The EARLIEST schools will open is 8th March!!!

[dingledongle]

I cannot believe this!

Stunned!

My kids have lost one year of school and are going to be paying for this for decades to come

@Parker231

Having seen the latest numbers of cases and deaths, today’s news isn’t surprising.

A teacher friend sent me the attached (not from her school).

What a knob that Headteacher is. Are teachers suddenly above criticism? If they aren’t doing their job particularly well, then they bloody well should be challenged (as should ANY profession)

@ CrackOpenTheGin “If children are behind academically then maybe some parents should have stepped up more.”

I see your argument, but bear in mind that it can take years for primary school aged children to be diagnosed with conditions which can affect learning. I’m trying my best to home school a reception aged child who’s been referred for ASD, but it will take up to two years for him to be assessed. Meanwhile it’s not easy to keep him focused while I also have his baby sister at home, trying to eat everything, pulling furniture down on herself etc. If I contain her anywhere she screams so much that it’s equally distracting. Some parents are trying their best but our children still remain behind.

We really need an investigation as to why Europe has an infection rate about 20x higher and a death rate 30x higher than E/SEAsian counties (Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, S.Korea, China, Taiwan) etc

Europe has handled it abominably.

@middleager

I'd like to know how he'll help my two year 10s in time, one of whom spent 10 weeks having to learn remotely between Sept and Dec due to rampant Covid cases in school.

Sadly and realistically there won't be any help for your Year 10 children.

they don't have crystal balls That's good. They'd clink when they walked.

People, if you'd spent any time in schools, or studied social and economic history/ history and structure of British Education etc you'd know that your children aren't going to come to harm through lack of schooling. The only ones at risk are the 'hidden' abused/in poverty. Anything 'missed' can be ignored or covered later, except love and food.

Sorry OP it’s rubbish isn’t it? I am gutted for my children who do not see anyone outside their own immediate family and are just stuck in day after day. All the people telling you to ‘deal with it’ is unnecessary, not at all supportive and completely unhelpful.

Nothing we can do now, but the governments of Western Europe all need to answer for their complete failure on virtually every level.

@Dayofpeace

“I don't think your kids will be paying for this for decades to come. Everyone is in basically the same situation.”

Not true. State-ed children only seriously affected. £300M of school “catch-up money” isn’t going to go far as it’s about £10k per school, so less than employing a third of one teacher for one year.

Children are falling behind. Parents are stretched to the limit. Academic, social and sporting capabilities are being eroded. Child mental health issues are soaring. Child abuse and neglect is going unchecked.

These costs are nearly all being borne by the young and the financial costs will be theirs too. There is no way out of the burgeoning debt problem aside from inflation or default. The route will be inflation and it’s already started.

Our children are paying the price, in every way, for something that is of negligible risk to them, and is very low risk to their parents who are generally under age 60.

The liquidity issued by the Fed, BofE and ECB is flooding into assets creating massive asset price inflation, so the rich get much richer and the average person loses their job and can’t pay the mortgage.

Taxes will rise to pay for it, but not before the wealthy pop their massive gains into foreign tax-avoidance schemes and havens, so the middle and working class will pay. We are witnessing a massive transfer of wealth from the average person to the already wealthy.

And our children will pay the price of that for years and years to come, with lower attainment, lower living standards, higher taxes, and an ever-increasing elderly population burden.

Schools need to re-open. The money should have been spent on targeted protective measures for the Covid-vulnerable instead of f*cking our economy and future.

Say everyone is behind a full year- and never catches any of that up.

How does that actually, materially, impact their lives? What specific bits of knowledge or skills do students learn in Y11 that they need to learn in order to be successful or have a good life?

I do agree that there are individual issues with mental health and neglect. WRT the neglect, maybe social services could actually do their jobs, rather than relying on schools to constantly pick up the pieces? WRT the mental health issues, I think some students were equally negatively impacted by the situation last term. There is no good solution, except again, more funding for CAHMS etc. Individual children will equally be negatively impacted by their parents/carers getting seriously ill or dying from Covid.

I do agree that the wealthy avoiding tax is a major problem, and I do agree the rich are getting richer, whilst the rest of us get comparatively poorer. But opening schools doesn't directly solve that problem, and we could directly solve it.

Reopening schools alone does not solve the problems you identify. And it's not as simple as just protecting the covid vulnerable because a lot of them live with school aged children.

Reality is when schools opened after lockdown one one in 1,000 people had covid now it’s one in 55. Given how many children on here had isolation periods then what do some people think is going to happen if we open schools as normal right now.

Personally 8 March is the earliest I'd have expected and my instinct is that it will be longer.

I don't see, however, why people feel the need to come on here and chastise the OP. I happen to be feeling OK about homeschooling my 5 year old, despite being in a small flat with no garden and also trying to work at the same time. That doesn't mean I don't realise others don't find it awful. Not does it mean I feel the need to berate them for it.

There seems to be a massive misunderstanding regarding ‘vulnerable’ children being in school. There are many many children who would be considered ‘vulnerable’ in a social sense of the word who don’t have an EHCP or aren’t identified as ‘free school meals’, they are not at school. Children who are witnessing horrific domestic violence, who are neglected, ignored, emotionally abused, not all of these children have a ‘vulnerable’ label that the school are aware of and it’s extremely naive to think that a huge proportion of children are safe within their home environment.

Most countries in Asia knew that to protect the economy and keep schools open, you had to keep right on top of the spread of the virus from day one - track and trace, stringent mask use, no socializing when whoever numbers even creep up into double figures. Shitty, but better than the alternative (schools shut, businesses basically shut for a year and counting, 100,000 deaths).

