Do you think schools will return as normal in January?

[LucozadeGirl]

Just that really.

@MarshaBradyo Have you ever taught in a classroom with masked students? I have, with hearing loss and relying on lip reading. It was fine and really did help stop the spread. With omicron we know it is very transmissible but masks can help lower the viral load.

We are back to "normal" from Thursday. 2 days to get organised in case we remote teach. Am in Wales.

The problem with isolation is that some are unable to understand what 'close contact' actually means. The number of schools sending home entire classes and year groups has been shocking.

The figures, before the DfE stopped publishing them for some mysterious reason, showed that the isolations per pupil with covid, when isolation of close contacts was a thing, was on average, less than a class. The idea that heads were with abandon wasn’t borne out by the figures, and also ignored the fact PHE were in charge of those decisions.

We had a year group in the summer which was plagued with covid. Parents were regularly complaining to the school that the year group hadn’t been sent home. The kids themselves were saying it was mad that they hadn’t isolated the year group. But they never did, and their education was interrupted for far longer than two weeks.

@kittensinthekitchen

The problem with isolation is that some are unable to understand what 'close contact' actually means. The number of schools sending home entire classes and year groups has been shocking.

Close contact meant shoulder to shoulder contact and one in front and one behind in many schools that I know.

You could also do small practical things like giving any outgrown uniform to your school to be passed on to kids who need it, find out if your school has a breakfast club for PP kids and see what you could usefully provide for it - we give all of ours toast and hot chocolate etc every morning and I bet we'd be glad of all sorts of donations whether consumables or basic equipment.
This. However it's also important to normalise buying second hand or clothes for children to grow into, not buying new bags every year and so on.

@kittensinthekitchen

The problem with isolation is that some are unable to understand what 'close contact' actually means. The number of schools sending home entire classes and year groups has been shocking.

When that happened, it was because that's what schools were told to do. It actually made for more consistent and effective remote teaching than sending a few home, too

[quote kittensinthekitchen]@TerfetyTERF

Are you against all health screening? Or just for those which have no or limited apparent symptoms - HIV, routine mammogram, prostrate screening, bowel screening, antenatal scanning, post-birth testing, smear tests...[/quote]
Did we ever get an answer to this?
It's a very interesting question that ought to be levelled at all those U4T types people who rail against testing trigger word "healthy children."

@Northsoutheastwest76 totally agree a Sen parent my self!! Also my children (all with autism) have to spend their whole life adapting to what’s normal what they should do, however people with no disabilities can’t seem to adapt at all!
Not testing health kids-not adapting
Not wanting masks- not adapting
Not wanting places closed-not adapting
Not wanting to isolate-not adapting
Not wanting to do lft- so on…
I have kids that didn’t want clothes on, couldn’t talk, couldn’t ask for things, didn’t know how to ask others to play, get angry quick etc etc. each part I have had to teach… yet things like this people don’t want to do. (Pointed at no one this is generalised to the out side world).
Issue is- kids go back to school-high transmission-lots of positives-parents catch it- meaning nurses/doctors/carers/therapist/social worker/retail staff/teachers etc etc catch it- then short staffed- people don’t get the treatments needed- cev in care home, hospital, cancer patience die, huge strain on key workers- a&e days wait (already hours).
Actually I know someone whose hubby died as the ambalance wouldn’t attend as said he was to poorly and they had to triage and he was terminal.
It’s about protecting our kids but about making sure we have enough key workers at the same time.
I actually think the government are playing a scary game.
Education side- education has got harder, face it the kids in year 5 now learn what i was learning in year 7/8 so do they really need to learn as much as they do, do we still have good doctors/accountants/professionals that were in education 30-60 years ago!
The government could make standard lower.
Now, home schooling was so difficult for me, I have 3 kids with asd/learning difficulties and adhd, my hubby is a key worker so it was on my own. Last year I was awfully sick (although pregnancy related). I managed. If parents were both key workers or single parents were they were offered school places. So childcare not so much of a issue.
On the positive side, kids have technology now. It’s not ideal but it’s something, look on the positive side.
As for vulnerable children, special services should still be open working and doing home visits them children known should be offered school places.
I’m not for or against school closures but I’m anxious about
Needing the nhs in the next few months, I’m worried about my kids being poorly and needing the nhs as worry it will be at breaking point.
There is no point people blaming each other, no one wants their kids to not have a education, miss school miss their friends.
I don’t think they will close schools but I think the nhs will change forever I think more sick people will die (not from covid) I mean cancer patients/people in accidents/other illnesses etc. if you can’t see that schools being open
Has a knock on effect to that care well 🤷🏼‍♀️

@kittensinthekitchen

The problem with isolation is that some are unable to understand what 'close contact' actually means. The number of schools sending home entire classes and year groups has been shocking.

