Home-schooling.

[FfsAlexa]

I know that this will be anxiety triggering for many people and I know it might not happen BUT I have heard countless parents say that if they have to home-school again especially WFH parents. It will finish them off, let alone the mental health implications for their children, even more challenging for those with additional needs, disabilities.or illness, babies or demanding toddlers, single parents etc. I believe there needs to be a big effort and campaign from the education department to involve agencies (cahms, health advisors, sencos etc) in putting together support and advice for parents. How to prioritise a child's or their own mental health above their learning. Techniques, guidance, etc and assurance that they will have support during and once through to the other side Eg. Tutors, well-being advisors, helplines, free resources etc. It's going to take more than Joe Wickes to motivate the nation if schools close again. Children's mental health needs to be prioritised and so do their parents. The stress of it all needs to be properly validated? Can you tell im worried? Aaaaaaand brreeeeeathe.

Mt school is in a covid hotspot. We are closing temporarily as more than half our staff are sick with covid including the head, deputy and office staff. Nobody wants to do home learning again especially the teachers. It's incredibly time consuming making videos and adapting lessons to be uploaded to online learning platforms. I'd much rather be on school teaching. We won't be sitting around doing nothing!

I have been a teacher for 12 years and love it, but if schools close again I may need to leave the profession. Online teaching is impossible, I had students attempt suicide during Lockdown 1 and the buck of how to assess kids for GCSE and A Level and how to fill gaps in learning has been passed to schools when it should be a proper, well thought-out and fully funded government strategy. The stress of the last 2 years has been horrendous. We have a Year 7 cohort who are experiencing social issues and separation anxiety like nothing I have seen before. As a parent, I also worry about the impact on school closures on my young children. Schools really must remain open.

I wouldn't be able to cope, i'm a single parent with a 3 and 6 year old and i can barely get any work done whilst looking after them let alone attempting homeschooling DS1. My mental health is extremely precarious as it is without throwing another challenge into the mix and in the January lockdown i got a (albeit tenuous) keyworker place and whilst i got vilified for it it was absolutely the right thing to do. DS1 has issues with seperation anxiety and school refusal and if he had had over 2 months off school this year I wouldn't have been able to get him back into the classroom. It's bad enough every September.

Everyone struggles with different things and I don't judge people who struggle with things that I don't.

To be fair the Government put together Oaks Academy online, which is free tutor-led videos and other resources for the entire primary and secondary curriculum. Plus BBC Bitesize has some amazing resources online. And it’s all still up and freely available to anyone worldwide who has internet. I’m just saying that was impressive and it should not be dismissed.

Mental health is a problem yes. I’ve been shocked by how many adults have gone a bit bonkers lately.

To those saying ‘they won’t shut schools’ two of our local schools have already warned parents that so many staff are now off sick that if it gets even slightly worse the school will have to send some years home as there will be no staff left to look after them. It isn’t just a central policy decision it’s also a matter of realities…

Parents can help avoid this by keeping sick kids off school, or testing them, even when in a normal year you’d send them in. The reason my locals schools have such disastrous levels of covid are down to a small number of parents who sent their ill children without testing them as they thought ‘it’s just a cold’ and then infected large quantities of people including staff. Be aware that the government guidance on symptoms is out of date and delta variant covid symptoms are exactly the same as the common cold in many children, with sneezing rather than coughing, etc.

Oak academy is shite. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. Qualified and experienced primary teacher.

My son's school tell me that they are not childcare when they send them home from school due to a light snow dust. Equally Im not education. Teaching is a skilled job. I cannot work at home and home school my son.
All these threads do is whip up tension.

"I really can't understand how people can't handle their own children if they need to in a crisis situation, like a lock-down."

Some children struggle with change more than yours do. Mine was constantly hurting himself and us. Fortunately his disability social worker said he must be able to go back in. Other families weren't so fortunate.

Just received an email from our school saying to prepare ourself that home learning is likely to happen imminently as they are short staffed due to teachers getting inflected. In my case, im not sure id have the time to do any additional reading/talking to someone about our wellbeing alongside doing everything else,(please no additional zoom calls) but that may work for some people..

I totally agree we need to prioritise children's mental health and give a bit of a thought at least to parents, but there is only so far you can go with online resources and helplines when the problem is the shit situation. We have a whole government website here in Scotland (ParentClub) that gave us 'advice' for keeping kids mentally healthy and combining WFH and homeschooling and so on for working parents, and it was almost comically useless.

@Cosmois

I really can't understand how people can't handle their own children if they need to in a crisis situation, like a lock-down. I say this as a WFH mum. 2 of my 4 children have SEN and one goes to a SEN school so they by no means easy. But we will cope if we have to.

Oh goody, this discourse again. "I can't even FATHOM why people would struggle with chairing a 20-person crisis work meeting while changing a toddler's nappy while teaching Primary 1 phonics to a screaming sobbing child all at the same time, it is a total mystery to me. Why could this be?"

At my nursery I had to operate a key worker system when this happened & include childcare workers in that to guarantee all my girls’ kids a place at the nursery. Otherwise there would not have been any childcare for the doctors, nurses, carers and supermarket workers who needed it locally & exclude kids where one parent wasn’t working. I could only do that by forcing parents to prove they were both working through payslips etc. I don’t want to do that again especially as I’m sure a lot of wealthier families did abuse the system by pretending mums were employed when they weren’t. I think I’d rather just close.

17:27Invasionofthegutsnatchers

How is Oakacademy shite?

Incidentally I think it's incredibly unlikely that schools will close because we're looking at a level of vaccine cover, anti virals and public opinion strongly against.

Each of my children (Y4, Y2 and preschool) came out of Friday with log in details for the new online learning platform the school is introduced "for children self isolating and in the event if another national lockdown" although the letter reassured us that they are planning for all eventualities and aren't expecting another lockdown

Lockdown #1 wasn't too bad in terms of homeschooling. The weather was fab and the work was very child / parent friendly.

Lockdown #2 was grim. I had to homeschool 2 children and follow the curriculum / submit daily work / attend zoom calls. Alongside working and looking after the toddler. We only had one laptop and one Chromebook (Chromebook doesn't work anymore so we now only have my work laptop) so I literally had to pick a child to "teach" and the other was left their own devices. It was horrendous and the thought of doing it again fills me with dread and sadness.

My Y2 is clearly behind in all aspects of her learning and I am afraid I did more harm than good, when it was left to me to teach her.