To be shocked at yet another last minute gov announcement.

[wantmorenow]

New guidance for schools just announced on a Friday night before schools return. Breathtaking incompetence.

@canigooutyet

I'm confused.

Those saying it's easy set up, they did it themselves. Is this for sharing with students?

Things like CG, MS etc should always be set up by Tech support including all pupils accounts.

Assuming you are a Google School...

Go to classroom.google.com, click on the big plus sign, create you classroom, add your students.

@canigooutyet

Depending on how these things are set up their could be potential problems for individual staff.

There are always Luddite staff who can’t even input their username.

@mumsgonetogreenland

Just an aside, but our school won't use anything provided by Google because they insist on storing their data on US servers (unlike MS). Instant GDPR fail.

No. Just no.

[quote MrsHamlet]@canigooutyet ours is set up by our tech team. By default students cannot use the chat function and their cameras are turned off. Every team is monitored centrally. Staff can't set up teams either - that's done centrally too.[/quote]
Paranoia the destroyer.

Why do you worry (ASSume) so much about what other teachers/schools/families can manage? Just do the very best job you can do.

What are you whiffling on about?

Primary school parents will struggle to get their kid through 5 hours of remote learning a day. Of course they will. Many have jobs to do, and it is hard to get primary kids to focus for that long.

That’s completely irrelevant to me ‘doing the best job I can do’ because I’m a secondary maths teacher who will do as I’m told.

But can you understand that some schools are in the position that students don't all have access to technology @CraftyGin.

So what would you suggest for those schools?

Surely this was planned for from March to July when the then current remote learning was at a minimum. Please dont try and tell us that right up until the official end of term you were doing full school days preparing and assessing last terms work and not forward planning?!!
My colleagues were forward planning. They were trying to redo the curriculum ready for September and play a guessing game on GCSE provision because the exam boards didn't confirm changes for next year's year 11 until part way through the summer holidays.

Unfortunately, however good my colleagues are, they can't plan for every single possible decision that the government may or may not make.

Dear lord, @CraftyGin. How can you keep insisting that the problem with large state schools is a lack of positive thinking, not the fact that we don’t have the same resources as your tiny private school populated by priveleged kids who all have school chromebooks and home WiFi. Do you understand how hard it was for schools to source laptops at the start of lockdown for staff and students? We tried to buy 80 laptops in March-April and they were like gold dust. It took weeks and weeks to source them. Even in a magical world where we’d had a spare half a million quid to provide one for every student and staff member, there is no way that we could have sourced 1,200 laptops anyway. We had two shipments cancelled because they’d been requisitioned by the government for other purposes before finally getting our delivery of 80. Sourcing mobile data dongles to send home (because not all our students do have WiFi) was a similar ordeal.

You need to stop talking like you provided online education because you are so much cleverer than other teachers. The fact is that you work in a tiny school, where all of the kids have decent tech access and there seem to be very lax policies on teachers setting kids up on online platforms independently. In a large school you just can’t have that kind of free-for-all. There needs to be one consistent system, understood by everyone and managed by the central IT team so that there is oversight by management.

My partner is an IT contractor for schools and supports some tiny “rinky dink” private schools like yours. They just don’t operate in anything like the same way as a big secondary. He had the most ridiculous time trying to explain to one school that rather than teachers all setting up their own classes and groups on Teams they should just use a consistent naming system for classes in SIMS and then generate the groups from that. Their timetabler just couldn’t get their tiny mind around why using a consistent naming convention for classes in SIMS was necessary. My mind boggles. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have that anyway, regardless of lockdown and there is no way you could run a school the size of ours without one. Their timetabler would clearly not have a hope in hell of writing a timetable for a school like ours with the level of complexity that our timetablers work with despite thinking they are wonderfully brilliant at it. It’s a bit like being proud of how well you organise your sock drawer when you only own two pairs of socks. 😂

No. Just no.

Loving your well reasoned arguments. Google refuses to meet GDPR requirements when storing data, presumably so it can sell that data. Microsoft doesn't do this. For this reason, some schools choose to reject Google products in order to protect staff and student data. But of course, you can just say 'no' to this if you like.

It’s a bit like being proud of how well you organise your sock drawer when you only own two pairs of socks.

Throughout this pandemic I've got to the point of rolling my eyes to myself each time a poster seems to think 'but my private school / DC's private school / the private school down the road does X' is a decent way to have a go at the state sector.

You call it paranoia. We call it safeguarding.

We are really lucky, because my school is in a privileged area.

'Devices' are reasonably common - but usually 1 tablet per family, or 1 laptop for a parent trying to work from home + all their children, or a couple of phones across the family.

We set up 'non live' online learning, because it was really clear to us that the times pupils were submitting work was at the weekends, after their parents' working hours, very early in the morning, only for 'their' hour on the family computer etc.

We supplemented it with printed material, or printable material, putting up the resources every Friday so parents hit the website every weekend to print off a week's supply of worksheets if they could.

We accepted work in all sorts of forms - written and photographed, typed, within online programmes, recorded as speech...

We lent out every school-owned laptop.

We had a large proportion of the over half the school who had keyworker parents in school, all with adults prepared to 'teach' and allocated time on in-school IT equipment to get their work done.

Every teacher, after half term, balanced in-school teaching for retuyrned groups + keyworker groups with online learning for everyone else, including video contact with our own classes every week.

