The Fifty-first republic - twice weekly tests and wear masks at all time till Easter

[StaffRepFeistyClub]

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.

Do not give the staffroom password to others just in case it attracts the wrong sort

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 booze is stashed - Thirsty Tuesdays, Fizz Fridays now in operation. Do not sit on the chairs and wear a mask.

@noblegiraffe

It feels like you're going mad, doesn't it Ange? To be told over and over that it's perfectly fine to go into a crowded room with no social distancing and no mitigation measures for hours a day to the point you think maybe you are making a fuss over nothing.

Then you see the fuss being made in other places and the lengths they are going to to minimise contact with anyone.

Reading articles about how office workers are outraged at the suggestion they might go back to work at some point in the future is pissing me off. Again we're told we're the only ones with any concerns and everyone else is just calmly getting on with it.

Fucking liars.

This is exactly how I feel.

Exactly.

My child's class WhatsApp group is full of twats. Honestly, I know it's not a 'nice' opinion to have, but stay at home mums are the scourge of the world. Especially the rural English world. Far too much time to think about bollocks to moan about. Out of my friends, the SAHMs have all been the batshit ones too.

It is MrsH, if I'm reading it right. The e-mail is a little confusing and I guess they might need to clarify it when they send the next one out.

I think it will only apply til the end of the shielding on March 31st though and given cases here are low and I had the jab 6 weeks ago I'm not sure it's worth the hassle.

Unless shielding carries on again....

Well yes. Or if things start going wrong again when schools return. Not having to catch the bus twice a day would make a difference.

The people who need to respond to my emails still haven't.

They came to staff meeting yesterday (not run by me) with their cameras turned off, having had their cameras on in every other meeting since January.

I'm going to ignore them outright on Friday in person. Fuckers.

Oh look, I seem to have the rage again!

Rage is a semi permanent state here.
I left the dept watts app group after about an hour of inane drivel on the day it was set up. They seem to have migrated it to school email now.... piss off!!!!

Oh god not the e-Mail. At least with what’s app you can usually assume most of it isn’t important.

I do just hate work e-Mail in general though.

I think just like our kids are losing resilience with it all, we are too.

@noblegiraffe

Graph is in this article.

schoolsweek.co.uk/covid-recruitment-boost-sees-government-meet-trainee-teacher-target-for-first-time-in-8-years/

Doesn't have psychology, suspect they come under 'other'

Good to see Classics meet 256% of its target with its massive bursary and exodus to the private sector

Who sets the targets? Why do we need fewer Physics teachers than Biology? Seems like targets may have been set knowing where they can be met tbh.

I suspect it's done by the providers. We would have set a target of 4 for English and 2 for Physics, hoping for 1 physicist. Part of how you're judged is on recruitment to target... so you're going to 96 for PE fairly easily but 2 physicists is a case of crossing fingers and making blood sacrifices.

Are parents engaging with the planned testing?

We're still trying to get half of them to respond to a simple Yes or No consent and Lord Knows how many have stated No.

They all managed to respond instantly when it was a case of offering access to vouchers, laptops or free internet, so it's not a case of them not receiving emails or not having internet access.

I'm having visions of the place still looking like a ghost town when they're supposed to be back.

Oh the classics thing continues to be so ridiculous!!

Yeah I heard we’d had less than half of consent forms back.

Which will make it a lot easier for testing but will mess up the plans for teachers escorting their classes for testing if only half need to go.

@Piggywaspushed

Oh the classics thing continues to be so ridiculous!!

And yet people on here will defend it to the death because their state school offers Latin.

Who sets the targets? Why do we need fewer Physics teachers than Biology

I’d love to know how many Physics teachers actually have a physics degree. I teach GCSE physics, no physics degree here.

There just aren’t enough Physics graduates in this country.

I have never met a physics teacher in all my teaching career who had a physics degree.
I have WAY more physics qualifications than my schools current 2 physics teachers. They also seem to only like male physics teachers in most of the schools I have worked in...

I think it's known that a huge percentage of Physics is taught by non specialists - may have come across that when researching for my Science grad nephew whose considering teaching.

At our school they don't even pretend people are specialists (eg. which science) until A'level. I used to feel so bad about being a non specialist and then realise that some were in fact a physiotherapist originally or did marine biology or ecomanagement or something.

We had a lovely, robust, funny student for her second placement and she'd already been offered a job with pay from July by her first placement school. I congratulated on how well she must have done and she said, 'nah just I'm a warm body with a science degree'

Agree about PE teachers poor buggers with 4 years of debt to pay and no jobs.

We have three physics teachers who are physicists!!!
It's amazing... but one retires soon, one is having a baby and the other is getting greyer by the day.

And yet people on here will defend it to the death because their state school offers Latin.

I’d love to know how many of these offer it to everyone. Ours offers it, but only to top set in one subject, replacing that subject for 1 lesson a week in year 7 and then as an after school lesson in yrs 8&9.

It doesn’t get properly timetabled until you choose it as a gcse/alevel option. And probably 80-90% don’t get an option to study it at all.

Can I just ask why do all kids have to do two gcse's worth of science? Does it really drive up our stem industries? It's just such a huge chunk of the timetable for kids who have no interest or aptitude.

I'd love to see a sort of Science 101 that gave 1 gcse via say 3 lessons per fortnight for those who don't take it as an option and for those who take it as an option the 2 or 3 gcse's.

It's so bity and specific and for those who aren't taking it forwards. A 101 type of GCSE on the scientific method, the history of science and maybe a few basic units on say electromagnetism (fun building circuits), human anatomy and ?? the periodic table would take the pressure off of how many specialist science teachers you have to have, how many labs, etc and free up low ability kids for more basic interventions in literacy and numeracy. I dunno.

Hope I haven't offended any Science teachers.

Crazy lucky that in my school we have equal number of science teachers with biology, chemistry and physics degrees (2 of each). And we don't teach A level! So our GCSE groups get a good deal, being taught by a specialist on a carousel.

I feel guilty now that we're taking decently qualified staff away from A level students in other schools!

I also kind of think a single science option should be acceptable.

Especially if able but uninterested students were otherwise permitted to do, say, double languages plus double humanities, and less academically able students could do more useful to them things in the slot, too. (This is also true of English - really weak students should be able to do a mixed lit/lang GCSE or just one or the other.)

Yes to just one English GCSE. I used to have that as an option for the weakest students... we'd do entry level in year 10 then "just" English in 11. It was more use to them than battling with Shakespeare....
They did literature as part of English but they didn't have to do an exam. Way less pressure on them and better English as a result.
Buckets did for that.

I always think the 1 English + GCSE Media is a good compromise - accessible and engaging, wildly more fun to teach and still teaching critical thinking (and critical analysis of media texts is probably more useful to most people than literature...),