If the schools close there should be no pretence that they have switched to "online learning".

[Billie18]

If the schools close they are shut. Schools are not equipped to deliver teaching online. Teachers have not been trained to teach online. Children are not equipped to learn online. The curriculum has not been designed to be taught online. If schools close then children will not be receiving an education. It is dishonest to pretend that they are.

So if the schools close then teachers should be furloughed and children's education should be paused at the point of closure. Closing schools should not be disguised as something it is not. This would allow the damage to continue indefinitely. If schools remain closed for a longer period then teachers should be made redundant so that they are free to do other work. This of course would be terrible and would hopefully not be allowed to happen... But then schools have already not been fully open for nearly a year.

Do people actually think this?

Secondary school teacher here. I've been in school 4 days per week (my usual contract) since May half term. I'm going in unpaid on Monday.

But please feel free to make me redundant and find another Oxford graduate with 16 years' teaching experience (10 as HoD) in secondary schools to take my place.

@SmileEachDay
Luckily it wasn't my child's year group that was isolating. However the work for each isolating year group is clearly visible on the year group page on the school website. I looked out of interest to see what we could expect if they did have to isolate.
I didn't feel it was my place to complain about the work set for other people's children.

This is a goady post for sure, ( I believe the OP has form)
But teachers jumping to the bait of this are missing the point.
It holds a truth. Education provision since Covid 19 has not been fair or consistent, or consistently accessible, and even if it were it is a woeful substitute for the experience of school, for most children.

know smile, but that doesn't mean that every school is now geared up for providing alternative provision

No. But there is an edict from “on high” to provide high quality remote education. . Whereas last time the edict was to “suspend the curriculum” and “provide childcare”.

It’s never going to be ideal - the variation in quality of education has always been there. It’s unsurprising that going remote has exacerbated this. Covid is temporary - I hope the energy and outrage can perhaps continue and be directed at those in charge of the funding and curriculum provision within our education system.

I do agree in a way. The manner online teaching was conducted varied hugely from school to school or even teacher to teacher. Some made great efforts, some just assigned work without giving any actual instruction.

Also, many lower income households might not have a computer per child or even a suitable place for children to work. Parents in these households are also more likely to work in service jobs where they still have to be onsite for work. There are still homes with unreliable broadband. There are many many reasons why online teaching doesn't work well.

What a load of crap.
Our school has provided a phenomenal online education. The teachers are unbelievable. In fact for yr 12, they’re teaching half of the class at school while the rest join on zoom. It’s really alright. Unfortunately with my 6 year olds class , parent participation is a huge issue. It’s clear only about five out of 30- odd kids are completing the set tasks. I don’t really get it because they’re micro tasks eg ‘write a sentence about your favourite toy’. Easy enough to get it out of the way first thing and spend the rest of the morning more free range, but parents moan and moan that it’s too much work when they’re working from home, so do nothing. It’s rubbish seeing it’s the same four or five kids posting work every day, and imagine the teachers must be finding it really disheartening.

And to add... this is a school in an extremely affluent area.

@Ihatemyseleffordoingthis

This is a goady post for sure, ( I believe the OP has form) But teachers jumping to the bait of this are missing the point. It holds a truth. Education provision since Covid 19 has not been fair or consistent, or consistently accessible, and even if it were it is a woeful substitute for the experience of school, for most children.

How do you think that's different from education in normal times?

Do you really believe there has been no inequality or lack of consistency before Covid?

Also don't forget that the DFE suspended the curriculum. There was no benchmark, no guidance, no consistency to abide by. We were literally considered childcare for weeks on end .

I'm hopeful, for all children's sake that with the new guidance in place there will be at least a good enough effort for all the children if we lock down again. Whether ALL the children will be able to access it (due to various reasons) , that's a different issue. But then again a lot of children can't fully access education even when in school and I don't see many people shouting about that.

As an aside we got out allocated quota of laptops for disadvantaged children. A whole 3 of them in a school with over 300 children, in a massively deprived area and high SS involvement in one way or another. I suppose we'll just have to draw names out of a hat.

I mentioned before that I was on my laptop as I had been in a meeting this evening and answering emails; genuinely over 15 emails complaining that we hadn't updated them about exams next week (I know as much as they do) that they were having issues connecting to their internet with the school issued Chromebook so we had to come and fix it (I'm not tech support nor going to their house!) or that another teacher hadn't answered their previous emails on Boxing Day

Madness.

@SmileEachDay

know smile, but that doesn't mean that every school is now geared up for providing alternative provision

No. But there is an edict from “on high” to provide high quality remote education. . Whereas last time the edict was to “suspend the curriculum” and “provide childcare”.

It’s never going to be ideal - the variation in quality of education has always been there. It’s unsurprising that going remote has exacerbated this. Covid is temporary - I hope the energy and outrage can perhaps continue and be directed at those in charge of the funding and curriculum provision within our education system.

Fingers crossed.

Education provision since Covid 19 has not been fair or consistent

Education provision in the UK is not fair or consistent regardless of Covid. And largely, it comes down to how socially advantaged or disadvantaged the catchment area is - yes, there are outliers (I work in a “Good” school in a really deprived area) but by and large, it all comes down to money.

The stripping away of support services by the Tory government has made this situation much, much worse.

I partly agree with some of the sentiment.

I am a primary teacher and I did good tasks during lockdown, following my “in school” plans as far as possible with lots of video lessons and good quality feedback, phone calls and messages.

I hated the fact that I was likely adding to parents stress with every single task I set. My class were 7ish years old and the truth is that they can do very little online learning on their own. My DD is this age too and even zoom lessons for her ballet classes needed one of us to sit with her and remind her to do what the teacher was asking, and she loves her ballet.

