We need to rise up about the lack of education for our children

[Speeding201700]

Please do this. Please join the Twitter movement #usforthem
Please write to your MPs
Please talk about this.

Our children are missing out on their fundamental human right of an education.

The children of regular families are suffering (all 5 of mine are suffering desperately), but those in vulnerable families are suffering even further. The gap between these children will be HUGE

I am a teacher and a mother. I am ready to go back to work full time and with the 'old normal'. I am also type 1 diabetic.

Please help us rise up to get our children educated. Our children have been totally forgotten about. Throughout my career I've had it rammed down my throat about how school is a safe place for so many children. They don't care about these children now.

I am amazed so many people have just accepted this. It has gone on for too long now.

Thank you @Speeding201700, I will.

I can imagine how much fighting you do if you are advising more than one family. I have been fighting for 3 years for 1 child but speak to many other parents in similar positions so you will understand my cynicism at anything being done.

The problem is we shouldn’t have to fight.
Any of us

"NO ONE knows if lockdown has saved lives. It may have inadvertently caused alot more than it saved."

Well anyone who understands virology or maths does know that, of course.

Maybe not rawlikesushi but the flu season is only Dec-Mar so those deaths weren't over 12 months either.

The 50,000 excess deaths we have had were not due to a particularly bad flu season. The flu season this year was mild. The deaths came at a totally different time. They are due to Covid-19. If we had not locked down, there would have been many more of them.

OP I agree, it’s appalling what we are doing to our children.

The excess deaths from Covid-19 mostly occurred over a 3 week period.

Lockdown isn’t sustainable on any level. We know who are likely to be vulnerable and who need shielding. We have to get back to normal.
My new normal is wearing full respirator mask to carry out routine treatment on healthy patients, but then I can’t work if I practice social distancing. If we don’t start easing lockdown for the healthier population we are going to see a massive crisis in all healthcare going forward.
Children are ultra low risk unless they have specific underlying health problems. Even if they develop the rare complications theses are actually treatable. However, delays in diagnosing childhood leukaemia, severe asthma, sepsis and meningitis carry a much higher risk. We may be blindly increasing risks to our children by overreacting to the covid risk.
Yes, we do need to protect the actual vulnerable/shielded group but that is far more doable than keeping schools closed.

• You know the numbers are low due to lockdown don't you? And they can go up again as quickly as they did in March? can't imagine not being able to understand exponential maths."

Um...I understand thank you, what I'm saying is we don't know if the measures I mentioned around hand-washing, hand sanitizing, increased cleaning regiment, masks, temp checks and mandatory family/individual sick leave allotment so people can stay home when sick would have kept numbers sufficiently low from the school population and that they won't be good enough moving forward.

"Maybe not rawlikesushi but the flu season is only Dec-Mar so those deaths weren't over 12 months either."

I know when the flu season is but do you really think that people don't die of flu all year round, just in smaller numbers? The government produce a weekly report during flu season and a fortnightly report during the rest of the year. It's funny you know so much about covid but not about flu isn't it?

"and that they won't be good enough moving forward."

Well they didn't work at the beginning of March.

@Char2015

www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.21.2000903

In summary, From the report:

No evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from children attending school in Ireland, 2020 separator commenting unavailable

Laura Heavey1,2, Geraldine Casey1,2, Ciara Kelly1,2, David Kelly1,2, Geraldine McDarby1,2

“Children are thought to be vectors for transmission of many respiratory diseases including influenza [2]. It was assumed that this would be true for COVID-19 also. To date however, evidence of widespread paediatric transmission has failed to emerge [3]. School closures create childcare issues for parents. This has an impact on the workforce, including the healthcare workforce [4]. There are also concerns about the impact of school closures on children’s mental and physical health [5].”

We have six more weeks until the summer holidays. We need to focus on. If people want their children back in school quickly, they need to ensure they comply with all social distancing guidelines and probably go beyond them, to bring cases down as low as possible. They need to download whatever god forsaken privacy breaking app the government's buddies create for us. They need to isolate at the slightest symptom or whenever they are contacted by the tracking people.

There are two routes back to normality. One is through behaviour modification, the other is through mass fatality.

I’m not sure what you are trying to say or twist

I’m twisting nothing. I find it hard to believe you don’t know what I’m trying to say given your supposed part time fighting for “ignored” kids. (Perhaps you can point me to the posts you’ve made on MN previously saying parents needed to rise up into ensure education for them? )

But I’ll spell it out. A parent body must rise up to right because their kids are denied and education. The same parent body sat silent when our kids with ASN have been denied education for years.

If they had access to The Oak academy for these periods that would be good if they are well enough to access it. It doesn't mean the rest of the country should be off school.

Yes, if local authorities made any attempt to fund these kids’ education that would be wonderful, but they don’t and parents not affected by it don’t give a shit. Nothing to do with what they are doing elsewhere with schools. Oh, and it’s not just “children with cancer etc etc” whatever that is supposed to mean. Thinking you have absolutely no clue.

