Schools still a covid shitshow

[noblegiraffe]

"Schools have been forced to send year groups home this week because of "rapidly rising" Covid rates among staff and an inability to find supply teachers, it has emerged.

The removal of the need for Covid testing among staff and pupils was making the situation worse, with some schools now experiencing their worst absence levels of the pandemic, a headteachers' leader told Tes.

Heads warn that some schools are having to send year groups home on a rota or combine class groups in an attempt to protect exam year groups from more disruption."

www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/covid-schools-absence-send-year-groups-home-cases-spike

Some will claim that getting rid of testing would improve the situation, but clearly a situation where lots of teachers are getting ill and requiring a few days off school to recover, regardless of isolation rules, is not 'getting back to normal'.

The teachers that I know who have had covid recently would have required a few days off school despite it being 'mild' even without isolation guidance, even though teachers are well-known for dosing on Lemsip and turning up to school regardless of illness because setting cover work is worse.

Still, the covid catch-up effort has basically fizzled out, and it's looking like zero effort will be made by the government to support children in recovering their education from the impact of absences and lack of teachers.

Exams start in a couple of months for kids who are having an extremely disruptive time. The government has fixed the exam grades so that they will come out with better results than the 2019 cohort, this will basically cover up the impact on educational standards. How this will play out down the line at uni/college/sixth form is anyone's guess.

Well my Dd's school on reduced hours with a strict 'send them in with calpol' attendance policy.

Just been chatting to a friend whose child at a different secondary - their head (who, to be fair, is very experienced and I think secure) is still isolating year groups, no whole school assemblies, and has a strict policy of insisting children are kept off with any contagious illness (so a fever, nose like a tap, that kind of thing), is able to properly ventilate all classrooms (luckily has the buildings to do this but is ensuring the CO2 monitors in every class) and their school is operating as normal with far lower teacher absence than is typical. This is an anomaly among secondaries around here - most have some year groups sent home for at least a period, or reduced hours.

It's not rocket science. I'm guessing they'll have much better GCSE and A-level results due to just some basic common sense.

As well as happier and healthier teachers and TAs

And beyond the evidence that this sort of basic measure actually works I think very little has been made of the mental health impacts of an attitude that nothing can be done and nothing is worth doing to protect teaching and other school staff.

I don't think it's good to teach a completely defeatist attitude to children, either.

Our school's management of covid is getting more bizzare by the day. We're still dropping off in the playground despite mass assemblies and a play with full audience going ahead and open to the public while covid prevelance in our area one-in-eleven. It seems there's more guidance in place to deal with an outbreak of head lice than there is for covid.

Have been following school threads on Covid on and off for the last two years.
Depressing to see that attitudes have not changed.
Teachers are being basically told to crack on no matter how many times they get Covid or how poor their working conditions are. If you say hang on, where's our PPE etc you are making a fuss about nothing. Meanwhile most other professions have been working from home or with massively changed working practices. And yes you have a right to say this is wrong without other professionals diluting the situation by saying it's just as bad for them.
Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. TAs can't be recruited.
Wonder why.

Co2 monitors are useless, ours goes off within 5 minutes even with all the windows open. We've had to turn it off because it's stressing the children.

@user1471509171

Co2 monitors are useless, ours goes off within 5 minutes even with all the windows open. We've had to turn it off because it's stressing the children.

That's not the monitor being useless though, is it? It's doing exactly what it is meant to.

New guidance states that lateral flow tests will only be available in prisons, hospitals and social care seeings and not in schools.

Teachers will have to buy their own LFTs
.
Apparently covid STILL doesn't spread in schools. FFS

@MrsHamlet i agree, I meant useless as in it goes off within 5 minutes but what can we do about the fact that levels are too high, absolutely nothing except unplug it

Invasion

People still not getting it 2 years on

It’s not about risk of catching it

It never has been

It’s about the risk to those having it

Those 3 settings you mention are all high risk areas housing people at high risk (yes prisons are full of vulnerable high risk people)

Those at very high risk in community are still eligible

Teachers and kids may have more chance of catching it but are no more at risk when they have it and that’s what people on these threads simple can’t grasp

What you can't seem to grasp, Watapalava is that if lots of teachers get it at the same time, the risk is that schools have to send kids home as there's no one to teach them.

It's a different risk to killing elderly patients, but it's one that we have been told over and over the past two years is totally unacceptable.

Yet no one seems to want anything done to lessen that risk because that might make teachers a special case.

Are you happy with your kids being sent home because there's no one to teach them, or being supervised in the hall by office staff, as is currently happening across the country?

People previously cared about their kids being in school.

my kids are year 11 and 10 and haven't had a single teacher off this year. They seem determined to come in to school come what may and i'm grateful for such committed teachers. The school even took them skiing to France at Feb half term (comprehensive in Liverpool before anyone things its private). Some schools seem way more capable of getting on with it than others it seems!

Are you suggesting that committed teachers are immune to covid?

How bizarre an attempt to insult teachers who have caught it!