We can’t and won’t do this, but, for my age of learners, if we have to close I do just wonder if we should just say fuck it.

Totally agree OP

My dd's school didn't teach any new material from March to September and they've been at home more than at school since September, so they're missing a lot of course content, which the school have said they won't be going over as they don't have time.

They wouldn't do live lessons; just set 1 or 2 tasks a day and didn't mark them for ages, if at all.

Any questions/issues had to be emailed in and generally took 10 days+ to get a reply. This was for yr11, so pretty disappointed tbh.

Her grades have really suffered as she was a straight 9 student previous to this.

We're lucky in that we've been able to afford to bring in a tutor over Christmas to try to fill in some gaps, but not everyone is able to do this and tbh, we shouldn't have to.

That’s awful @AccidentallyOnPurpose abs yet the government misuse funds without much challenge.
Could their be some kind of appeal such as one The Times ran last summer for school holiday provision in a deprived area.
I know that doesn’t fix the problem but could give some help?

@Ihatemyseleffordoingthis

This is a goady post for sure, ( I believe the OP has form) But teachers jumping to the bait of this are missing the point. It holds a truth. Education provision since Covid 19 has not been fair or consistent, or consistently accessible, and even if it were it is a woeful substitute for the experience of school, for most children.

For it to even start to be every child need consistent access to their own individual computer and a good internet connection

The thing is we can’t have it both ways.
There are European countries that had contingency plans in place for scenarios in which children had to learn from home. They had a fuill schedule from the beginning, with very little leniency for those who didn’t participate. Eg you don’t complete the work, you fail.
And in those places, parents have really struggled to oversee the sheer volume of work. (As they of course had to work themselves).
Here it’s been fairly sketchy but I don’t think many of us as parents have felt totally overwhelmed with supervising homework? It’s a really tricky balance

Candiscophonous

“What a load of crap.
Our school has provided a phenomenal online education. The teachers are unbelievable.”

And that’s exactly my point. Those who are fortunate enough to have had great experiences write off anything other as “what a load of crap”.
I can only imagine the outrage and vitriol that would be aimed at a poster who said that a description of a teacher as great or effective was talking “a load of crap” or “rubbish”. Yet when people state that they have had poor experiences, they are told they are talking “rubbish” or “a load of crap”.

Very telling.

@AccidentallyOnPurpose

The existing, entrenched inequalities have been massively exacerbated and it is naive or obtuse to pretend otherwise. And the blame squarely falls with the government for that.

Why do more than one poster on this thread (and other threads) keep saying that they had no provision from their school from March to September ?
In total (unless you were Nursery/reception, Year 1, Year 6, Year 10 and Year 12 from June when you had 6 weeks on average at home in most cases) there was a total of 13 weeks of school term-just over three months. Not 6 months that keeps being mentioned (or 9 months in some cases)
This over embellishment isn’t helping to make the valid points made by many about the provision the government provided being absolutely woeful which caused the disparity in provision provided by schools.

Since 26th October, the government has finally provided guidelines for schools to provide remote learning (which isn’t necessarily live video lessons by the way) that should be provided so parents like me will need to not necessarily assume next month’s provision will be the same as before and if it still doesn’t suit your child’s needs, parents should contact their schools to discuss a way forward, rather than complain on social media.

But teachers jumping to the bait of this are missing the point

No they're not. They see exactly what the OP is doing, as per usual.

All the OP's solutions, as fuckwitted as they are, involve getting rid of teachers, so it's plain they are not the slightest bit interested in systemic issues, and seek to locate the blame with teachers.

It holds a truth. Education provision since Covid 19 has not been fair or consistent, or consistently accessible, and even if it were it is a woeful substitute for the experience of school, for most children

The DoE set the rules for the last lockdown. Accessibility is down the DoE. A woeful substitute for school? Please. I'm willing to bet I've done more remote teaching than most, if not all MN teachers: seven months. I'm under no illusions that it is second best, but reject the woeful label - not talking just about me here. I saw real engagement; not 100% for sure, but no surprises, either. True, I teach in Australia, but I'm sure I'm no better at remote teaching than my UK colleagues. Just better equipped.

@hedgehopper - yes, quite, that was my point, tbh - "consistently accessible". Digital poverty is very definitely still there, and the gap is worsening.

Ok, I shall put my feet up then (and enjoy the freedom to find another job without a six month notice period round my neck). Thanks for sorting it OP.

@ChloeDecker

Why do more than one poster on this thread (and other threads) keep saying that they had no provision from their school from March to September ? In total (unless you were Nursery/reception, Year 1, Year 6, Year 10 and Year 12 from June when you had 6 weeks on average at home in most cases) there was a total of 13 weeks of school term-just over three months. Not 6 months that keeps being mentioned (or 9 months in some cases) This over embellishment isn’t helping to make the valid points made by many about the provision the government provided being absolutely woeful which caused the disparity in provision provided by schools.

Since 26th October, the government has finally provided guidelines for schools to provide remote learning (which isn’t necessarily live video lessons by the way) that should be provided so parents like me will need to not necessarily assume next month’s provision will be the same as before and if it still doesn’t suit your child’s needs, parents should contact their schools to discuss a way forward, rather than complain on social media.

Thank you Chloe. This information needs highlighting.

Completely agree. Our local council has put a total veto on live teaching, unions are dead against it too. So it's back to April/May with a few worksheets.

Piss poor.

And it's not "if schools close" in Scotland, Queen Covid has already announced we're not back until at least 18th January.