Concerned schools will just reteach material from March 2020

[notevenat20]

I have become worried that schools will decide they need to reteach all the material from March 2020 onwards when they go back in September. For the many families like ours who worked their socks off trying to provide decent home schooling in the lockdown, this would be a kick in the teeth.

Do you think this is going to happen?

We've all been desperately trying to find out whats going on with our dc. And failing.

There is at least one child I know at our school who has a private lesson every week (reception to year 3 so far). I can see why if you have the money. I completely sympathise about the lack of information too. We are very much given the impression that our child is none of our business when we try to ask any questions.

Ensuring that the most able are challenged is one of the hardest parts of teaching a mixed ability class. I know my most able mathematician thinks she isn't challenged in class, but when ofsted came they saw her book and commented on the good level of challenge. But it's not easy to do and I don't get it right every lesson. It's probably harder to do than differentiating for my least able pupils.

I have total sympathy for this. You are clearly trying to do your best.

The problem comes with the line that more able children "will be fine" and so don't need any attention.

That line should never be said though @notevenat20. As a school governor I would not be impressed if that was the approach in my school.

The problem comes with the line that more able children "will be fine" and so don't need any attention.

Not a line I'd ever use.

So for gcse year 10, who are now year 11, would they really only have missed a few quality weeks of teaching since March?

@hopeishere me too But feeling guilty is nonsense. How can we possibly do 2 professional jobs at exactly the same time? Trying to work out SPAG or do a maths worksheet, while simultaneously interacting with the professionals in your day job on Teams/Zoom/Skype?

I think homeschooling is impossible at primary level. If I tried to be a lawyer and prepare a court case while never having had one second of legal training, people would think I’m nuts. Ditto a surveyor without any training whatsoever. Therefore, how come I’m supposed to be a teacher with zero help or training, no notice, and at exactly the same time as working my own job!

And because I can’t achieve this impossibility I’m expected to feel guilty

You couldn’t make it up.

Op, I wonder if we are at same school.
Yes we are made to feel how are dc are doing is non of our business. Or information comes from odd perspectives on how we might think or receive any information about our dc.

In my school we carried on teaching normal timetable online.
GCSE pupils started their A Level courses so have completed three month of that.
So, no we shall be continuing, no need to repeat.

Life, a local grammar said they are actually ahead of the curriculum time table! Without interruptions getting to classes etc!! They went on line straight after lock down.

I think it just shows that there was a huge mix across the country. Even with online work which was poor quality from my son's school there is no way he grasped the underlying principles they were trying to teach.

Yy hope.
It was varying school to school here. Unfortunately, ours were appalling.

My friends have two boys in junior classes. Their school provided no material and didn’t return phone calls and emails. My friend and her DH were both working from home full time so couldn’t create schooling. The boys have gone from high achievers to refusing to read a book. Their school will need to do lots of work to get them back to the level they were at.

I understand the point that you are making OP but the teacher will always be aiming to satisfy the requirements for the majority of the class and not necessarily all of them, particularly if that child is an outlier at the upper end.

There are many children that are capable of performing very well at the Y6 SATS prior to Y6, I recently gave my DD(9) an old KS3 level 5-7 paper as an out of level test and she scored 132/150, so well into level 7 according to the boundary guidelines. The school know that she is an outlier but there is no attempt made to differentiate for her - she gets the same work and ‘challenges’ as the rest of the class. I know this because it was told to me by the teacher at parents’ evening.

The school will have a battle ahead to try and get the majority of the class to where they should be. I think your best bet might be to try and get the school to allow you to provide your own challenge work so that when your child demonstrates that they have met the requirements (recaps are useful as long as they are not needlessly long) they can at least do something interesting rather than the unnecessary repetition.

Don’t get me wrong I can see that it would be a lot of work for the teacher so I am happy to do it.

Secondary here - we’ve mapped out the curriculum for next year for each year group - English, so we’re looking at skills which build and build.
We’ve focused on making sure the first unit for each year group is a lovely, engaging text rather than something really tough. That’s meant teaching things in a different order and squishing some things a bit for some groups.
We also didn’t use standard curriculum texts for lockdown work, so we have no worries about repeating the actual texts.

We’re also devoting some of our writing time to writing about lockdown and how things have changed/worries/fears etc.

My biggest worry is that we’ll have chaotic and unpredictable further lockdowns and loads of children missing big chunks of a sequence of learning because of isolation. That and whether I’ll have any staff in my department 🤦🏻‍♀️

What is happening to the catch up classes the government promised? Have the unions and schools sorted these out ready for the start of term?

What is happening to the catch up classes the government promised?

They’re in the same place as all the additional laptops the government promised.

Have the unions and schools sorted these out ready for the start of term?

How? We are working additional hours to facilitate the staggered starts/beaks/lunch. We have enough hours in our directed time to do this until Christmas.

Where am I going to fit catch up classes in?

Have the unions and schools sorted these out ready for the start of term?

On what planet does this have anything to do with the unions?

Schools haven't been given much information about them at all. There was some talk of them training tutors over the summer but nothing seems to have materialised yet. The exams fiasco has rather overshadowed it tbh. From memory most of the tuition wasn't available until after October half term at the earliest. The majority was starting Jan 2021.

There was some talk of them training tutors over the summer

I would bet the bottle of very nice Rioja I’m about to open that this will also be filed under “government laptops” and “government track and trace”.

I would back your bet with a second bottle (probably malbec!).

If we ever get a tutor inside our school building I'll have to poke them with a 2m stick to check they aren't a mirage.

If we ever get a tutor inside our school building I'll have to poke them with a 2m stick to check they aren't a mirage

😂😂

@Parker231

What is happening to the catch up classes the government promised? Have the unions and schools sorted these out ready for the start of term?

When last my SLT discussed this, the main guidance on this announcement had yet to come to schools. I believe that's still the case.

There was supposed to be two elements to it. The first was the creation of a national tutoring scheme in which the Government would give money to existing organisations so that they would lower their prices for schools to buy them in. That would be something like schools buying one to one tutoring for a child at the cost of £12 per hour per child instead of the usual much higher price. Unfortunately, that does mean schools would still have to spend money in the first place in order to access it which will likely price out all those except schools with the highest proportion of pupil premium funding.

The rest of the money, I believe, had a similar restriction: schools had to spend their existing budget in order to access it. For that reason, some educational experts were predicting that a chunk of the money would sit there untouched for a few years because no-one would be able to spend what was needed to access it. I think this was the part of the announced funding that worked out to be around £80 per child.

Op, I wonder if we are at same school.
Yes we are made to feel how are dc are doing is non of our business. Or information comes from odd perspectives on how we might think or receive any information about our dc.

I wonder too! Sadly I just don't think it's rare.

I understand the point that you are making OP but the teacher will always be aiming to satisfy the requirements for the majority of the class and not necessarily all of them, particularly if that child is an outlier at the upper end.

I think that's exactly right.

Learning isn’t linear OP. The prevailing thinking in education is now that things must be taught and constantly reviewed so that they get stored in long term memory.

This is based on research in neuroscience and educational research.

I have spent the last two weeks re- writing the first two schemes of work for Yr7 English so they take into account the skills and concept for writing that our new students haven’t practised for a while.

Other posters are correct in saying it is a spiral where different stages link back to each other. It’s not just a ladder your DC are madly climbing.

@Parker231

You seem to have misunderstood what a union is.

They don’t have any control over anything. They are an advocacy group for teachers as workers.

The government is who you’ll be wanting to talk to about where all the ones for catch up is coming from and why it hasn’t appeared yet.