Private prep schools furloughing TAs, "offline" teaching, no fee discount.

[Coronateachingagain]

Have NC not to out myself.

We have a DD in year 1 attending a prep school in W London owned by one of the private equity groups.

It looks like they have furloughed the TAs, and us parents are not very happy with the situation as there has been no communication about this (and none so far either about any reduction of fees forthcoming). I also find it a bit offensive they are using the furlough scheme when they are not really struggling as a business, and as a taxpayer too I see this as a bit cheeky (even more when the owners are a private equity firm).

I wanted to check what other preps are doing in Y1? for example:

• are they furloughing TAs? any discount offered?
• do you have live online classes, how many in each online class, do you divide classes in groups?
• top London preps, ie Kensington Prep, Bute, Glendower, etc, what is best practice?
• what is the schedule of the day, how many English/Maths lessons? any one on one interactions, like once a week for each child on what they need?

I have a feeling our school is underdelivering, making some money on the furloughed staff and leaving all the hard work to the parents. We are very disappointed to say the least.

Should be called offline teaching, rather than online teaching!

It's too soon to say for this lockdown, but in the main one last year our prep furloughed everyone they could - catering, some support staff but not all, etc. I think it was an appropriate use of furlough. After all the school still has all their site costs and the building overheads won't reduce much during lockdown (especially if they open to key workers, which ours did). There was a fairly substantial fees discount.

There were online group lessons as well as pre-recorded materials made by the teachers. No one to one because that's a safeguarding issue online.

It's far too early to assess what sort of fee discount they might give, it's been less than 24hrs! What do you propose the TAs do remotely?

My DD is at an international fee paying school but it's marketed as 'British' so I'd imagine they try and keep broadly in-line with the UK. They are going to school as normal at the moment but I can tell you what they did March -Sept last year if that helps?

She was in Y2 and had x2 online lessons per day. Some were half the class and some were individual. They had whole class 'circle time' once a week too. They also had work set on Seesaw which was divided into maths/English/ science / native language/ ICT / PE etc.

We had to print worksheets and email/upload pics of work to the online portal. They also signed us up to Doodle, Oxford Owls, a local online learning portal and the government set up a home learning TV channel so there was quite a lot of variety.

I also had x2 teens home learning so did have to divide my time when not working, but my DD took from around 9.30 - 3ish to do her work.

They didn't offer a discount, though, only about €600 for lunches if I recall correctly.

Similar situation here - my DC is in year 1 at a north London independent. Assume all TAs have been furloughed as they were the last time and again, as plans were only announced yesterday, I wouldn’t have expected the school to inform us at this stage. No discount offered - none expected as I feel so much of the school’s cost is fixed.
Online provision is a mix of live and recorded material and we print off resources. No one to one - I wouldn’t expect it either, the teachers are being stretched to breaking point as it is.

We are at W London Prep too.

No furloughing here (not private equity company owned). Fee discount last summer but not this time (as far as I know). I am happy with no discount - would rather have maximum help from school with home learning.

We have a full timetable of lessons, mostly live full timetable with the odd pre-recorded dance or art lesson on SeeSaw. The TA was on the live session too and the teacher mentioned from next week the TA will sometimes take extra support groups and she seemed to be helping answer questions live and mark work.

Today in each live the teacher did about 20-30 mins input, asking questions, whiteboard tasks and then the class went onto SeeSaw to do their work but could go back onto the Google meet chat to ask questions. At the end they shared their work and the teacher had marked some work live during the lesson and got them to improve it if the girls finished early. Worked well.

We are Year 2.
Friend is Year 1 said they have a half class sized group live for maths, English and phonics each day and then the rest is videos on SeeSaw. Their daughter also gets some extra support and this is happening online too. They're happy. Obviously as this age more supervision is needed from parents whatever the situation but they feel they are getting lots of teacher feedback and input.

Last summer was good compared to lots of schools but more pre-recorded video lessons which I had to help DD with.
Now I can now just set DD up with laptop and her timetable and leave her to it. Just help her make sure she logs back in at the right time after breaks and lunch.

I would wait in your situation and see if the fee discount comes. I imagine parental pressure may lead to it.