The Fifty Ninth Republic - May Half Term beckons

[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 for school staff to let off steam.

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 non-staff as it attracts the wrong sort of crowd.

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 do wear a mask. Finally, upload your covid test results twice a week on Wednesdays and Sundays.

I’d be interested to know what children’s mental health services think of creating a longer school day, which currently looks to be classroom/academic...

I would support a longer day if they used the type of model we’ve discussed before - morning of more academic/classroom based learning. Afternoon or extended sports/outdoors/practical type stuff. You wouldn’t need teachers to work more, but you would need to employ extra staff...

I'll take being directed until 4.30 every day but I won't be working after 4.30 or at weekends. That'll massively improve my work life balance 😂

@MrsHamlet

I'll take being directed until 4.30 every day but I won't be working after 4.30 or at weekends. That'll massively improve my work life balance 😂

Exactly. Our school day ends at 3.45. Meetings begin a 4. If our day is extended until 4.15 meetings will begin at 4.30 and end at 6. My DC’s after school club closes at 5. I’m sure they’re old enough to roam the streets for an hour til I’m home 🤔

@MrsHamlet

I'll take being directed until 4.30 every day but I won't be working after 4.30 or at weekends. That'll massively improve my work life balance 😂

I concur! I don't have any more to give. Goodwill has evaporated, I'm afraid.

Our school day ends at 2.50pm currently as we have completely cut out the afternoon break and only have 40mins for lunch. Meetings start at 3. I've got a horrible feeling we'll never get that afternoon break back.

If it generated zero marking and minimal planning and was paid at the proper rate I'd do some extra after school hours but that is because I'm currently under employed and could do with the additional hours. Would no way do it if I was full time. 5 extra hours a fortnight would put me up to 0.5fte and an extra 3.5k so worth it for me.

Mind you the very fact that 2.5hrs a week from me would cost them over 3.5k a year would presumably mean that it wouldn't be me they'd want to do it. Far too expensive.

We have 50 minutes for lunch at finish at 3.30. Meetings start at 3.40. I think we're a bit under on directed time but if we all had to teach til 4.30 that would soon disappear. So wholesale renegotiation of teachers' contacts plus paying support staff to stay another hour plus losing extra curricular....

I don't think we are under on directed time because of the amount of mandatory training that we have to undertake independently - like the reams of safeguarding stuff on ever expanding topics and bizarrely this year a whole thing on Health and Safety including how to use bloody ladders that we never use and all sorts of different chemicals. Plus whereas it used to be either a departmental or pastoral meeting each week since covid it's both and sometimes teaching and learning ones too - they all happen online but it's still directed time. I could be wrong though.

The thing with directed time though is it's such a 'tip of the iceberg' thing. Presumably all of the extra marking could be seen as 'not directed time' because you weren't made to do it at a set time or place - whereas moderation meetings obviously were. Likewise all of the additional time to photocopy, as a small example, this year due to working in zones so not being able to rely on textbooks or the amount of time taken to produce lessons and resources suitable for online learning - again not directed time but definitely additional work.

I think it would be very difficult to put a number on hours this year and there would be some very blurred lines on the borders of 'directed'.

Thats a good point about meetings. At BFS not all kids stay every day till after 4. And not on Fridays. But meetings and parents evenings, hmmm

We could just claw back our 20 mins they have shaved off lunch, reintroduce afternoon reg and start 5 mins earlier yo do it but something tells me that isn't what's intended. I can't do an extra half hour when our lunch is 30 mins!

I really can't stand afternoon form time. It is such a waste especially when I have to move rooms.

Republic Choir - Oo yes!

Might go and find this R4 interview to listen to, sounds worth it:

Stuffy classrooms and workplaces among causes of Lancashire's rising infections

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4
A lack of ventilation in workplaces and schools is one of the problems amid Lancashire's rising coronavirus infections, its public health director Dr Sakthi Karunanithi says.

Karunanithi outlines some of the potential causes of surging case numbers there:

• the more transmissible form of the virus, first identified in India, and now spreading in parts of Lancashire

• many people in hotspot areas not being fully vaccinated due to lack of access or hesitancy

• gatherings in settings that are not fully ventilated such as workplaces or schools, and the "vulnerable socio-economic environment"

On the latter, he says some places have not been prioritised for faster protection, despite some having been seen as hotspots during the first and second wave of the pandemic.

