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

@teaabdcustardcream thank you so much! I’ll give it a go that way next time...

Just finished working. Again.

I know I'm silly but I bit in the thread about a petition. Apparently teachers are already in school and its fine . I'm in a room with 12 today not 31 like I normally would be and it's one of the bigger classrooms.

Appu in answer to your q I think the kids could largely stay put and the teachers move around which could work if all practicals are cancelled (though god knows how I’d fill multiple hours a week of science with no practicals and shitty undifferentiated textbooks and not enough knowledge to effectively chalk and talk past year 8 at best).

Our caterers are outsourced and can’t imagine them wanting to work longer for the same revenue (currently the kids have a 50 minute lunch all at the same time to stagger it and clean between groups would take hours but the same amount of sales).

So if all on pack lunches it could work by them eating in different areas.

Behaviour of secondary school kids forced to sit in the same room all day would be atrocious at the best of times. After months out of school and doing only core subjects with non specialists? Not pretty I’d have thought.

Buses they’ll say different year groups sit in different areas and pretend that covers it though they’ll be supposed to be wearing masks because bus drivers are afforded protections that we’re not.

Basically travel to and from and entering school will not be anything like bubbles.

Behaviour is going to be awful and stressful and somehow you need to support individuals who want to learn without getting too close yet having to deal with whole class behaviour management that will make it hard to teach from the front and to be honest hard for the students who need help to dare to speak up if there are hecklers.

Bit like your worst most challenging group you can remember but on steroids and presumably without the ability to remove unless they have giant removal rooms for each year group.

Good eh?

eitak I asked MNHQ to move that to petitions. We'll see. Otherwise it's going to recycle the same arguments.

Us for Them is such an ill thought out name : it buys into the martyr/hero symbolism but has no real sense of who 'us' is and where teachers belong , because we aren't the Us or the Them. Them for Ours, more like...

Anyone do bus duty in a secondary ?? Nightmare at the best of times.

I did last year piggy. This year I was on the gate trying to get kids to walk their bikes out and put their helmets on.

More detail on the 'dropping GCSEs'
schoolsweek.co.uk/dropping-gcses-only-for-exceptional-circumstances-leaked-dfe-guidance-states/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

I cannot see why Oak would need to do this:

schoolsweek.co.uk/oak-national-academy-could-collect-basic-data-on-users-says-chair/

I do bus duty every year. It's normally not so bad at my school, but I don't know how it will work with trying to enforce mask wearing, etc. I know that I normally get on each bus, check their seatbelts are on, then by the time the bus actually leaves there are several who are no longer wearing their seatbelts. So it'll be similar for masks I would imagine. We'll make sure they're wearing them as they get on the bus, as soon as it leaves they'll take them off to chat and eat their mountains of snacks.

So doing subjects at GCSE will be in exceptional circumstances, and will be quite rare. So what a lot of schools do every year then. Each year we have a few kids who drop one subject to give them more time to study the others. Whether that's because they've been ill for a long time, had a close bereavement, etc. For a couple of years there were lots of them who dropped a subject and were offered small group maths and English intervention by hltas. So business as normal, but "leaked" as if it's something special for this year.

I bet you’ll get a lot of bus drivers resign rather than be responsible for this shitshow. Trying to get kids to behave on the bus can be a nightmare anyway-down to having the right change (will they be allowed to pay with germ-ridden coins?!) but trying to get them to sit with their year group and wear a mask will be awful.

[quote Piggywaspushed]More detail on the 'dropping GCSEs'
schoolsweek.co.uk/dropping-gcses-only-for-exceptional-circumstances-leaked-dfe-guidance-states/amp/?__twitter_impression=true[/quote]
I’m sick of bloody leaked guidance. The government should be banned from doing it.

MsD yep. And embedding numeracy and literacy into the whole curriculum just like we’ve been doing for 20years. Big news

It's the way poor gcse grades are now our fault that worries me. We did not choose to keep grades same as last year's cohort. The gov did. I want my a level.Kids to get the grades they deserve, but they can't.

I seriously think they scan MN and ,therefore, know the only real uproar they got from parents re the original leak was the reduced curriculum , so they have now leaked a more reassuring version.

Nudge theory at its finest....

How do the exam resits work in areas with sixth form colleges? Are they supposed to go trotting back to school for their GCSE resits or are we supposed to run an exam series for courses we don’t even teach (and do not have the room for without suspending normal lessons)?

Apparently the DfE are thinking about all of this. Piss ups. Breweries.

Of course with a good half dozen or more feeder schools the possible number of exams/courses/exam boards is absolutely mind-boggling!

I hope the DofE aren't using Mumsnet to gauge opinion. It seems to be massively out of sink to the rest of parents when you look at the pollls on other sources

DH was wondering last night about local closures. He teaches in the next county, I teach in our city where we live, the kids go to two separate Schools in the city. If the city goes into lockdown (and it’s on the Daily Express list of greatest infection increase) does he still travel 30 miles to work in an unaffected area? (And vice versa I suppose, does he go to work if the other area (unlikely but who knows) shuts?)

I guess he goes anyway, plenty of staff have the same commute and it would shut his school if they didn’t go. I wish the expectations of these situations had been published or even thought about - maybe it could all happen more swiftly and finish sooner through being more effective

The definition of effective is different for this government than it is to the rest of us.

We do bus duty. The buses are also shared with the school that we have our joint sixth form with. I hate bus duty week as it is.

Oh, there must be dozens and dozens of small towns, like the many market towns in my county who have 2-3 secondary schools and all the students come in on the same bus or train from their one village and then split off to three schools. That actually makes the bubbles in that scenario 4-6000 young people (collective roll of three schools).

I don't think I can cope with this today. My FIL who is part of our bubble (he lives alone) has an oncologist appointment tomorrow to see how his terminal cancer is progressing. It would be heartless to stop him seeing his grandkids in his final months.
So our options are to carry on as if the virus didn't exist in schools, or deregister my kids, and walk out of my job without working my notice....