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.
Your good friend needs to get in contact with the school and speak directly to them they know this child and cn work a plan to help support. We cannot offer advice on an unknown, many very bright children don't engge at school either and learn by cramming or by paying just enough attention.
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.
Do the parents need to speak to CAHMs? Obviously they are in touch with the dr who mayhave made a referral. Lots of kids are anxious at school and suffer tremendously being in the school building ☹️ this is why most schools are planning to do lots of health and wellbeing work on return to meet the neds of all the different children.
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.
As above massive input on mental health, something that needs to happen more even in normal times. Also, as educators, we need to start working with parents, and communities as to how to support mental health needs during lockdown and part time schooling. Perhaps psychologists leading team/zoom discussions with small groups of kids, voice only. But it would require parents, schools, governments to sig up to this. To be honest just going back to school will not solve it but may in fact make it worse. Mental health issues have been rising for years, teachers are expected to council/support children with serious issues which waiting on appointments. We are not trained at this level and can inadvertently cause harm. We need government to make our children's mental health a priority and have trained people in school to support them.
I’m clearly clueless about schools so what do you think we should do?
We know what the guidelines from the government are so we look at what we can do within these. Then we look at what the greatest need is. If it is mental health we need to get specialist teams in to work with our kids, perhaps that could become a priority learning time when in school or during online learning.
If it is gaps in learning or disengagement then we look to address this. For many people learning is not a priority just now. They are worried about family health, money and the changes in the world. We have to be holistic in our approach to helping our children and our communities. We start from the child and work out, yes it will be constrained by howbopen we are allowed to be, just like the NHS, but if we have parents working with us we can find ways together.
Other ideas...
Just opening and returning as normal. This can't be done safely, yet. We are all constrained by government guidlines just now and until they change we have to work differently.
However...
For learning we need to ensure all children can access online learning and that those who can't due to need (not financial that area the government can sort) have a differnt form of access or that these children become the group that needs to be in schools now. Is it time to look at moving key workers groups out of schools and into sports centers etc for child care and have children in school being supported?
If it is for mental health reasons then perhaps groups led by mental health professionals using sports centers etc could be set up to support groups of children in activities that promote and aupport their mental health in a positive way.
Maybe communities could come together to organise support, utilise expertise within the community. Offer support like communities offered to shielding people. Obviously this would be difficult to police and could lead to vulnerability. So maybe not a great idea.
What can staff in a school do? Some staff will be working flat out just now, I know we here lots of stories about teachers sunning themselves 23h a day but they are not the majority. We are always told to work smarter, our latest was work out how to teach full time and do full time online lesson within your hours? 🙄😳 Trust me it is so much easier to be back doing the normal stuff. The problem we have is that social distancing is a thing just now, lots of threafs have discussed why schools are in such bad shapes and have too few staff. What do we need? Government finances, volunteers, extra people and apaces to allow ua to bring more back in. Maybe 1/2 in for education in school and 1/2 in community areas doing sports and mental health stuff supported by staff from these areas? That way parents get back to work, your kids will learn better in smaller focused groups and mental health issues will be dealt with.