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

I don't know who Ashely Booth is! -and I thought I knew everything--

I think Birbalsingh may be out of favour : it's all about the MATs these days with their knighted and sometimes damed exec leaders showing the rest the way to treat staff, leading the way.

My news is that the shop they have been building for 7 years ahs opened opposite me today. It's like a tourist attraction.

All I can hear is horns beeping because the sodding entrance is to narrow , and people recycling : they put the recycling banks right in the entrance in some genius planning.

My living room window looks on to all of this. Could weep, actually.

What shop is it that has taken 7 years to build and attracts this much attention?

A Sainsburys Local.....

Then there will a chip shop.....

It's an estate. We moved in at the very beginning and were told about the 'small local shop'

Yes, yes, I knew when we moved in so would get no sympathy off MN... but the building work has been so noisy, the car park is just concrete and they also built a block of flats which were never in original plans. And the non distancing primary school.

This is a village.

Don't egt me started on the Amazon warehouse,

Difficult to recruit an army of volunteers if parents are meant to be back at work and we will not bother with the same SD as other work places. My friends who registered as part of nhs army have done nothing as they were put on standby instead

I registered as an NHS volunteer straight away and got my first alert when I was in work last week

My neighbour (destroyed by WFH with her kids but in a nice way) has just told me her office has no plans to reopen until at least October.

My DC are definitely in the top 2 or 3 of the class, top for certain things, which I know by judicious teacher snooping (yes I can decode everything on the clipboard on the desk at parents’ evening, and I read very well upside-down!) and by the teacher-to-teacher hints I get, but I don’t know how non-teachers would know with any accuracy. I don’t mention it to anyone, because it’s irrelevant apart from as a boost to my parental pride - they’re the children of two teachers and have inherited my early reading skills and good memory, so they’re genetically primed to be Good At School. So was I and I still ended up a teacher!

There was a numbered ranking when I was at primary, so no deciphering upside down needed. Not for individual subjects either. They added up our test scores and that determined where you were. I think some parents on here would like to go back to that nonsense. Or maybe not, because it is a very stark measure purely of academic performance,

The only questions I ask of DS is “what is that score out of?” and “how does that compare to last time?”. Couldn’t give a stuff what anyone else got.

I remember getting a score on all subjects in secondary school. I only remember because I was good, so it was pretty much top 5 in the year. Apart from in cross country where I came 105 out of 105.

I wondered why things had gone quiet then realised the previous thread had filled up!

Hope everyone is well and congratulations if you're already on summer break! I've got a week and a half to go and slightly dreading having to teach Circle Theorems to Year 9 next week. They are a lovely bunch but this will be tough for them.

I've given up on the education threads elsewhere on MN, but got the hump with a parent on FB today (don't know him but from his posts, know I'd dislike him!), who posted that Metro article about the head saying teachers aren't working or something - there's a thread here about it on AIBU but I haven't read the article.

FB parent moaning about how poor their child's school has been, how the unions are too strong, how "truth hurts" etc..... . Pretty much every response was from parents who were happy with their child's school. I mentioned that breaking government guidelines would probably put us in breach of our insurance, and also spoke about how hard the teachers of my dc (and my colleagues) have been working. Saw that said parent has responded, but can't be arsed to check as he'll probably put me in a bad mood.

Saw this short video from ICT with Mr P, which summed up how I've been feeling about this all.

www.facebook.com/IctWithMrP/videos/314161566266168/

I’ve got a secret crush on Mr P.

@noblegiraffe

I’ve got a secret crush on Mr P.

He makes me laugh . I loved his videos about Mrs May!

@DreamingofBrie Mr P has done some hilarious vids

da funky elephants 😂 could be a lots worst

Final few reports. Writing this and thinking about coverage for the year is making me panic a bit. I wasn't worried about the academics until now, but I'm writing this stuff thinking that so many of them were nearly there on so many things, and now almost certainly will have gone backwards.

Aaw, Vic Goddard on Twitter:

The complete lack of understanding and empathy demonstrated in the dialogue about online learning has become deplorable. Enjoy the rest of your weekend

The Time has done a number on them this weekend. But his first line here is basically all anyone should write/C&P in any TB threads on here.

Poor Vic.I hope his community rallies around.

Blimey, I’ve been in awe of Vic Goddard over lockdown and the massive effort his school has made for its community and families. He’s regularly posted photos of the piles of photocopied packs being sent out, and he was so vocal in getting support from the DfE for kids on FSM, having organised food for them himself - I’m pretty sure the DfE hadn’t even clocked that those kids would be going hungry.

To have a headline criticising his school because they don’t do online lessons just beggars belief and shows complete ignorance of the context in which some schools operate.

It looks like they've spent £7.5k on work packs.

I've found you 😁 I've spent my day collecting dd1 from uni, so she's now at home til September 😁

I haven't looked at anything on MN until now today, so I'm feeling pretty happy with life atm. I might go and spoil that in a minute because I just can't help myself.

I loved your meta-analysis Piggy it seemed very accurate to me.

Interesting this in Schoolsweek

schoolsweek.co.uk/dont-go-back-advice-for-shielders-will-be-updated-next-week/

I see people on that thread are still quoting ‘reading age’. When did that stop being a thing? I was a long old time ago I think.

Piggy, that is interesting but also I feel towards the end it's a bit confusing. There's been an awful lot of confusion still in the public and my own school staff over who is shielding and who is clinically vulnerable and wft. (A couple of staff have referred to people who are CV as shielders at my place and my head didn't correct them though I know she knows the difference.)

The article describes children who have diabetes and asthma as shielding; only a very few asthmatic childcare were shielded and I don't believe diabetes is either. So I'm unclear as to who they're talking about?

flamingo I was given dd's reading age as part of her report last week. She's 10 and has a reading age of 10, last measured in December, so about average it seems. It's something we do at my secondary school at the start of year 7 as a very crude way of figuring out who needs some reading intervention as well. So it hasn't died out altogether, but does seem pretty old fashioned and not the best tool for many jobs.

I have used a reading age for kids in year 3. Actually, I don't really use the age, I use the scores for decode and inference. Sort of gives me a clue of where they are at.

This year I used a 'year 3' aged text from Oxford Reading Tree and read properly with them instead, asked them some question and worked out if they were where they should be or not. Most were not. Ha. All mind can decode fine, over half haven't got a scooby when it comes to what actually happened. Lack of vocab, EAL.