Covid primary schooling and virtual lessons

[Merryoldgoat]

I’ll try to be brief - I’ve been speaking to a friend from a different area who I’ve not had a proper catch up with in about 2 years.

She said during the school closures her primary aged children (Y3&Y4 at the start) had virtual lessons every school day.

Not for the full school day but about 2-3 hours depending on the lesson.

Normal state school in a mixed area.

Was this normal? We didn’t have a single online lesson.

YABU - my kid’s school had regular virtual lessons

YANBU - no virtual lessons at my kid’s school.

Does it matter now?

No lol.

Our provision was utter shit.

A few scanned work books sent via teams.

Whilst virtual lessons sound like they are brilliant, they would basically be a teams call with a load of kids. I think obsessing about this now is beyond daft. Move on.

It might. My son has an EHCP and the provision was extremely poor and he might need a new school and I’m trying to understand if the poor provision was ‘just Covid’ or ‘shit school’.

I’m not obsessing - I’m asking. You’re not required to answer. You could also ask WHY I’m interested if you wanted to know rather than just assume something else.

My local state primary was the same as yours OP. Thankfully my DC are secondary age and they did have online classes.

Thing is, it's possible to have delivered ineffective lessons, via daily online sessions.

So it doesn't really tell you much about how good/ bad the school is.

It has already happened. Why would he need a new school?
If you think the school doesn't meet his needs now, move him. I don't understand why trying to decide if the provision back then was poor helps.

Say that the provision was poor. It is now over. How does that affect the provision now?

My DCs’ primary school polled parents and they didn’t want live lessons.

We didn’t want them because we needed the laptops for our own work at the time the classes would have been scheduled and our DC would have missed them.

Videos that we could access at our convenience while we could be around to support were much better.

The only virtual lesson my DC had was a recorder lesson 😂

The rest was a weekly plan of obligatory and optional work for each subject, but nothing the children couldn't do themselves or hadn't already covered in class. Submitted via email or upload. Twice a week the teachers held a chat hour - one so the kids could see each other and the other was optional.

Our provision was dire. 2 worksheets off Twinkle a week. Nothing marked.

We had zero lessons. A few tasks set on seesaw, utter shite.

Our school had an online provision.

DS was in reception that year and attends as were key workers. He was off for a week and we tried some of the online session but it was chaos as previous poster said it would be.

Schools had NO idea what they were doing. They found out when you did that they were closing and they ploughed on as best they could.

there are many different reasons for not having online learning. Ours didn’t because a) most of the families only had a phone to use to access the internet b) families had multiple children in the same home accessing one device c) teachers had their own children to sort out / safeguarding concerns.

schools did the best they could under the circumstances. They had never used (or heard) of teams prior to March 2020. It was a massive learning curve.

Ours was some online worksheets,
Some prerecorded lessons by their class teacher (these were really good) and a weekly zoom show and tell in small groups.

Correct.

It depends when.

The first lockdown we set some online work. We were not able to set up many online lessons as we didn't have the facilties initially.

The second lockdown (January to half term) we were much better equipped and I taught every lesson as normal but online.

1st lockdown absolutely nothing though a quick video catch up before summer was hastily organised so we could tick a box saying they had been in contact. 2nd lockdown was much better had 2 video class calls a week but they weren't lessons. Just sent 4 hours of oak academy lessons - nothing inspirational!

My friend is a teacher and her school was so different she was delivering multiple online lessons a day, taking in work, marking and giving children feedback. She was also teaching in school at the same time and absolutely worked her socks off.

No blame on the teachers but feel our head teacher really was to blame for the lack of education in the school at the time - he luckily was 'promoted' after. The replacement had a very different approach.

Each school had their own approach.

I think primary schools varied so much during Covid. Mine had work packs, live lessons but not every day although everything stepped up a level for the 3rd lockdown (daily live lessons and intervention sessions). My youngest teacher dropped round reading books.

Teachers checked in every couple of weeks.

This. Entirely this.

@ShirazSavedMySanity

They had heard of it by dec/Jan 21 though

And by the end of the 1st couple of weeks of lock down

My kids school actively made an awful situation much worse than it had to be.

They badly failed the children and as far as I know, they've never been held to account for it. Nor have the govt who were ultimately responsible

My dc went to tiny rural primary with only 3 classes.

Two weeks before covid the head saw what was potentially coming line and got the kids in the top class doing everything on school tablets. When lockdown happened they already knew how to use the apps, and kids without their own tablets were lent them by school. Kids who had tablets at home were given a list of apps to install. From day one they had 2-3 hours of activities a day and once the summer term started they had class check-in and register twice a day, and some live teaching. The younger classes also had live teaching and the littlest ones had phonics lessons online, and the teacher reading to them every afternoon. All of the kids in the school were able to access school pretty much fully, and a number of kids left other local schools (private as well as state) to join ours, because of the teaching.

My dc was in the top class and they got on with most things independently so I was able to work from home. They needed help with science experiments and some of the art stuff, and once or twice wanted maths or English help, but mainly they worked with the teacher or in a group, or just by themselves.

I realise this is unusual for a state primary but the head is fab with IT and it helped that the school was small enough and in an area where most families were able to afford tablets and internet connection (school sorted it out for the pupils who didn't)

I'm a primary school teacher in a state school.

We didn't do live lessons. We knew that families were sharing devices between working parents and the children.
They all had different schedules and preferred to work at different times.

We set work, recorded lessons (in addition to teaching the children who were in school), which were uploaded to the school's learning platform.

Children were encouraged to upload their work. All work was marked, some during lunchtime, all by the end of the day.

My kids didn't get a single online lesson on the entire pandemic.

Worksheets and pdfs. That was it. Even when my eldest moved to high school.

Standard state primary here. We had nothing in the first lockdown. In the second lockdown (Jan 2021) we did have 3 zoom lessons a day for 30 minutes each and work set to be done in between those lessons. DD was reception and then y1.