Times saying secondary schools might not open

[Orangeblossom78]

www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-secondary-schools-might-not-be-able-to-fully-reopen-in-september-hrfmxlg5j

Schools will not be able to fully reopen in September unless people behave themselves over the summer, scientific advisers have warned ministers.

Even a modest increase in people’s leisure contacts would mean a choice between shutting pubs or keeping secondary schools closed, modelling for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) suggests.

But when it’s unknown and they are getting a test and waiting for the result (which likely will be relatively often) they’ll have to isolate pending the test results

They’ll only have to self isolate if someone in their bubble has a positive test. We almost need test centres on school sites.

It's an issue in primary too though as many schools now employ teachers to cover ppa who would see several classes over the course of a few days. I do; if I were positive under my normal role I could close half the school. We are just going to have to be prepared for lots of absences left right and centre. Even a negative test could mean a teacher is off for 2 days.

Also, staff will catch normal bugs (possibly less??) and be ill and so absent.

I am a childminder , I worry if my Ds is sent home as someone else has symptoms, I would be forced to close

The government will have to stop all the targets in schools about attendance-they can’t have those in place whilst simultaneously telling people to be responsible and remain at home if they have CV symptoms.

Neuro - we are currently closing instead of having PPA teachers in. At the moment it is for a full day, to allow deep cleaning and for those of us currently out of our normal year groups to have an intensive period in contact with our own classes. However in September I can imagine that we might have half a day a week shut to allow PPA for all, or the class TA will have to take PPA while the teacher takes the class alone for another half day to give the TA some respite.

www.lbcnews.co.uk/uk-news/boris-johnson-1-billion-schools-coronavirus/

Not Nightingale schools- plans to fix substandard school buildings

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/school-reopening-whole-year-bubbles-full-guidance-covidukk_5ef9dd4ac5b6ca97091288e4?oo9&guccounter=1

This is apparently going to be the new guidelines

Even a modest increase in people’s leisure contacts would mean a choice between shutting pubs or keeping secondary schools closed, modelling for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) suggests.

There should be no contest then, we don't need pubs to be open.

@cantkeepawayforever

Neuro - we are currently closing instead of having PPA teachers in. At the moment it is for a full day, to allow deep cleaning and for those of us currently out of our normal year groups to have an intensive period in contact with our own classes. However in September I can imagine that we might have half a day a week shut to allow PPA for all, or the class TA will have to take PPA while the teacher takes the class alone for another half day to give the TA some respite.

or the class TA will have to take PPA while the teacher takes the class alone for another half day to give the TA some respite.

TA's getting respite, well that's a novel idea!

At the moment, all TAs have the same pattern (4 days per week, 1 day off for PPA / work with own year groups) as teachers.

@redolent
Pubs aren't being allowed to open as normal , there is no standing at the bar and its table service
Moat of europe have open bars and restaurants
Its not open aa before they have a lot of rules to follow
Those who say outside only , that might work on a hot dry day but we cant rely on them and also many pubs and certainly restaurants have little to no outside space

WHAT?!

DS is due to start at an inspiration Trust school this autumn. We have had no information whatsoever about an 18 August start. Their website still says 5 September. DS was supposed to do a virtual tour event today -- only recorded videos were possible to view. Couldn't get thru to any of the advertised 1-2-1 sessions with staff.

Nothing on their website about 18 August. Probably not applicable to yr12 starters given GCSEs not out yet by then? #Baffled.

'Pubs aren't being allowed to open as normal , there is no standing at the bar and its table service
Moat of europe have open bars and restaurants'

People will take their drinks into the streets; there was even talk of changing the law to make this easier.

European culture re bars is very different to ours. They sit down and eat at the same time as drinking. In addition, we are still a long way above Europe in terms of prevalence of COVID in the community.

I just cannot see the sense in opening pubs until all schools are fully open and we can see that infection is under control. Restaurants and Cafes are another matter as people stay at tables, and infection control measures can be effective.

