What will schools do when kids get the inevitable temperatures over winter?

[toastmeahotcrossbun]

Won't they be having to close down every 5 minutes? So many will get temperatures over autumn/winter as they always do. Or will the schools just rely on people getting kids tested ASAP and then close for 2 weeks if someone tests positive? I'm struggling to see how it will work in practice

Teachers, you are heroes & have utmost respect for you & the task you face in September

@DominaShantotto

Wow! That was the rudest message I have ever had on MN. It says much more about you than it does about me.

No one else report it. I want it to stand as a testament to what kind of poster DominaShantotto is.

Seriously what in the actual fuck? Are you on glue? Even in the nature of how fucking bonkers MN is these days-you're fucking on crack mate

What a horrible thing to say to someone .

@BelleSausage It really does say more about them.

Currently the guidance at my school is of two positive covid tests in a bubble. The whole bubble has to isolate.....the bubbles are year groups of 240 kids!!!!! No mention of what is happening to the teachers! It’s insane

@DominaShantotto

I’ve been posting on MN under various NN for ten years.

You didn’t ‘call me’ on anything. You swore at me and made yourself look silly.

My point to you- as to everyone who demands that school is open full time- is that it isn’t a viable long term solution. Teacher and students will get sick and a few will get really sick. Schools will be sending pupils home. There will be no consistency. It will damage learning because we’ll have student who will get no online provision while they are at home because the government haven’t provided the money for some schools to update their tech the create these resources.

The only people I have ‘attacked’ are ‘Us for Them’, who I consider to be a dangerous lobby group who have caused untold damage to the education system and who will be responsible for teacher deaths if they try to stop schools introducing mask wearing for secondary pupils. I find them ludicrous.

If you are one of them then you might feel ‘attacked’. But as you put it- I’m just call them on their BS.

@motherrunner ugh I'm so sorry. Hand sanitiser all the way definitely. New guidance released on 11th August so your school might do a U turn on that yet....

@BelleSausage I think you speak an inordinate amount of good sense on this matter.

Ignore @DominaShantotto- She's clearly projecting her own MH issues (anxiety around what life will be like from September etc.) onto you.

who will be responsible for teacher deaths if they try to stop schools introducing mask wearing for secondary pupils

I said this on another thread but given many grown adults are moaning (a lot) about having to wear a mask for 10 minutes while they go into a supermarket, do you really think it's realistic to expect teenagers to wear a mask for 6 hours?

I think it's a bit over the top to say teachers will die if teenagers don't wear masks.

We catch lots of bugs but schools don’t close as teachers soldier on.

This worries me. We were nearly all ill by 20th March, but no one was off school apart from pregnant and shielding folk. We just go in to work, it's the easiest option.

I've planned and recorded 2 weeks worth of lessons already. I think I should probably do a few stand alone lessons to do if a kid is off waiting for test results but still able to work.

Currently the guidance at my school is of two positive covid tests in a bubble. The whole bubble has to isolate.....the bubbles are year groups of 240 kids

But PHE will get involved to advise who needs to isolate. Would be about who has been in close contact with the positive case - probably for more than 15 minutes, regularly/closely etc.

I'm assuming it's me and my 24 little dudes, and we'll just soldier on making the best of it. I've got quite a lot of SEND children in my class, one of whom has 1-1 support, but no other support. I've planned almost every second of the first 4 weeks, we're going to go hell for leather in coverage of the basics that they'll need for this year group so they can access some home learning on the same stuff (or obviously do in school)... after that I expect things to start going wrong.

The majority of teachers I work with don't want secondary students to wear masks, they know what trying to enforce that would look like.

@cologne4711

It’s a learned behaviour. It can be trained. Lots of other countries manage it.

We know that masks make a huge difference to infection rates in enclosed spaces. What is a classroom of 32 kids if not an enclosed space.

What few people seem to have calculated is the viability of keeping schools going if staff fall ill. We know adults, especially those over 40 are more likely to get very ill.

Finding a decent long term (more than a week) specialist supply teacher for secondary was impossible before Covid. It costs around £300 a day. How many sick teachers would it take for a school to have to close? How many sick teachers would it take to blow the school cover supply budget?

Uniform can be enforced so it’s perfectly possible to enforce masks.

Kids don't tend to take their regulation trousers off numerous times during the day Carrie. They arrive in uniform, it more or less stays that way.

@Alloverthegrapevine

Almost all of our come by coach or bus so will have them on at the start of the day anyway. All the staff and quite a few kids already seem keen to have them at my place.

There will always be those who push the rules- just like with uniform. But that’s what the behaviour system is for 🤷🏻‍♀️

I am biased because we have been doing shifts at key worker school all of lockdown for two members oF the department who are shielding. They are such great teacher. They are worried about Sept and we are worried about them.

It would make sense for secondary to wear masks in lessons for the sake of the teachers, but they'd have to take them off at lunchtime and as pp have said, how do you enforce it. Plus if you're bringing them back for the social and MH factors (rather than online learning) then wearing a mask kind of defeats this purpose.

It sounds like it's going to be chaos though. It's not fair on teachers, who were already being asked to do too much before all this. Why should they have to take these risks with no PPE

If Us For Them really want schools back & education to operate anything like normal, they would be campaigning for masks for children & staff alike.

How does it work if siblings are in two separate bubbles? If one bubble gets sent home do siblings in other bubbles have to go home also? In some school parents could potentially have 3 or 4 children all in different bubbles.

hopefully schools will be testing temperatures as students arrive, and sending home any that are raised

It's great to see that more parents are waking and to fact that the government guidance is pretty much unworkable, especially for secondary schools. If my child was in a bubble of 30 students at primary I would accept the balance of risk for the sake of her education. What I'm concerned about is that she will be in a year group bubble with children who travel in from our county plus some of the surrounding ones some of whom have shared school transport with pupils from two other schools with an equally wide catchment area. It's a recipe for disaster and I fear it could lead to community spread. A more realistic plan of part time schooling to allow social distancing is needed in secondary. This would also ease the transport situation. Most secondary school children won't require childcare. The Us for Them campaign has been very vocal, those of us who disagree with them need to write to our mps to raise our concerns. Also I'm hoping that the teaching unions will be fighting the corner of their members. Parents and teachers need to work together and not let the government drive a wedge between us and play the blame game as they tried to do in June and July.

Well we just need to wait to see what the next round of advice is from Dfe.

If lots of staff are off and we cant get the right supply then I guess the approach most secondary schools will take is to focus on the exam groups first - yr13, yr 11, yr12 and yr10.

We have been told to prep for more online blended learning just in case. We are not buying hard copies of textbooks but buying e-books instead.

Hippofrog - In my case 3 kids in 2 different schools, then me in mine and a dad who is in hospitality. I think the rest of us keep going, but if it's a little one someone needs to be with them, so would be me most probably- and then I don't know who would teach my class (small school of 3 teachers)

A lot of ours arrive by bus too. Even on the bus, they have them on when they get on, they don't stay on for the journey though.