The Eleventh Republic - countdown to summer holidays

[StaffAssociationRepresentative]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff. Baiters and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

You can play here only if you are a member of one the following groups-

-ABBA - anti bashers and baiting association
-SWAB - school workers against bashers
-SWOT - school workers opposing teacherbashers
-STARS - schoolworkers together against ranting + slurs

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the toffee vodka is hidden.

If you are fed up with cakes and biscuits there is now a cheeseboard on offer

If you come with a stick to beat us with then please do so elsewhere and not in the staffroom

Well that’s it. You get people saying ‘oh I’m sure you can wear a mask and the school won’t mind’ but what about the kids? If the teacher is the only person wearing one then that’s not particularly useful.

@Piggywaspushed

Apparently Cineworld staff have started a petition asking for the public to required to wear masks in foyers. They feel they are not being protected. Much public support.

Just school staff being thrown under a bus then?!

I like the way the leaked guidelines want the children facing the front so they aren’t breathing all over each other, but it’s perfectly fine for them to all breathe directly en masse into the teacher’s face!

Statistically that is fine.

If you forget you’re dealing with people (as scientists often do)

And if you don’t really value the teacher in all this (as politicians don’t).

These proposed bubbles are lumps of porous pumice.

It's all such a mess. I think they are basically going to say everyone back, here is some guidance, but if you can't follow it just have everyone back. FFS.

Thanks for all the Teams advice everyone - just wanted to ask, do any of you that use Teams, use assignments/polls in a lesson. I tried it on Monday, but it only registered one of them as having completed the assignment, but when I go into Forms I can see the rest of them and their answers? What is the best way to get them to do an assignment/quiz within a lesson? Is it for them to go back to the teams page and access it from there? Sorry!

On the one hand people keep banging on about masks not protecting you but the advice for a suspected case in school is staff member in mask, apron and gloves. Not the child in a mask, you know, the one who is coughing all over everything.
And a deep clean of the room you had to sit in for however long it took for a parent to arrive. Not a medically professional deep clean, just you doing what you think might need doing. So who knows if it’s adequate?

I had to do this. Still waiting for test result to come back if parent agrees to have one done. Fucking terrifying.
I can’t go into details but I felt abandoned and unsafe. And I’m someone who would previously just get on with cleaning up whatever presented itself as safely as possible. But norovirus etc are merely unpleasant. This is a fucking killer of a disease and I don’t know if I can do that repeatedly, or expect my colleagues to do it.

Just since I posted late morning, 12 new job adverts on my local County Council website for admin/TA jobs in school... 😮

TAs are leaving at my DC school. Been there for years, too.

Just looked on tes and there are 48 ta or teacher posts with September starts advertised here. Interesting times

Teacher tapp today asked about masks, interestingly.

I hadn't looked at ours; will have a nosey.

Sadly most of our TA staff desperately need their jobs.

That's an extremely good point saucery. Sorry you had to go through that.

And most TA posts won't be advertised in the TES. Too expensive. They'll be just on local sites.

Yes, on Teacher Tapp, it didn't give the option "we are banned from wearing masks except for when dealing with suspected cases."

We have also had zero training on how to safely put on and take off PPE. Not even a link to a video to demonstrate. Considering how we are usually trained to do the simplest thing including how to put up a pleasing board display (there’s a whole manual on that, who knew?) that’s surprising. With a confirmed case we could end up spreading it further than we know, inadvertently.
I do know how to put on and remove PPE btw, because I made it my business to know. Point is, you can’t assume everyone will do that, just like you can’t assume everyone knows the most up to date Paediatric First Aid, COSHH regs or Safeguarding. If any one of us can be required to sit in a room for 90mins with a suspected Covid 19 case then we need training. I have passed that on, but just got platitudes back.

So yeah, my job may well be appearing in the Vacancies section by the end of July.

We just had a Teams staff meeting where we all just stared at each other for most of it. All flipping knackered.

Crazy saucery. Guess we can add untrained infections control officer to the ever growing pile of hats we’re expected to wear. I’m pretty sure I trained to be an educator but have somehow ended up with at least 10 jobs to do for the privilege of actually getting to do something resembling teaching sometimes.

Thing is as a minimum teacher should be mask wearing.
They are f2f with all the kids.
And we 100% know they can pass it on. If even say 10% are asymptomatic.
Also lack of SD will mean more other bugs going around so

• even if just d&v more kids off with that when they are supposed to be catching up. Germs all over the buildings/toilets
• following from that do gov really have the testing capability for a test every time a child has a fever/cough. Mine had 2 fevers in 6m and i dont even know how many coughs but at least 3..
• once numbers go up tests will take longer to come back

Anyway this needs to be looked at as discriminatory against people with health issues and older people and men. Who are being forced out of jobs and education for their kids and risking fines.
Negligence: Mainly because it is clear there is a risk. Did someone say 8% of hospitalisation for over 50s? People are expected to wear masks dealing with asbestos and yet a 50yo i imagine may not even live long enough for it to affect them.

If masks made that much difference to communication then it would be impossible for hcp to war them.
Also it is a conflict of interest asking PHE about ppe as surely if they are in charge of it they dont want to impact their supply?

Rather short sighted and rather reflective of their attitude to care home staff which then caused mass infection in the community.

Does anyone know anything about striking and whether the unions is actually able to strike about schools going back in September with no attempts to mitigate risks to staff?

I’m fairly sure the government sneaked some changes to striking in a while back requiring a certain percentage of the workforce to vote yay for it to be possible to start strike action. I expect it needs a fair amount of notice beforehand as well?

It’s the choice that parents have whether to test or not that gets me. Ok, so they are supposed to keep their child off for a certain amount of time (7 days?) but they could be back earlier if they manage to persuade SLT that their child has hayfever/was putting it on so they could go home etc.
So we’re supposed to just sit there and wait to see if we come down with it? Bloody ridiculous.

Anyway, I’ll stop moaning about PPE and danger I didn’t sign up for now! . There’s only one solution if my workplace isn’t safe, after all and that’s in my hands only.

OMG! OMG! COMRADES! Hello Leicester!

Do you remember all the shit we were getting a few weeks ago about children not getting the virus and therefore could not spread the virus? We were panned for saying that children spread germs etc We were told that we did not know what we were talking about. We were not allowed to call children 'super spreaders' All the basher, moaners and haters that basically said that we were all scaredy cats ......... almost saying that the safest place to avoid the virus is to work at school!

Well let's watch them re-write history (again)

On the plus side I have just finished writing my 'long' reports - so feeling smug

@Saucery the leaked guidance talks about compulsory testing. So presumably a child gets excluded from school if the parents won't test them?? Don't know how that will play out legally or from other points of view...

On a slightly different note has anyone seen this?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-53238991

I'm now convinced our MAT will be running revision sessions for resits at the same time as catch up sessions for all those students who have ignored my well-crafted remote learning lessons.

I think I may put on another two stone with all the sress eating I'll be doing in the Autumn term.

It's come out of consultation that : it's like they want to throw the kitchen sink at everything!

Hopefully, none of my option lot will do it, as there will be no NEA to count. Which makes a mockery of it, rather. It plays into the hands of the 'good at exams' crowd.