@cantkeepawayforever

At the moment, all TAs have the same pattern (4 days per week, 1 day off for PPA / work with own year groups) as teachers.

At my DC's school the teachers have their normal working hours with PPA and so do the TAs - which for most of them is full time without PPA, they don't normally get PPA so they don't get it now.

Purple, the point is that the majority of us are working out of our normal year groups, to cover priority year group / keyworker bubbles.

We are meanwhile providing home learning at the same level as we have throughout lockdown for our own year groups (essentially 5 English + 5 Maths activities / lessons every week, plus at least 1 suggested activity for every other subject, with marking, plus maintaining a safe 'social media'-type platform). We are also doing group video calls for our own year groups, with both teacher and TA present, on our 'PPA' days.

That's what the teachers and TAs are doing during their home / PPA day, while the teachers / TAs for the priority year groups plan what the rest of us will deliver for the other 4 days....

So double the workload then ?

They can't tell yet - September is months off and anything can happen.

Personally, I would prefer the schools stay closed. Preventing yet more deaths and horrific suffering from Covid-19 must take priority.

A few months off school won't hurt the vast majority of children, and the vulnerable ones have been going to school with the key workers' children anyway.

My eldest will be starting uni and my others are doing ok at home with a mix of working alone and teachers via Teams.

I find it completely ridiculous when they claim the children are a lost generation or whatever just because they missed a few months' school. I missed YEARS due to illness and nobody has ever noticed or asked or suggested whether it had any effect (none that I noticed other than probably more fear of SARS-CoV-2 then most).

Mrskrypp,

I am just not sure you can make that assertion without evidence.

You might have been ok. There was a fairly recent Nobel laureate in Chemistry who said he learned to be creative when he wandered around bombed out London during the war with no formal schooling. However, I think that these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Vulnerable children are not, for the most part, going to school. There is no compulsion and no teacher to spot bruises if a child is being beaten at home. School meals are really important to some, whose nutrition will have collapsed during lock down.

If you are middle class with your kids at a private school, then you could probably pretty much keep going indefinitely with little (although I think there would be some) educational cost. However, if your parents have little means and are not educated themselves, a lack of school will be horrendous and you may never catch up.

We are already in a terrible position with regard to wealth distribution, with something like 90% of economic growth since 2008 going to the top 1% of the population. Covid has massively exacerbated that. There is a lot of talk about privilege on this site (white, male etc) but the one privilege that overwhelms all the others is being born into money.

There was an article I was reading about private jet companies being overwhelmed by demand from people who want a safe summer holiday-the birth of the £1 mil package holiday.

Education (and health care) is the best way to help social mobility. Schools have to be the number one priority.

So double the workload then ?

Yes, but what is the alternative? Not teaching the children who are in school? Not teaching the children who are not in school? Not having the staff to open the school to its maximum extent (currently 5 days keyworkers, 4 days returned year groups, maximum number of bubbles given the number of classrooms)?

Online home learning is a relatively well-oiled process now, luckily!

September is less than 2 months away & nobody in bureaucracies makes decisions in August.

I suppose a great many Afghani, Syrian & Yemeni children have missed years of schooling. Formal education stops in many countries at age 8 or so. So that's our best view of what it looks like for almost all kids in a society to have no education. I wonder how their economies are doing. But they could rely on trained people coming in from other places with stable education systems, or safe places they could export their young people to for education & training. There wasn't an entire world of education and training grinding to a halt (Sweden & New Zealand excepted?).

[quote strugglingwithdeciding]@redolent
Pubs aren't being allowed to open as normal , there is no standing at the bar and its table service
Moat of europe have open bars and restaurants
Its not open aa before they have a lot of rules to follow
Those who say outside only , that might work on a hot dry day but we cant rely on them and also many pubs and certainly restaurants have little to no outside space
[/quote]
The problem is that social distancing and following lots of rules are not really compatible with consuming a drug that reduces social inhibitions.