But in Europe and the Americas we thought we knew better and thought we could and should prioritize “the economy” whenever possible, as if it could somehow be divorced from overflowing hospital wards and ever spiraling numbers. And we did this not just once at the beginning of last year, but yet again in the autumn and the lead up to Christmas - and then believed we could just use desperate lockdowns whenever things got too hairy. Result, economy totally fucked and we have around 20x infection rate and 30x death rate of major east Asia and SE Asian nations.

@movingonup20

I'm sure they will be more damaged if we don't get this under control and their parents die.

Yeh, because the 20, 30 & 40 year olds are dropping like flies.

What an ignorant and narrow-minded answer.

@dingledongle

I cannot believe this!

Stunned!

My kids have lost one year of school and are going to be paying for this for decades to come

100k dead 1700 died today and you can't believe schools aren't going back in 3 weeks.

Yes, it's hard. But is it realistic to expect 100/1000s of kids to return to school in 3 weeks? I personally think that would cause another lockdown in another few months. Get winter over, get vaccinations continuing to happen, gets infections low, then think about reopening schools!

Infections and deaths are through the roof ,8th of march is about 6 six weeks away do you honestly think it will of settled by then.

I think you need to look at the whole picture rather than the tiny bit that affects you .

I don't understand why it's worth opening just before Easter. Doesn't it risk a repeat of the start of last when they went back for one day and virus spread.

Surely it's better to knock virus on head and go back after Easter for a whole uninterrupted term?

Start if last term

When I read posts like this I honestly despair. They are YOUR children! It’s your job to do your best by them. If learning was so poor from March to September then you needed to step up. Even if you are working full time you have weekends, days off and holidays. You could have had them doing a few hours work every day you weren’t working, right through the summer holidays.

I did..and so did a lot of parents. They didn’t just whinge about all the lost learning, they did something about it. My children were working 6 months to a year ahead when this all started, they are now 1.5-2 years ahead. Did that just happen? No! It was dedication to their learning over the holidays and every day I could spare. It was working to get them on board with it as well. Anyone can buy appropriate workbooks for their children, use oak academy etc. If children are behind academically then maybe some parents should have stepped up more.

Posts like this are very unhelpful, you must be living under a rock at the moment if you haven't realised how many parents are struggling.
I honestly think it would be better for struggling parents to stop focusing on catching up and just spend some quality stress free time with their children. Children will catch up, there's no point spending months with stressed fragile parents trying to keep up.

Anyone can buy appropriate workbooks for their children, use oak academy etc

What about single parents working from home 9am-6pm with no flexibility from their employer, no spare laptops or tablets, and no spare cash to buy workbooks or spare electronic devices? What should they do, in your expert opinion?

Wow, there is a much wider issue here for children than whether their parents are able to provide them with ‘oak workbooks.’ Children are living in appalling home life situations, think beyond your privilege.

But in Europe and the Americas we thought we knew better and thought we could and should prioritize “the economy” whenever possible, as if it could somehow be divorced from overflowing hospital wards and ever spiraling numbers

This has been the most frustrating thing for me throughout this whole shower of shit. The fact that people have been lead to believe it is an either/or situation. Like if we just said "oh sod all the 80 year olds, let the rest of us get on with it", we'd be able to get on with it as normal. No. If we did that the economy, mental health and education would be trashed even worse than they already are.

The ship to be "normal" sailed when Boris and co refused to lock down when they were originally told to by scientists in early 2020. Then again multiple times when they have chosen the "balancing act" with the economy, failing to realise that there is no balance possible. Prioritise the economy and you fail in all areas. Prioritise the virus, normality can resume sooner.

The pandemic has certainly shown us how selfish SOME parents are.

They are the ones who’ve always seen school as childcare, and moan about spending time with their own children, regardless of the death toll in the nation.
They seem happy for other older people to die, but ignoring completely the deaths amongst the younger population
I wonder what their reaction would be if children started getting covid and suffering illness or death?
They’ve always complained about teachers, and don’t care if they live or die, as long as their arrangements aren’t affected.

“The economy” is a social construct, entirely man made, and the levers affecting it can be switched on or off depending on the political decisions being made. This goes globally, not just in our own Plague Island, where the venal Tories have used the opportunity offered by the pandemic (and lack of usual scrutiny) to line their own pockets and those of their friends, with public money, which would normally be subject to more formal purchasing decisions.

Dead people can’t shop.

The Govt should be looking at Universal Basic Income, forgiving debt and other entirely viable stimuli to enable people to recover financially from the past year.
This lot won’t do it, though. The general population are nothing more than Units of Labour for Tories.

The borders should be properly closed to people, schools should not go back without better PPE and physical building changes, or a promise for lessons to be outdoors during the Spring and Summer.

109,000 people have already died because of the stupidity of a Stop/Start approach to an infectious virus, which is now becoming MORE infectious.
The vaccine distribution is being fucked up as well. This Government wants us to be poor and terrified.

Sickening.

@Parker231

Having seen the latest numbers of cases and deaths, today’s news isn’t surprising.

A teacher friend sent me the attached (not from her school).

Bloody brilliant, but surely not for real?

If it's real, I take my hat off to that HT!

The pandemic has certainly shown us how selfish SOME parents are.

I disagree. It’s shown how much has been taken on board by young people.

I think it'll be too early on 8 March but I'm glad it's not after half term. That would be total insanity.