@kittensinthekitchen Schools don't make that decision. Each case is assessed by public health advisers in line with DfE guidance. If children are sent home it is because it is necessary on public health grounds, classifying as an outbreak.

Well said ScottishTinyDancer and kudos for surviving the last couple of years. It was hard enough for me to get one NT but very stubborn son to engage with education.

Ime the kids have been way more adaptable and resilient and mentally healthy than many adults throughout this whole saga. Thankfully as I've worked with them throughout so if even a minority of them had been as obstinate and reactionary and down right odd as many mn'ers it would have been a nightmare.

They also seem more capable of understanding that if you want x you may have to do u and w to give it a chance of happening rather than just stamping their feet and saying no, I want x and I'm not going to do anything to make it happen other than shout and stamp my feet.

The teens I've taught thankfully have been more rational and reasoned and compassionate than foot stampy mn'ers who refuse to adapt an inch.

I know of one clinically vulnerable colleague for example whose students broadly chose to wear masks in her lesson even when it wasn't mandated because they knew she was clinically vulnerable. Who knows one of their parents may be on here stamping their feet at the very idea that children should have to wear a mask for a few weeks.

if most other professions have gone back to normal I don't see why schools and teachers also can't

What’s normal? DH is back WFH, DD back in masks at work, social distancing in place for others, masks on buses and LFT twice weekly.

Schools - especially younger years, no bubbles no social distancing no masks, full assemblies of 400 plus children, no additional cleaning, kids are washing hands but that’s about it.

@swallowedAfly that’s lovely!
I think the kids have been amazing. I also think there is ways to boost their mental health at home too.
My older 2 caught covid in December, I didn’t need to but I got my 6 year old asd/ld daughter to do lft daily as I didn’t want her taking it into school (we all did apart from the positive kids). As I felt that was right. We made a joke out of it, made a song up, bribed with a bit of chocolate too, let her do the test her self like a science experiment etc. She managed it. We have been doing lft twice weekly anyway. I just don’t think we can have it all ways, we either do our part or face a lockdown. I think if we had managed to do these steps all the time we prob wouldn’t be facing what we are now. However I know others feel differently. I think that’s lovely what them kids did for their teacher, maybe out of this we will be better people and not take so much for granted.

@swallowedAfly

Well said ScottishTinyDancer and kudos for surviving the last couple of years. It was hard enough for me to get one NT but very stubborn son to engage with education.

Ime the kids have been way more adaptable and resilient and mentally healthy than many adults throughout this whole saga. Thankfully as I've worked with them throughout so if even a minority of them had been as obstinate and reactionary and down right odd as many mn'ers it would have been a nightmare.

They also seem more capable of understanding that if you want x you may have to do u and w to give it a chance of happening rather than just stamping their feet and saying no, I want x and I'm not going to do anything to make it happen other than shout and stamp my feet.

The teens I've taught thankfully have been more rational and reasoned and compassionate than foot stampy mn'ers who refuse to adapt an inch.

This s a great post, I agree kids are in general acting in a much more mature way than adults.

The problem we have is that the government is run by people who this applies to just stamping their feet and saying no, I want x and I'm not going to do anything to make it happen other than shout and stamp my feet.

They've announced major policy changes overnight that medics and teachers have then had to try and implement - without doing anything at all towards making it possible or likely. Like saying 'schools won't close' when they're doing nothing to make it less likely for large numbers of teachers will get ill or 'waiting times in ambulances will be cut' but not funding the NHS any more or doing anything to address the thousands of HCP positions unfilled and huge staffing crisis (which suggests that they need to pay more but again they do nothing). My GP surgery had no forewarning at all that they were suddenly going to be expected to do boosters for all over 18s, they found out at the same time as us, and have done amazing things to set up clinics, but the government is behaving like the most spoilt child in not laying any groundwork. Totally unprofessional.

HCPs and teachers are the kind of people in general who try and do the best for their patients / students and in my opinion have done heroic things during the pandemic in the face of a foot stamping toddler government, but there is a limit. They're not magic (however much the actions of the government imply they are),

It's the same with Brexit - they've done precious little to actually lay the groundwork which would minimise disruption or mean that Brexit was a success. Things like the lack of fruit pickers and lorry drivers were entirely predictable and predicted and they did nothing to plan or prepare.

if most other professions have gone back to normal I don't see why schools and teachers also can't.

