I don't know what the answer is, but it's not that.
Every single parent household would be eligible. For me, I'd have to be furloughed one week on, one week off (children are here EOW), and I suppose that type of arrangement is now fairly common - admin nightmare. Can you imagine how many essential key workers who can still wfh this would potentially take out of action?
As for this post:
Schools need to provide workable online education, including live lessons.
Schools are already being forced to go above and beyond. What is workable for one child is not for another and online differentiation is incredibly limited. Many schools are offering live lessons, but, again, these don't work for everyone. In ours, there are a number of students working mornings close to school rather than home to be able to walk straight from work to school. Others have to share laptops with siblings, but have entirely different live lessons. Many others are young carers who now don't even have respite from this while at school.
Parents need to accept that they will be juggling childcare and work and be exhausted for a while.
I mostly agree with this. I teach live lessons while still getting my children (reception to mid-secondary school age) to do their work. It is possible, but requires some planning ahead. You have to train and enforce some independence, work out a schedule, which enables you to be "on" and "off" in reasonable intervals.
Employers need to be flexible with deadlines and supportive of employees with children. My work are shit with that and many others will be, too. Parents essentially got told, tough, this is what we're doing, roll with it or find a different job.
If we all work together, we will easily get through this. If each group pursues its own agenda entirely selfishly and is not prepared to make any sacrifices, we will really struggle. People’s lack of resilience in the face of Covid is quite scary. We can all cope as long as things go swimmingly. Any challenge and society seems to fissure.
Apart from the "easily", yes, agreed. It's bloody hard. But I have noticed that many people are incredibly whingy about some of the rules.
I do see it as an opportunity to train ourselves and our children to become more self-sufficient. Maybe it will curb the expectation that someone else will solve all of our problems and force people to see themselves as strong enough to cope and figure out their own solutions. Maybe it will encourage parents to let their children have more responsibility for themselves, grow up independently and actually learn some life skills in this. It's an ooportunity,
I can dream 