit more I'd say and this sort of info is really helpful.

Thanks. I really wish parents and teachers could understand and work together to pressure governments into better schooling. Instead the government is very effective at divide and rule and blaming teachers for structural and funding issues those governments have created.

The whole teachers are shit thing could be hmm schools, some more than others, seem to be really struggling and have been for many years now. We have a shortage of teachers especially in stem subjects and teachers are leaving in droves saying conditions are too shite for them to continue. This can’t be good for our children’s education. Parents and teachers should pressure the government to improve conditions and funding in schools to make them good places to teach and learn so that kids and teachers want to be there.

Instead we get teachers are lazy entitled whinging bastards and we don’t care if they all quit.

Cheap divide and rule

@TheHoneyBadger at least on a Teams training session I can turn my video off and doodle/read mumsnet/ chat to DS while I roll my eyes and sigh

Instead the government is very effective at divide and rule

ain't that the truth

True pillows

It’s amusing that we’re all trained not to talk at people for long and to break up lessons etc in our own practice yet come inset I find myself sat passively losing the will to live while people read PowerPoints at me for hours.