Only someone without kids in school could write this.

Schools HAVE been back 'as normal' since Sept 2020 pretty much with much fewer mitigations than in the rest of society. The only time they weren't back pretty much as normal (particularly primary) was when the lack of mitigations elsewhere and piss poor management of covid caused cases to overwhelm hospitals and force a lockdown in early 2021. Even then, most kids seemed to be in school.

And 'normal' in schools is an underfunded, crumbling system, where vulnerable kids fall through the cracks and there is an increasingly demoralised (though amazing) and stretched workforce. With school buildings crumbing and the amount spent per pupil steadily declining, where parents are increasingly asked to step in to buy essentials which were previously paid for by the state (e.g. our PTA recently bought a load of reading books).

It emerged recently that in my daughters Reception class the materials such as scissors, paper, pencils and card were being purchased by the teacher and TA out of their own money. We parents did a quick whip around and gave them some money as they're not exactly paid a fortune (unlike MPs).

It's a national disgrace and the Tories should hang their heads in shame.

@herecomesthsun

It is easy to search for old threads that discuss this; however it is a mumsnet principle not to use one thread to discuss another.

It also would be invidious to single out particular posters for expressing a fairly commonly held opinion.

It's not as if there is only one poster to whom we are referring.

Use the Search functions.

What would you suggest I search, and how would this search tell me anything about what posters are doing when they're not posting on here? We've been told that posters certainly don't really care about vulnerable children, so no doubt there'll be more basis for that than some of you feeling it in your waters and finding it a convenient concept because they said something you don't like. You clearly don't care about this MN principle given the allusions you've already made, so we don't need to hide behind worry about that.

Yes.

It does seem like we're living in the era of oversized toddlers stamping their feet emperor!

YY to all the last minute announcements and magical thinking leaving those of us actually in the thick of it trying to make things happen and dealing with foot stamper types angry that we don't have magic wands.

We lose a family member in November due to an ambulance taking 3 hours to turn up. Absolutely awful but it would never occur to me to blame the ambulance drivers who must have been in hell knowing that they had a backlog of people who needed life or death treatment who they were not going to get to until it was too late. I know where to squarely lay the blame.

They won't even introduce the reintroduction of nhs bursaries ffs and no one seems to mention that their withdrawal of them will have played a part in the staffing shortages we see.

"It's a national disgrace and the Tories should hang their heads in shame."

You're absolutely right in this and everything else you've said.
There are also some posters on MN who should hang their heads in shame too, for the misinformation they're spreading and the vile teacher-bashing. The last two years have been particularly awful in schools, despite our best efforts, yet you'd think we were responsible for concocting Covid in one of the science labs to deliberately infect and ruin the lives of as many children as we can. We have been at the mercy of the DfE/Government indecision/last minute policy changes. Teachers didn't close schools, the Government did.
And nearly everyone I know apart from front-line NHS workers has been working from home for a large proportion of the time since March 2020, and even more so now.
So get lost with the "if most other professions have gone back to normal I don't see why schools and teachers also can't" nonsense.

Sorry that post was full of errors but hope it made sense.

@CallmeHendricks can’t agree with you more I think all teachers/nursery nurses/carers nhs workers etc etc we should be proud off. I don’t get the teacher bashing because even when learning from home they did their upmost to help.
MPs got £100000 to work from home as
Well. Imagine where that could of gone!

Yes, I can't remember how much of a grant they got to set up a home office whilst teachers were going out and buying laptops and web cams and visualisers from their own pockets during massive price inflation to be able to provide remote learning. Their mates were getting massive back handers in dodgy contracts and schools were trying to scrape together money to buy sanitiser and nurses were wearing the same shoddy ppe all day.

It wouldn't matter how far you bent over backwards there are some people it would never be enough for and who would still point the finger at the people trying to help rather than the real culprits. So ??? Fuck 'em I guess. The kids did appreciate our efforts ime.

MPs got £100000 to work from home as Well.
To be fair - and I'm not a defender of theirs at all - this was to set up offices at home for the MP and their staff.
The £6 a week I was able to claim back against my tax rather pales into insignificance, mind you

@Barbie222

I'm an engineer for British Gas I worked throughout the pandemic as have all my colleges

Oh, with a mask on, yeah? apart from that colleague who didn't bother at mine

Actually no we didn't wear masks at the very start of it all they didn't come in until July 2020 and myself and many of my colleagues don't wear the down to the nature of our jobs