School telling us to re do year 1 curriculum in year 2

[Voiceofreason92]

So headteacher announced this week that the children coming in to year 2 will do the year 1 curriculum in September and wont be starting the year 2 curriculum until January.
She said that we wont be able to fit in the entire year 2 curriculum but that is doesnt matter.

Are any other schools doing this? It feels like a bit of a silly decision. I don’t understand why we can’t wait and baseline them and then decide where the gaps are that need filling. It seems she has written of my new year twos before we’ve even started!

I know a lot of the year group havent accessed the remote learning, but an awful lots have.

All thoughts appreciated

Hmmm is she in every lesson? If not just do what you like!

Sounds nonsensical to me. The kids were in school til March after all, it's not like they had no time in y1.

I'm secondary but we're planning on carrying on as normal and plug gaps/be aware we may need to check and teach prior knowledge before teaching a topic.

Sounds like your HT has gone a bit mad.

I think the idea is that they do summer year 1 curriculum (that they effectively missed)

Surely they'll then always be a term "behind"?

Seems mad. Just be aware of the stuff they might have missed and crack on? All this recovery curriculum is irritating.

I'm secondary rather than primary but we are continuing as 'normal' and we will just assess where the gaps are and fill them as appropriate.

So, when starting a new topic, we will look at what pupils should know from previous years/KS2, assess that knowledge and go from there. Otherwise, surely everyone is just going to be playing catch up forever?

What a stupid decision

Carry on as normal but you might find the mixed year 1/2 White Rose useful. I'm planning on using it for my year 6 group. The 5/6 one!

Yep, that's mad. We are cracking on with year 3 and 4, and will be filling gaps when we get to spring and summer terms.

It seems a bit mad. There will be a huge variation in what children have done during lockdown, surely? I'm not a teacher, but wouldn't it be better to assess their knowledge and then differentiate the teaching (some will have gone on ahead during lockdown, some done nothing)? In my DD's school they assess their learning before any new topic, fortnightly in maths, and then set them accordingly for that 2 week period.

Guidance from County for us was that we had two options (Maths) 1. Pretty much exactly what you described, teaching summer curriculum in autumn and knocking on down the line (part of a long term curriculum plan following the children through primary. Guessing hope would be to accelerate teaching somewhere along the line.

We hated that idea for exactly your reasons.

Option 2 - start September as usual but being prepared to teach the steps before age related objectives and plug gaps as they arise, including additional pre-teach or tutoring as needed, and being hot on passing on info to next year's teacher at the end of each unit so they could pick up the baton.

We plumped for that one...which incidentally sounds very much like normal teaching.

Phlebas, is that the White Rose for this year? They've given a suggested lesson breakdown to aid Covid catch up, stressing where to reinforce.

No, i've got old mixed class plans from 2 years ago so i'll use that. I prefer that to the current plans - they don't seem to do them anymore, just offer mixed class suggestions, but if you google "white rose mixed class 1/2 " you can find the old schemes.

Surely just think for yourself and teach Y1/2/3 content depending on what they are getting and where the gaps are??

E.g. if you are teaching place value, teach TO, then HTO, ThHTO, TThHTO... until the class is maxed out- just like you would if you had a mixed age group class.

I will have kids working from Y1- Y7+ for different content in my class of 8chn next year. I'll still teach them all together most of the time. The idea that you can only teach one narrow terms worth of curriculum at a time is faintly ridiculous.

I would plough on. No sense all kids ending up behind. Also if there are local or nationwide lockdowns/illness they will get further behind.
You would be 14w behind then add to it.
Dc1 was struggling a little with maths in yr 1 though obviously did all the content. By yr2 was doing pretty well. Do you have online maths? As i think something that reinforces it at home does make a difference.
Something like mathletics has something easier section. But some other ones might have even better variation on year group work.

Our school has marked against end of year targets and the kids have mainly met them apparently (so most kids must have done the work.)

Same as all the others - carry on, check for and plug gaps.

Do you all have details of what your recovery programme will look like for the first few weeks?

Did you have your Y1s in school? We followed the summer curriculum as normal so it’ll only be a handful of children whose parents kept them home and didn’t do the work set who will have missed out. We’re starting Y2 work as normal in September with a slight tweak to literacy to allow for them to do their phonic screening check in autumn.