To keep the transmission of the virus low, Karunanithi tells BBC Radio 4's Today programme it would make sense to "space the lifting of restrictions in a way that more of the vulnerable populations get two vaccinations first".

But he says the easing of lockdown is not just about reducing infections, with factors such as the economy and education also needing to be considered.

Our long form time (20 minutes) is in the afternoon.

I concur! I don't have any more to give. Goodwill has evaporated, I'm afraid.

Yes! And I could foresee school trips evaporating too.

We have a start of day form time again now thankfully - far easier to deal with dribs and drabs of arrivals in form rather than in a lesson and I personally feel like issues like uniform, lack of equipment etc should be dealt with by form tutor first thing.

We start form time at 8.50am but pre covid we had briefings from 8.30 which were loathsome (everyone crammed in a small overheated staffroom after I'd walked to school did not go well with peri) and made you late to your lessons as slt would blithely keep on talking leaving you to face chaos when you all legged it back to your department areas late and in my case mid volcanic level hot flush.

Yes so basically that's 8.30-2.50pm with only a 40min break (which obviously by the time you get rid of one lot and arrive early to have a starter up and be at the door to do crowd control for the next lot) is half an hour max. Which would be fine in a calm sitting down go to the toilet when you need to job but feels intense to me as a teacher.

Our lunch is stupidly early as well - like starts and ends before midday. I'm sure I saw somewhere back on these threads that lunch is meant to be between 12 and 2 but that news obviously never made it to my school.

Tmi but I had a really heavy period last week and 3hrs of teaching without a toilet break was not doable. Luckily a TA in one of the lessons let me nip out to the loo.

We only have 40 minutes for lunch too and a 20 minute morning break but as our school is so big for the building it was intended for we have staggered lunch times. We also run on a two week timetable. I often forget which lesson I have. Didn’t matter ore Covid and a class turned up who I want expecting. But awake are now I teach in a gazillion different rooms!

Considering LSAs where I work aren't even paid the whole time the children are in school (paid 9-3, school starts 8.40-3.15) I'm not sure they'll have it in the budget for us to stay longer.

This is mad. I think we must have doubled the population size of the place over the weekend. I reckon I’m going to be about half an hour late for work because it’s now impossible to do anything.

On the plus side the restriction on number of people in Tesco has made it a much better shopping experience than most summers. If only the half naked men were as attractive as the pictures of the ones on this thread.

Are they still restricting numbers? I have just spent 45 minutes tutting at people for blocking shelves whilst staring at every sell by date or doing that annoying hand held shopping thing.

I don’t know about the big out of town one, but the in town one where I do most of my shopping is. They have a traffic light system over the door and the doors won’t open from the outside if the light is red.

Omg I just read a toilets at school thread. They so don't get it! They're so about the rights of the individual 'child' - they cannot comprehend the reality of trying to manage teenagers en masse!

Then there's helpful suggestions like 'just record it on sims or whatever' every time a child asks to go to the toilet without any comprehension that that means pausing a whole lesson to take your computer off of the powerpoint/video/whatever that it is on for teaching in order to go onto another piece of software to find the right bloody column in a row of fifty to log that so and so has gone to the toilet.

We have been told to log toilet visits on GO this term - I haven't done it. I can't do anymore than I'm already doing legging it around school from class to class with all the right stuff for a lesson and not getting to go to the loo myself for 3hrs straight. Lots of kids go to the loo because they've only got a couple of loos between a whole year group and sometimes aren't even allowed access to them during lunch break so?? Sod that.

Reading that thread it is so clear how that individualistic attitude of parents has effected what teaching their children is like.

I suspect a lot of threads would go quite differently if people had any idea about what teaching their child is like.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay

I suspect a lot of threads would go quite differently if people had any idea about what teaching their child is like.

Absolutely! When you meet those parents, suddenly everything about the child's attitude in school is explained!

I always let kids go to the toilet. And they rarely ask, oddly. Year 9 are a bit annoying about toilets

My own DS hated school toilets so much he never went the entire time he was there! They weren't allowed out during lessons.

My school has put CCTV in the boys toilets. Now that is weird.

We have cctv in all student toilets!
I usually let them go as long as I've done the input bit. Were expected to log it on Sims but I don't always because it's a faff.