@Justgivemewine

Not surprising is it. Like the time they told DD she couldn’t have new AFOs for a month when the ones she had were making her legs bleed. They suggested she “just used her wheelchair instead” Imagine if parents were told their kids just couldn’t have new shoes so they just had to avoid walking anywhere for a month. But we just have to accept it knowing nobody else will be bothered to fight.

Like when the LA decided they were going to cut breakfast club (primarily used by affluent parents) there was a huge movement to protest. When we tried to get the same support for cutting ASN support nobody lifted a finger despite the fact the ASNAs spend more time doing non ASN stuff around the school. No surprise, they kept breakfast club and cut ASN funding.

I think my issue is that OUR school don't seem to be trying very hard. I see other businesses (I know school isn't a business) but also services trying really hard to re-open, and they are, but in a different way, inventing different systems, trying different ways of working.

If course I can only speak for our school, but the attitude is very much 'we don't know what to do/it's never happened to us before/there's nothing we can do, it's a pandemic, it's out of our hands.' It's week 12 tomorrow, it's never happened to anybody before, but at least other services are trying to find a way around this, it seems like our particular school really aren't!

I think parents need to realise :

Your children have not been forgotten, everyone knows that they need to be back in school and that they are suffering in many ways while they are at home.

It is not that nobody cares, it is that there is no alternative at present.

It is only six days since some year groups returned.

Let's make sure that - as many of you suspect - this doesn't impact the infection rate significantly.

If it doesn't, of course, yes, let's get more children back to school.

But let's not race back, increase the infection rate and make all of this for nothing, risk more unnecessary deaths and ultimately cause even more suffering.

No one wants stressed parents who can't work, or sad children, but it's got to be done right hadnt it?

If they can't do it, they can't do it, but they just need to say that's it, nothing until September and the online provision needs to be sorted out quickly.

Sending through a few worksheets and you're on your own is so difficult to combine with your own work.

"I think my issue is that OUR school don't seem to be trying very hard."

Yes that must be frustrating. Is it a particularly small school, or does it have high numbers of shielding staff maybe?

nellodee the vulnerable who didn’t die because of the low flu virility this year were still around for Covid outbreak. If we’d had a particularly bad flu outbreak we may not have seen as many Covid victims. But we will never know whether this is the case.
Death rate through the whole of the winter was lower than five year average.
In a heat wave summer we often see an increase in excess deaths in the same vulnerable group. And also in exceptionally cold winters.
We all know that Covid kills but the statistics have given us a very clear indication of who it is likely to kill and it’s not schoolkids.
It may mean that children will have to continue to avoid contact with their grandparents but I’m sure most grandparents would not want to see their grandchildren’s futures suffer.
And before the “vulnerable” parents jump in. We all have to risk assess individual circumstances. If you are not happy for your children to return the so be it.
I will be delighted when my son can return to a normal life.

TokyoSushi, I think you are right, to a point.

I am SLT in a school and even among my leadership colleagues there is less will to find a way than there might be if the closure was costing them money. But that's not the only reason. The advice from government and the LA changes daily and whilst in some ways it is only "guidance" it would be a brave HT who went against the guidance to do more or open more quickly than is required.

Unions have reported a school where there have been cases to the HSE, I don't think many other businesses are facing that.

And then there's the reluctance from a very large number of our "customers" and staff, for what may or may not be genuine reasons but we can't open more fully without them.

@MintyMabel. It’s shocking, and ultimately it’s all about money.

Yes, the children who lost a parent to Covid have definitely had their education messed up. Education doesn't have to take place in a classroom. But they lost one parent who would have helped them through online learning.
You know who else will have their education messed up? The children who will lose a parent in the 2nd wave. They don't even know it yet.

I agree with the OP. Children need to go back to school.

What I find particularly unacceptable is that schools that are willing, and able, to take more children and still follow the current “bubble” etc rules, are not allowed to. So many schools near here are lucky enough to have room and staffing to take other year groups as well as R, 1 and 6.

It is NEVER acceptable to work to the lowest common denominator and it is a disgrace that schools are being actively forbidden to do the best job they can!

@rawlikesushi nope, massive 'community primary' type, 3 form intake, huge modern building!

I'm a teacher. I would go back do the old normal in a heartbeat. I am an inclusion lead in a deprived area. I've had a couple of suicide attempts, kids going into care, parents referring themselves to social services in desperation. The SEN kids have been let down massively. Only one of our ehcp kids is attending and there is nothing to offer the rest. I feel like a lot of the progress they have made will be lost. It's terrifying and depressing. All the kids I've spoken to our feeling deprsssed and are desperate to come back. They are now in the position of being allowed outside but have nowhere to go, putting them at further risk.

I've spent a lot of this lockdown feeling deeply anxious for these kids who I normally check in every day. We are in for a huge social, educational, mental health crisis the longer this goes on.

A lot of them don't have the technology they need to access the education they have a right to.

Diana, children are losing parents because of lockdown. One of my vulnerable students' fathers died this week, the boy found the body after he'd overdosed. Maybe it would have happened anyway but the fact that none if the support they usually get, professional or community, had been near for weeks camt have helped.

Very few under 50s have died, which would suggest the risk to school age children of losing a parent to covid 19 isn't actually that high.