The Twenty-fifth Republic - circuit breaker before/during/after half term

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You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff only – a sort of room of requirement. Baiters, haters, goaders and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

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

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Do not give ‘The Every twat for Themselves mob’ the staffroom password as a number of them are operating in an alternative reality.

No DfE muppets allowed

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 goad us then that is not allowed in the staffroom and you will receive a detention

I like my colleagues and my HoD but she has form for stirring shit a bit - saying one thing to one person then another to someone else. Luckily my closest colleague and I are now wise to this and give each other heads up when we think it's happening, and we always compare notes so we know what's going on. I think she doesn't like to mess with me too much because she needs me - I do a lot of shitwork for her that quite frankly she'd struggle to do without me and I'm the only full timer in my department too. Also not easy to replace as I have a very specific degree of experience that not a lot of other people have. It's tiring though, I'd rather take people at face value and actually trust what they tell me, but that's hugely unwise in teaching as we all know...

Oh I forgot to say I have been invited to take part in a home antibody test trial. It's a finger prick one that gives you the results there and then though they repeatedly states that the results are not reliable at the level of the individual. So presumably not overly confident in precise accuracy but broadly useful for indications across populations?

@TheHoneyBadger I do need to work on my confidence. I just want to teach so desperately I'm so scared of not being good enough to qualify and more worryingly letting the children down by failing to teach them adequately. I'm a bit too attached to them already.

So glad that gin drinking forms part of S8. I've found my people

If you're worried about being good enough, that's a good start.

Have we all seen this?

www.tes.com/news/exclusive-masks-mandatory-hundreds-more-secondaries

Hah looks like they just remembered about the school tier thing.

I know but I am SO pleased. I’ve spent all day finding out what every school does in neighbouring boroughs and have bombarded my union group with information... a friend in Essex is in a school the same as mine in terms of lack of masks and he messaged and sent the link and said his head has mandated masks from Monday!

@ohthegoats

senecalearning.com/en-GB/blog/free-cognitive-science-level-1-cpd-course/

Dual coding as part of the above.

Thank you.

Oh that's really quite useful, to have an answer on how the education tiers relate to the general tiers (well at least some of them)!

Now if someone in the government could just rename one of the systems, because surely at least a few of them have noticed it's,,well, like, a teensy bit confusing to call them both "tiers"....?

I'm getting more frustrated with how shambolic schools are. I've been left with a class of 4 pupils out of 29 after another positive case. This on top of being left with 2 other classes consisting of 6 pupils. Pupils at home are not engaging with work via teams. I did however manage to do a parent's evening over teams tonight. Bizarre seeing them in their homes.

Good news about masks for those areas but has made me even angrier, tbh, that London gets moved up a tier whilst being significantly lower prevalence of cases than so many other areas, including mine. It's so unfair!!

If you teach sixth form SAGE released advice for FE settings that should also apply to sixth form and obviously don’t.

Mind your blood pressure reading this twitter.com/karamballes/status/1316084210088718337?s=21

Oliver Caviglioli has done a Seneca course, it's well worth a go.

What would happen if the govt suddenly announced school closure for a week or two after half term? It can't be before half term now, after tier changes announced for weekend, and surely wouldn't be after schools return for a week or something.

Teachers couldn't be expected to switch to 100% online learning with no prep time at all, or is that precisely what the Oct 22 law demands? (Sorry, can you tell am not a teacher?!)

I suppose am particularly thinking of schools like mine which have a fortnight's half term starting tomorrow.

This doc has the schools info:

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/926847/Weekly_COVID-19_and_Influenza_Surveillance_Graphs_W42.pdf

I don't mean prep time exactly, I mean making sure they have the right books etc at home. Just thinking about what our head said yesterday re "you might want to ensure you have everything you need at home". It's not as if all heads are saying that, is it?

Augustbreeze, the school closures in the two lockdowns in Victoria were adjacent to school holidays and additional days out of term time were designated pupil-free days to give staff time to get themselves together.

This is a very sensible approach, so I don't hold out much hope for the UK government doing the same. I think the 22nd is arse-covering by the government: we told them it had to be ready, so it's the the schools' fault. None if it takes account of teachers turning themselves inside out to teach in the new environment, so where's the time to design more online stuff? I also assumes that all pupils have access to the technology and broadband. Which they won't.

I think it'll be first week of November if it happens.

Can't help but wonder if this will have to be national, despite the rhetoric about regional control. Surely if they only extra lockdown some areas then those kids lose out compared to other areas? Hardly seems fair.

I just need my visualiser at home.

Oh, and I need next Tuesday afternoon in the computer room to teach my kids how to log on to Teams.

Hi coming up for air after a gruelling but productive few days. Two situations yesterday could not include any possible SD at all with staff or children as it would have been dangerous. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Christ, look at this; I had a weird horrid neck and shoulder thing for about 10 days that only eased last Sunday, where I felt I was fighting something off. Definitely didn't think Covid.

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/headteacher-warns-parents-over-lesser-19102778

Everything feels stressful as I'm trying to sort home learning for my subject plus several other projects and completing some curriculum docs

This job is just about manageable at the moment without any extra stuff on top.

I just read this in a local news article. It's based on the week to 11th October so I know that it excludes several current cases:

Of the 144 people diagnosed, six cases relate to care homes, 15 in educational settings, 10 are students and may include those not living in the borough, and 113 are residents in the community.

These are the council's figures. Interesting that they can differentiate between educational settings and students; the data is obviously out there.

The 18th Oct results will make interesting reading.

Learning walks for me today because having two sets of mocks to mark and live lessons to organise isn't enough. Funny thing is, this time last year there was a big push on staff wellbeing.

Our head has told us that according to one source he has, the circuit breaker is going to happen. Then told us that according to another, BoJo doesn’t want people to dislike him because of it so it isn’t. Useful intel as ever, never useful