In the US, many governors are blaming their spikes on the reopening of bars (at 50-75% capacity). Drunk people really don’t care.

Also re. pubs: alcohol consumption reduces your immunity. Obviously people haven't stopped drinking at home, but there seems to be some kind of national obsession with pubs and bars and getting very drunk in public.
I am v v worried that 6 months of lockdown (which is what it will be in September) will still not have lowered cases to a low enough level in England (Scotland's eradication policy is admirable) for children to go back to school normally. Back in March if you had said that we would lockdown for varying degrees for 6 months and still not have few enough infections for children to attend school normally, we would have been shocked. Now this seems acceptable to many people.
The problem for older children is that the time to catch up and achieve is less the old you are. So a year 11 is in a really shitty position. Their GCSEs were cancelled, they are going to get grades likely to be lower than they could have achieved with 2 months more of hard work, they have only 9 months to learn 3-4 subjects to AS level and 1 year 9 months to learn 3 subjects to A level. Then their education is over. Just a few months of delay is going to create a situation that cannot be caught up.

Instead of giving in to Tory party donors in business, the government should be following other countries' policy of driving infection levels so low that school in September will be safe for pupils and teachers. This is possible: other countries have done this.
As things stand and as our government is totally corrupt and incompetent, schools will reopen in early September and the next few months will be total chaos of lockdowns, bubble closures, lack of enough teachers to run classes/schools, missed learning, older children failing to reach their potential before the age of 18

My Ds ‘s school have plans well a variety - however the year groups will be a bubble in different blocks for different years. That is 250 children . If they are sent home after every single child develops a cough we won’t be there much

@larrygrylls

Mrskrypp,

I am just not sure you can make that assertion without evidence.

You might have been ok. There was a fairly recent Nobel laureate in Chemistry who said he learned to be creative when he wandered around bombed out London during the war with no formal schooling. However, I think that these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Vulnerable children are not, for the most part, going to school. There is no compulsion and no teacher to spot bruises if a child is being beaten at home. School meals are really important to some, whose nutrition will have collapsed during lock down.

If you are middle class with your kids at a private school, then you could probably pretty much keep going indefinitely with little (although I think there would be some) educational cost. However, if your parents have little means and are not educated themselves, a lack of school will be horrendous and you may never catch up.

We are already in a terrible position with regard to wealth distribution, with something like 90% of economic growth since 2008 going to the top 1% of the population. Covid has massively exacerbated that. There is a lot of talk about privilege on this site (white, male etc) but the one privilege that overwhelms all the others is being born into money.

There was an article I was reading about private jet companies being overwhelmed by demand from people who want a safe summer holiday-the birth of the £1 mil package holiday.

Education (and health care) is the best way to help social mobility. Schools have to be the number one priority.

Thanks for your response to what I wrote.

You say I would need evidence (yes, my comments were anecdotal) but where is the evidence countering it?

I totally agree with you about the terrible wealth distribution in the UK.

I would disagree about the parents not being educated necessarily being a problem. My own husband's parents were semi-literate and yet very supportive of him at school and his further studies. They couldn't help with the schoolwork, but were supportive in all other ways (except financial too, they were poor). My husband is not from the UK.

I do see your point though, and definitely agree there are parents who make it pretty much impossible for their children to do their school work. Then there are people in poverty who simply don't have the space or facilities. I thought these kids were going to school with the key workers' kids. Who were the vulnerable children then?

You say education and schools have to be the number one priority. I think our health should be number one right now - I can't justify my children going to school if it lead to more people suffering from Covid, dying from it, infecting others, suffering long-term effects etc etc

This is a pandemic. These are not normal times.

The UK has, so far, dealt with it far worse than any other similar country (Germany is very similar to us - culturally, linguistically, geographically, economically, yet what a difference in health care!!)