Teachers what ideas do you have for getting dc back to school

[whenthejoyreturns]

Some dc are engaging with home learning including mine. They’re secondary school age so by no means difficult to have at home so don’t accuse me of trying to palm them off because I can’t cope with my own dc.
They’re desperate to get back into school though, and I think it’s incredibly important for their continued development that they can, even though I appreciate they are more fortunate than many.
My very good friend is at the end of her tether. One Very bright secondary dc who’s not engaging in home learning, she can’t sleep with worrying.
My dds 13 year old friend has just been prescribed anxiety medication. I’m positive this would not have happened if she’d been at school with friends. I fear this is going to be the start of many dc going down this route. It all started off as a novelty for them, now the isolation from peers is becoming their normal.
I’m clearly clueless about schools so what do you think we should do?

This thread is going to go well, isn't it?

Staff refusing to return their own children to school so state they can only work x hours which they dictate

Like parents generally, teaching staff are experiencing difficulty with childcare. My children’s school isn’t operating breakfast and after school clubs. If you have sole care of your children, you are not going to be able to get to work till after you are able to drop off and then you will need to leave to be able to pick up. I am not sure what you want teachers in this position to do? Or am I wrong in thinking this is precisely why some people have been working from home or have been furloughed or have been given more flexibility? In which case, why should teachers be exempt from this?

My head's solution to childcare problems with primary aged children is to have them come into school with their parents and they go into the relevant age group with the key worker kids. Obviously doesn't help with the under fives or secondary school kids who are not meant to travel on public transport but it's a start.

@Howaboutanewname not a school but a childcare setting My colleague and I have precisely this problem. We wouldn't be physically able to open the setting until 10am then shut at 2pm. That isnt much good to most people.

We cant exactly just dump our own children with no care.

OP you could try lobbying the government to change the rules?

Is that five of your messages deleted now @EnlightenedOwl ? Are you enlightened now?

You need to lobby the government to pour money and resources into schools so that they can open safely. Each school has different circumstances so the exact solution will vary but casts amounts of money and resources are required to provide additional teaching space and teachers/TAs

I think we are going to have to work around part time smaller groups until social distancing is dropped. In the short term the government will copy the strategy put out by Wales I think. It will be difficult and inconvenient until other childcare settings such as before / after care and holiday groups step up to fill the gap of part time schooling. People will moan about the cost but it will just become another bill to factor in eventually.

It’s a shame threads like this go wrong, because sometimes people ask perfectly valid questions and they get jumped on.

So, for example, somebody earlier in this thread said that teachers’ ideas wouldn’t be listened to anyway.

But what are the ideas? Im not a teacher, however I’ve thought of several creative ideas that could work. If I WAS a teacher, I’d have suggested them to my SLT.

Perhaps that’s what the OP was asking?

Did you know countess that the unions wrote 4 letters to Gavin Williamson with a range of concerns, questions and ideas and he DID NOT REPLY TO A SINGLE ONE.

The governor quoted upthread does not like teachers.

Vulnerable teachers don't need a sick note,and the DfE guidance says medically vulnerable teachers should be supported to WFH of found the 'safest role in the school' (no idea what that would be?). That is not refusing to work.

To answer the actual OP, I have no real alternative ideas. Teachers are not epidemiologists or virologists, or public health experts.

SAGE modelled 7 different ideas, though, none of which the (English) government rolled with. That said, all of their modelling found the R would probably go above 1.

amounts of money and resources are required to provide additional teaching space and teachers/TAs

If social distancing is needed for a year or 18 months I think this would be judged as a waste of money by any government, sadly. The new buildings would only just be built before they weren't needed. Better to find alternative spaces where other childcare providers can operate at the same time as schools in a socially distant way, to take up the slack.

As stated on another thread, part of the "getting on with it" needed here also applies to changing our mindsets about how education operates. I think teachers are doing this a lot better than many members of the general public are at the moment going by these threads.

On another note, some SLTs are receptive, some not so much. But they are following DfE guidance in the main. I feel a teacher emailing SLT with off piste ideas ('let's have a full reopening, boss!) would be ignored over guidelines form the actual government!

How many more teacher hating threads? There really are enough, already.

Can we have a separate section like for Covid?

Then sensible people can hide it.

I left teaching last year after twelve years in the profession (I’ll never go back!). Here’s what I think needs to happen to reopen schools:

The government need to drive community transmission and the r rate down to safe levels across the whole country and introduce an effective track and trace system that will keep the virus under control and contained.

There is no point tapping your foot and glaring at teachers to fix this problem. Compared to the rest of Europe, the U.K. has done spectacularly, monstrously badly and we are rewarded with the worst death rates. How can we open schools back up properly when the government have created a catastrophe and failed to do anything to get it back under control?

If our country follows successful examples from other countries and the government manage to regain enough public trust to get public compliance back after they have squandered it so shamefully - then schools can reopen.

Teachers can’t fix this. They can’t make schools safe. This is the fault of the government and they are desperately trying to pass the buck. As people are so eager to blame teachers for everything anyway, it’s clearly working.

You have no idea what a crisis recruitment and retention of teachers was already in. Keep up with the negativity and aggression towards the profession and your children will reap the rewards of an utterly broken education system even after this pandemic. It’s already crumbling. It won’t take much to destroy it completely.

To be frank, we kept being told to follow what Denmark did.

So we did (the DfE told us to, that is)

And people are still complaining.

I think the old adage' you can't please all of the people all of the time' applies.

Yes but, these replies are all about what needs to be done about the virus. Wasn’t the OP asking what could be done to get kids back to school in the current circumstances?

Last time I saw a thread like this, someone who wasn’t a teacher, in all seriousness, suggested primary school children each had their own personal bucket of water in the classroom to wash their hands in.

15-30 buckets of water. Primary school children.

Forgive me if I think these threads aren’t very helpful.

So, for example, my child’s high school is taking 25% of y10 back at a time.

However, their buildings are split across two sites. The sites are a mile or so apart. Teachers routinely teach on both sites on the same day.

Thinking creatively, I would simply ask ‘could we open both sites and double the number of kids we can teach?’

That sort of thing.

That's not an idea : that's a complaint.

Your school is actually going above and beyond the gvt guidelines which don't even require teaching.

Are you sure they aren't splitting the year 10 across both the sites? We have to maintain SD of students in that age group.

Countess my replies were about school not the virus. But the two things are linked.

Schools would not be doing any of this , were it not for the virus.

Actually, we are now doing more than Denmark, as they still have not, in any way at all, brought back any older children.

My child’s school are very clear that they won’t be teaching. They will be ‘supporting online learning.’

They definitely aren’t opening the other site. Both sites are huge, as they used to be two different schools.

@catsandlavender I was thinking about that at school yesterday as I needed as many deep trays as there were kids just to Milton all the equipment. So yes, we did have the famous buckets. Maybe we should just provide Milton paddling pools on arrival :)

@CountessFrog -
The answer would be ‘no’ because the guidance says only 25% at any time.

Seriously, do you think they haven’t thought of that?

countess your school is following the guidelines. I understand you find that frustrating. The last thing I want to do is pointlessly go to school one day to facilitate students doing what could be done at home, but those are examples of an interpretation of the guidelines. And actually a fairly excitable example : some schools are doing one to interviews (also mentioned as an idea in the guidelines)

My child’s school are very clear that they won’t be teaching. They will be ‘supporting online learning.’

That’s also what the guidance says.

If you were a teacher and you went to SLT with this, the response would be “read the guidance”