The fourteenth republic - watching Scotland and ever changing DfE guidelines

[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

And yet the same people making those decisions Piggy also expect perfect outcomes and top knotch results...
You couldn’t make it up!

We’ve moved to collaborative planning in my department and it has been great in terms of CPD I think for all of us. Our NQTs got really good really quickly at sequencing the steps within a lesson, those long down the teaching road got to see lots of new ways of thinking. I’ve made a planning booklet with examples in it which we all have to refer to - just as a prompt to think about things we wanted to address. We’ve spent time each week talking about the lessons, what works, what doesn’t, what or how we’re going to say/model type thing. And if you picked any question or example in any of those lessons we’d all be able to tell you why it’s been chosen ditto with a sequence of questions.

The consistency now is much better, but obviously everyone still teaches in their style and appropriately to their own classes. It’s been great for subject knowledge for those not so strong and although we’ve all given up an hour a week and spent hours on one lesson each we’ve then got 6/7 great lessons we’ve had input into back. It helps that we all get on well though - or maybe that is a by-product? Second year in large, fairly difficult comp, that we are fully staffed with actual maths teachers and only one member of staff left last year to go and live in another country! Obvs current situation probably also has part time play this year - but this is the first time in 20 years of teaching that not a single person is leaving or joining our department!

Actually, Piggy, you've reminded me that our kids who have "extra English" (which is actually their only English) have an unqualified non-specialist. Genius timetabling.

This is quite an interesting article:

www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/masks-in-class-many-questions-as-germans-go-back-to-school/ar-BB17KvZW?ocid=spartanntp_edu

@Piggywaspushed

English is dumped on loads of people in my school! KS3 English can be taught by anyone ... apparently!

Do you work at my last school - apparently anyone who can ‘write a letter or read a book’ can teach English at secondary.... 🤦‍♀️

@RigaBalsam

Is the viner study actually new or the same old one trotted out? Does anyone know?

Is it this?

www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30250-9/fulltext

@GuyFawkesDay

I love PowerPoint and use it for a lot (including booklet and worksheets) but I try to keep all lessons to under 10 slides. Ideally under 5.

That said, I'm reliant on them this year. I'm teaching 50% of timetable out of my subject area, and a subject I don't even have a GCSE in. I bloody need the scaffolding the PowerPoint provides as frankly, I don't have the knowledge needed to teach this subject.

And no, I'm not reading up all summer. I'm livid after everything my and colleagues did last year that they've dropped me right in it. Teaching subjects, yr13 for first time, PHSE and core RE in 10 different rooms across my 4 days a week.

I'm really anxious about it. I can't relax this holiday at all.

I hope you are not the one writing the PowerPoints for this new subject GuyFawkes. I rather fear that you are though and I just don’t agree with that. I write them all for my non subject specialists-including the answer slides and reminders about what to bring in next lesson etc.! You shouldn’t have to do it GuyFawkes

I agree belle , the lack of vison of SLTs is an issue. And yet, we are told vision is essential to do well in an SLT interview. My old head once told me that. I asked him (completely innocently!) what his was and he could not articulate it at all!.

In schools like mine vision = good exam results.

I agree about Birbalsingh. I'd like someone with her energy and vision to lead my schools, but not necessarily her tunnel vision ,and definitely not her views! The silent corridor schools though are far less worried about coronavirus than the rest of us because they have the confidence that, if they can get kids to walk silently down corridors, they can juts as easily keep them 2 m apart whilst doing it.

The Viner study is new. My colleague's son was involved at his school. A few throat swabs over about a 3 - 4 week period. While schools were half (at most) full and the country had not reopened pubs etc yet.

Nearly all the areas chosen were lowish transmission areas 'to replicate the average'. (ie nothing in Leicester)

Perhaps they should impose a curfew on young people : we'll see how important education is then! All parents required to keep their children in at all times, other than to attend school. (only half joking...)

Thanks Appu

Thanks piggy. My health visitor friend took swabs at a primary thinking about it. Also wasn't a full cohort

Bang on Belle. They're not all on edutwitter though, I think it's just what middle leaders and even slt are like these days. And Ofsted are asking subject leaders, who can be nqts in primary, to be experts in their subject area. I'm in a fb group for one of mine and see so many joining and saying "I know nothing about this! Where do I start? How can I improve my own subject knowledge? I now have to write a curriculum!"

