Order of returning to school

[CaitlinEJ]

Am I reading this right, reception and year 1 will return before year 10. My year 10’s need to return to school more than my son in reception, reception will very easily catch up to where they should be, year 10 and 12 won’t as easily.

Year six is the strange one. I think that, without supportive parents, reception and year 1 really need to be at school, or the deficit may never be made up.

Also there is good evidence that younger children find it hard to get infected or spread the infection.

10s and 12s do need to get back but they can learn more effectively from home and are getting to the age where they become more infected and sicker.

Reception and year 1 due to childcare.
Year 6 as they often do transition work to go to secondary school.
Year 10 and 12 last as they can stay home alone so their parents can go to work.

I'm a Y1 parent and I'm very cynically thinking it's so they can still do KS1 SATS next year. And/or phonics screening in about Sept (though that is actually purposeful).
If it's for childcare they should have said all EYFS.

We are 3 tier here as well.

It's Y6 I don't get.

No SATS so must be for transition. But some children at middle school in Y6 won't be moving schools anyway.

My Y6 child worked really hard in the run up to SATS and when that was removed has become rather demotivated.

So the transition stuff is in collaboration with secondary schools. What on earth will the demotivated Y6 children be doing for 6 weeks? No plays, no residentials, none of the 'normal' Y6 stuff.
Just bizarre.

I wonder if yr6 are most likely to be left at home alone by working parents when they're maybe too young still.

Not to mention a lot of the practical Y6 worries can't be addressed.

Will I get lost? What should I do?

• well you might not be moving around the building, we don't know

Will I be in class with my friends?

• well you might not be in, we don't know

I'm worried about going to the toilets with bigger kids

• well they might not be in, it may be scheduled, we don't know

I wonder if yr6 are most likely to be left at home alone by working parents when they're maybe too young still.

This actually makes a lot of sense- I was wondering why Y6 and why not Y2 as well, but if you think of who might be left home alone for long periods by parents and be less able to cope, then Y6 does make sense.

I can't believe it will be for transition stuff, as they can't want people moving between multiple sites?

I reckon we will have yr10 and 12 back mid June and none of the others until September

#solidarity

Bluntness
What would be the point in having a staged return for all reception years and for secondary not to do the same? The point of only having 3 year groups in is that schools can split classes between the entire building, surely?

We will not have any Year 6 visits to the school - all been cancelled. About 8 schools feed into our secondary and all the activities are geared towards them interacting. Guess we will have to do something similar at the beginning of September instead.

I think more staff than just those year groups will have to go in? Surely they'll have to be spread between classrooms?

I honestly don't understand why Year 10 and 12 can't be in if Years R, 1, and 6 can.

I know the younger ones make more economic impact but really?

We have dozens of feeder schools into our upcoming y7 (10 form entry, city school). Gonna be an interesting transition, with or without kids in the building

I apologise for spamming this across different threads, but I do think the selection of year groups is at least partially for data gathering and to experiment with 'what works'.

Year 6 do not have an enormous amount of 'formal curriculum' left to cover, so time can be spent working out how to transition children of that sort of age back into schools, work on counselling & support, work out the routines, processes etc that could be used for the whole school without the constant 'but we also need to cover x.y. and z' that would be the case for other years. Because they are the oldest children in the school, they can be models / mentors for other years to show the new expectations and procedures if / when they return. And statistically, data from how much they increase R can be applied with some confidence to e.g. Y5 and Y4.

Yr and Y1 are the most difficult to educate from home, and are absolutely the worst case for social distancing - so again, if having them in school can be done without an epidemic amongst staff or a huge rise in R, then it's a reasonable bet that other year groups will be less risk.

So there is definitely an element, it seems to me, of choosing 'guinea pig' years to inform statisticians of the likely effect of returning other year groups.

Y10 and Y12 bring the issue of public transport, which is why i think they have been left out so far.

I think more staff than just those year groups will have to go in? Surely they'll have to be spread between classrooms?

I agree this will be the case- plus the staff coming in to care for key workers children will presumably have to be in more frequently if other staff come off the rota for this.

This will mean the children at home will get less support with home learning too.

I really, really don't want to believe that this is part of an experiment. We shouldn't be experimenting with small children.

Speaking from my own experience my yr 6’s mental health has declined over the past 2 weeks significantly. He needs to go back. He is terrified of not going back to school till secondary school. I think emotional support is the reason yr 6 have been also chosen

That may be the case but I'm not sure what three tier systems are suppose to do.

Y4 and y8 are the transition year there.

If R, y1 and y6 are in, plus Kw children it could be as much as 75% of the school.

I agree cant and sansa.

Y2-5 can follow BBC Bitesize is their thinking.

If anyone spots anything about pre school age or private nurseries will you post it? Teacher here with 1 year old.... trying to work out childcare. My parents are over 70 so can't use them and our local nurseries are closed because they didn't have any uptake from key worker parents.

I do think there is some covid logic in there too (though agree that childcare needs are likely to be the driving force).

Primaries are used to the one teacher all day set up, so can organise meaningful groups more easily.

To follow the dfe guidelines with y10 and have them in full time, they'd need to be in the same group of 15 all day, with the same teacher. So group A might get really good at German after a month of only being with their German teacher, but will get less input from their English teacher than they would have had at home (because the English teacher might be with group H). I don't get the feeling that the DFE know how to resolve the transmission to teachers issues, so are hoping that schools can work it out themselves.

The suggested solution of teachers going to the classrooms while students stay still isn't effective, because if Angela in group A has coronavirus but is presymptomatic, she could spread it to the whole group and all of their teachers in a week. She then gets a positive test for the virus, and all of her 15 teachers will have to self isolate.

At a primary, in the same scenario, only one teacher needs to self isolate, and that's fine because all of their group are also self isolating so no need for a teacher.

I think, anyway! I may have some flawed thinking here!

Also, nursery are included.

Early years settings, the guidance says:
3 and 4 year olds, followed by younger age groups.
So @Russell19, your 1 year old wouldn't be a priority, but as teachers/tas, we are key workers so your child can attend according to that criterion (which is still the priority).

One part I find bizarre is that year 6 are mentioned in the intro, but not in the body of the documents. The focus seems to be on 3-5 year olds first, with year 1 attending if possible.

So, while I think my post above about why secondaries are much riskier if run in any useful way stands, the driving reason is surely childcare.

On a related note: staggered drop-off and pick-up.
Won't work if as at my DD school, the regular entrance for each year is separate (so, it's not use saying all Y1 at 9.10 even if the Y3 is at 8.55, because all the Y1 parents crowd into the Y1 gate anyway).
Won't work with siblings (and that means a nursery and a Y1 pair of siblings would be arriving together, and one would be hanging around).
Much better to start up walking buses.

I keep seeing the early reading thing being thrown around, and I get the logic but then I think about how we are going to do that. With reading books, will they be cleaned after each child has used them? Can you clean reading books? Most early learning is practical, so each child would need a set of everything and they will need to be cleaned constantly. Schools do not have this volume of resources. I fully support schools going back and a staggered approach, but when I start thinking about logistics it’s really difficult!

The virus can't live on paper for more than 24h so you have Monday books in a box, self isolate the books till Thurs or next Mon if you have enough.