We are still berated by some on here because we 'didn't do proper live online teaching'.

Agree, LolaSmiles. Per-pupil funding at DH's school is five times higher than in the state sector (that's day fees, not boarding). If you can't provide a significantly slicker provision for that (both in lockdown and in normal times), then wtf are the parents paying for?

@LolaSmiles

Surely this was planned for from March to July when the then current remote learning was at a minimum. Please dont try and tell us that right up until the official end of term you were doing full school days preparing and assessing last terms work and not forward planning?!! My colleagues were forward planning. They were trying to redo the curriculum ready for September and play a guessing game on GCSE provision because the exam boards didn't confirm changes for next year's year 11 until part way through the summer holidays.

Unfortunately, however good my colleagues are, they can't plan for every single possible decision that the government may or may not make.

I was delivering my full timetable from March to July. I used Y11/sixth form time to forward plan, as I do every year. Doesn’t everyone?

I takes me about 10 minutes to put a lesson on Google Classroom, so not particularly onerous. I can reuse resources created for Google Classroom last year.

@ineedaholidaynow

But can you understand that some schools are in the position that students don't all have access to technology *@CraftyGin*.

So what would you suggest for those schools?

I can’t worry about other schools. I can only do what is right for my students using the resources available to me.

Are you suggesting I do nothing because other schools have fewer resources? Race to the bottom?

No I am not suggesting that @CraftyGin. But you seem very keen on telling other schools that they should have plans in place and go on about yours as if that is what other schools should be doing, so just wondered what you would advise them to do

@LolaSmiles

It’s a bit like being proud of how well you organise your sock drawer when you only own two pairs of socks.

Throughout this pandemic I've got to the point of rolling my eyes to myself each time a poster seems to think 'but my private school / DC's private school / the private school down the road does X' is a decent way to have a go at the state sector.

For the independent sector, it is all about survival. If we don’t deliver a full curriculum, we are dead.

We can’t do the ‘woe is me’ dance. We have to get on with it, and the on-costs are huge. Our development budget is shot for the next few years (apart from IT :) ). We don’t have access to slush funds and grants.

So it’s all about what we can do for the students rather than what we cannot.

@ineedaholidaynow

No I am not suggesting that *@CraftyGin*. But you seem very keen on telling other schools that they should have plans in place and go on about yours as if that is what other schools should be doing, so just wondered what you would advise them to do

I think teachers/schools should have plans. Absolutely.

I am not suggesting that all plans should be identical.

For the independent sector, it is all about survival. If we don’t deliver a full curriculum, we are dead.

We can’t do the ‘woe is me’ dance. We have to get on with it, and the on-costs are huge. Our development budget is shot for the next few years (apart from IT smile ) We don’t have access to slush funds and grants.

So it’s all about what we can do for the students rather than what we cannot.

You're proving my point here. It's all about how you (independent sector) are putting children first and how you are doing all this wonderful stuff, totally laced with the implication that state schools just don't bother.

What you should really be saying is 'I work in the independent sector and we did X Y Z because we are fortunate enough to have privileged families, most of our students have the advantage of appropriate technology, we have smaller class sizes and don't have the same challenges as typical state schools. Our response was directly linked to the nature of our sector and families we work with, and the different nature of our context means we have been able to make decisions that wouldn't work in other schools'.

You know rather than suggesting staff in the state sector just need to care a bit more about the students and think positively.

The state and private sector have such different drivers, almost opposite ends, that it’s a reason why the choices about part time etc become more difficult.

@mumsgonetogreenland

Agree, LolaSmiles. Per-pupil funding at DH's school is five times higher than in the state sector (that's day fees, not boarding). If you can't provide a significantly slicker provision for that (both in lockdown and in normal times), then wtf are the parents paying for?

Most independent schools are charities, so income has to match outgoings.

The difference between headline pupil funding is more like 3x, but state school allocation do not include all the costs of providing an education, so the difference is more like 2x.

A school with 2000 students will have much less overhead per pupil. compared to my tiny school of fewer than 100 students (with no access to grants and slush funds).

School leader here. Thankfully we’d planned for this shit show. I’ve spent the summer ensuring the site is one way movement as corridors are too narrow to socially distance, arranging bubbles and coloured zones of movement for them so they don’t ‘cross contaminate’ with other year groups, organised seperate breaks and lunch’s for ur groups (secondary), staffing duties x4 to supervise these, demonstration videos for students, staff and parents, new Covid policies, face covering use and etiquette etc etc the list goes on. I’m shattered. I’ve been on site 4 weeks of the 6 week break.

Pastoral and behaviour systems will suffer for schools who use detentions, isolation and internal exclusions.

What do you mean state school allocation do not include all the costs of providing an education @CraftyGin?

Where are these "slush funds" that state schools apparently have access to? I'd quite like some please!

Yes, but that just illustrates how different schools are. At some private schools income is significantly more than 3x state funding. Some private schools are huge, so the overhead argument doesn't apply. Income might have to match outgoings, but if you're already starting from a situation of superb facilities, high end IT and lots of outside space, then you're already at a big advantage. Other private schools won't have any or all of these things. I think it's fair to say that ALL schools will have made plans - but they will be quite different depending on very, very many factors. This is unavoidable - but it is also what has enraged parents.