Meanwhile, for those who live in the real world where people catch contagious viruses regardless of their dedication to their jobs:

www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/schools-knife-edge-amid-unforgivable-wait-dfe-covid-plan

"Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told Tes that the situation with Covid is now on a "knife edge", with school leaders reporting that they are having to use office administrative staff to run lessons and have lost close to 1,500 hours of in-person learning in a single term."

@Watapalava

my kids are year 11 and 10 and haven't had a single teacher off this year. They seem determined to come in to school come what may and i'm grateful for such committed teachers. The school even took them skiing to France at Feb half term (comprehensive in Liverpool before anyone things its private). Some schools seem way more capable of getting on with it than others it seems!

@Watapalava

This is good your school hasn't been impacted but surely you can appreciate that it might not be the same everywhere.

If you are too ill to work then you are too ill to work - doesn't matter how determined you are. For some schools, this is causing nightmares with staffing issues and disrupting teaching.

This isn't isolated to schools - it's a problem everywhere when you have lots of people ill at once. Hopefully it will be manageable but denying it's a situation that could happen (and indeed many posters have descibed issues in their schools) seems a little ostrich like.

It just won’t be true that @Watapalava’s school hasn’t had a single teacher off this year with Covid.

Parents don’t get informed about why teachers are off.

If healthcare staff will be required to continue testing and isolating if positive, surely there's going to be even greater staff absences in our hospitals and care homes? Same goes for prisons?

Yes and no. Testing and isolating stops the spread. No testing and isolating means people will still pass it around and will still get ill and will be off because they are actually ill, for a few days at least.

Not a single one of the 95% of our teachers or TAs who've had Covid has been asymptomatic or fine.

Well - there you go. Watapalava has the answer. If you're just committed enough you won't catch Covid or get ill.

I suppose that applies to health care professionals too?

I'll tell that to my colleagues, some of whom have had this for the third time and are dragging themselves back into work while still batting post- viral fatigue.

I do hope my colleagues who are off with covid at the moment are going get a firm telling off about their lack of commitment. If only they'd been more committed, I wouldn't be covering lessons at the expense of getting my own job done AGAIN.

I was referring to the potential problems due to only certain groups contining to test and isolate. With the majority of us just 'living with it' and going about knowingly infected we are going to have much higher infection numbers. More nhs, social care, prison workers will test positive and still be required to isolate. Some people say it's a simple solution but I'm not so sure.

Same in Somerset schools.it's been a tough few weeks with staffing

Our very small primary is ridden with covid. There are classes with everyone catching it within a week. Multiple staff are sick. I mean genuinely ill with covid. They are combining classes because of staff shortages. And there is so much disruption. But they still went along with singing in the assembly with parents attendance. After that we had outbreak in another class. Siblings coming to school with positive covid cases at home doesn't help the situation at all. They come to school for five days, spread it further along and then are out sick themselves as well. There are kids in school who have caught it twice within a month!

@noblegiraffe

Are you suggesting that committed teachers are immune to covid?

How bizarre an attempt to insult teachers who have caught it!

Meanwhile, for those who live in the real world where people catch contagious viruses regardless of their dedication to their jobs:

www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/schools-knife-edge-amid-unforgivable-wait-dfe-covid-plan

"Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told Tes that the situation with Covid is now on a "knife edge", with school leaders reporting that they are having to use office administrative staff to run lessons and have lost close to 1,500 hours of in-person learning in a single term."

What I find unbelievable is that the government can on one hand have 97% attendance policies and claim that if kids are off sick this is a risk to their education, but on the other hand apparently covid 'doesn't count' towards that target and somehow, magically, if a child is off with covid (or indeed their teacher, leading to 1,500 hours of lost learning) this isn't worthy of a mention or doing anything at all to try and remedy it.

I've come to the conclusion that the people telling us teachers should 'crack on' are the sames ones who were up in arms about schools only being open to keyworker kids during the peaks. They give no shits about kids or education, simply about far right policies to run state schools into the ground.

Either that or they're keyboard warriors, who have never been near a secondary school in recent history.

@Watapalava

my kids are year 11 and 10 and haven't had a single teacher off this year. They seem determined to come in to school come what may and i'm grateful for such committed teachers. The school even took them skiing to France at Feb half term (comprehensive in Liverpool before anyone things its private). Some schools seem way more capable of getting on with it than others it seems!

Wow. How insulting and ignorant.

Parents at our school don't know if teachers are off as we've appeared to cover seamlessly at great cost to ourselves.

Also, as someone struggling to get through each day in school as I recover from covid weeks later, your post is incredibly insulting.

@Watapalava

my kids are year 11 and 10 and haven't had a single teacher off this year. They seem determined to come in to school come what may and i'm grateful for such committed teachers. The school even took them skiing to France at Feb half term (comprehensive in Liverpool before anyone things its private). Some schools seem way more capable of getting on with it than others it seems!

I hope that area of Liverpool is being studied carefully by all the relevant authorities. We may have found a genuine way out of the problems caused by Covid if we can find out why the staff there have been unaffected by Covid.