I saw some research once, years ago, about information over load in teaching. Essentially, too many new initiatives ends up resulting in a disintegration of consistent and effective application of them and so it all gets lost as people get disenfranchised.

This report acknowledges elevated risk for secondary teachers :

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.06.20169797v1

Our government will not see this, and/or pay it no heed!

Class sizes of 10! ROFL.

If our lot were not so wedded to assessment by examined outcome, there would be much less panic about blended learning and part time school for secondary students.

No my HoF is writing the PowerPoints for it, he's head of that subject.

There's been s huge amount of stress in my own little department last year and I'm dreading next year (long term sickness of HoD and duties just passed to me and another with no thanks it pay) Nothing has been done to mitigate the same thing occurring as circumstances are same....HoD been given full timetable for September but is still poorly and I can't see anything getting better.

Thankfully my colleagues and SLT are marvellous and we will muddle through but I'm stressed about this year. It's a lot of plates to spin.

Essentially, too many new initiatives ends up resulting in a disintegration of consistent and effective application of them and so it all gets lost as people get disenfranchised.

This!!

@GuyFawkesDay

Your SLT deserve to have their arses kicked. What a stupid position to the department in! So short sighted! They will be regretting that once you’re into the second half of autumn term!

I’m pleased at least you aren’t writing the PowerPoints GuyFawkesDay but my goodness that sounds like a very stressful situation and I really feel for you and your HoD being off. It is astonishing that they expect you to pick everything up with no remuneration for it.
Sadly, I know it is all too common in teaching.

So the article study is the one that says we need track and trace. Why aren't the media highlighting this as major importance rather than winding everyone up with pubs vs schools!

The trouble is that some SLT don't see the problems until they smack them in the face. They see people "coping" and that's okay... until it isn't.
We had a weak NQT a few years ago who became a weak RQT. He had lots of personal stuff going on and wasn't keeping on top of things. People knew but weren't doing anything about it except suggesting he catch up at the weekend. He ended up sobbing in an SLT office one afternoon and never came back. He could've been helped if we'd got to him sooner but there's a really harmful "coping" culture. No-one wants to be the one to say "I can't do this" and that's not healthy or sustainable.

Absolutely agree.

The word "no" may figure quite highly in my vocabulary in autumn term.

@RigaBalsam

So the article study is the one that says we need track and trace. Why aren't the media highlighting this as major importance rather than winding everyone up with pubs vs schools!

Yup!

It states that ‘in the absence of a scaled-up testing programme’, they’ll be a huge second wave in December.

The studies also never seem to focus on the fact that CV/CEV staff/children have been shielding since March. Throw them into the Petri dish of schools returning with no social distancing or masks and it’ll be carnage.

I also recommend "I can't do that", "what would prefer me to not do instead" and "I don't have the capacity to do that". And is someone asks you to "just" do x or y, borrow them stick sharpened at both ends from the English department, and use it.

What really troubles me about the SLT who are still encouraging individual teachers to produce their own tailored resources and work as individuals rather than as a whole department is that they are steering the whole school towards failure.

Schools like this will fail Ofsted because there is no consistency and staff aren’t working as one. Staff retention rates will be bad because workload is higher and it is pretty impossible to offer decent online learning if everyone is trying to offer their own thing. No one can plan, resource, mark and report on seven year groups worth of topics at the kind of quality needed. It is just not possible to go it alone.

So my big bugbear is SLT who are still praising the hero teachers for spending all weekend resourcing lessons for themselves on flashy Power Points, not for department use but to make themselves stand out.

Someone on my Facebook shared misinformation that masks cause legionaries so we can't wear them in schools. Despairing at the moment.

Piggy, was it you? Or Appu? Who said that primary and secondary schools need to be seen as separate entities. Definitely the case.

A hybrid-learning approach with halved class sizes of 10 students

Showing again how large our class sizes are. Half in ks2 can be 15/16 here.