Just had an email confirming dcs' secondary school will be open for all pupils in September[smile]

[mostwonderfultime]

Such a relief as ds is year 10 and I think will just about be OK with GCSEs if back in September. Felt good to see it officially written down instead of just talked about on the radio.

Our secondary sent a similar email. What I want to know is how they are going to do it though... I expect they haven’t quite worked that out though themselves!

It's an impossible task as whole year groups are one bubble, and teachers teach all years so go across 5 different bubbles. Which means they arent in a bubble at all and if one teacher gets symptoms, the whole school has to close.

You can get one for a couple of hundred quid these days. People spend more than that on a couple of nights out and fags for a few weeks

I've never spent anywhere near a couple of hundred ££s on a couple of nights out and I don't smoke. I've been made redundant in the middle of a pandemic and haven't even been able to afford to drink at home. If school asked me to buy a laptop right now, I'm afraid it wouldn't be possible.

Havent most kids been doing their work on laptops for the last 3 months?

@ittooshallpass. Whilst I'm luckily working I don't have (ever) a spare couple of hundred quid. We are scraping into the overdraft every month, despite living very frugally. And I can't afford to just go out and buy a laptop for my son. We don't smoke, or go on nights out - but money is always tight. And no, many children haven't been doing work on laptops. Many children don't have access to one.

Some of these comments are a perfect example of 'how the other half lives'. At our school, for example, roughly a third of kids are on free school meals. Often these kids haven't got a decent pair of shoes on their feet, never mind a home laptop.

I bet theyve all got xBox's or ps4's though. And massive pet dogs at home that need feeding. And always plenty money for expensive fireworks whenever they want them.

Havent the Government bought kids on school lunches laptops.

On the OP - the intention is that schools will return full time for all pupils in September.

however, in reality i think there will be a mixture - same as when primary schools opened more widely at the start of June:

• Some areas will, at that point, have rates of infection that are too high to make this safe, and like some counties on 1st June, their local Public Health officials will not allow them to open.

• Some areas will be like Leicester - they will open, then rapidly shit again due to spikes in cases.

What we have to hope is that the number of areas in these two categories will be very small, and so the vast majority of schools will be able to go back, and stay back, for the vast majority of the time.

All schools have also been asked to have robust backup plans in place that they can immediately switch to, to provide online schooling instead, for the shorter or longer periods when either the whole school, or a particular class or year group, is closed.

Sorry for typo: shut again!

It's great that that is the direction of travel. Policy should have been focused on education as soon as the Nightingales were built and NHS staff redeployed. Instead we had weeks of faffing about discussing what to open up first.
So it's great that finally the focus is on the right place.

@NotShiny

Havent the Government bought kids on school lunches laptops.

No. They really haven't. It was a bullshit political statement. Very few were given out.

You sound an utter cow by the way, with your comments about lower income families.