The Sixtieth Republic - One half term to go - just need to survive Sports Day and Activities Week!

[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.

Made the mistake of opening up school email to read about the dreaded activities week. Cant I just teach?

And just for the record, I will say it on this thread as well

@noblegiraffe has greater insight than all those over-paid twits at the DfE combined

Doesn’t she just!?

Thanks Staff! Putting the kettle on and staying out of the rain.

@StaffRepFeistyClub

Made the mistake of opening up school email to read about the dreaded activities week. Cant I just teach?

Thanks @StaffRepFeistyClub

And WTF?! Activities week is on our calendar but so too are Learning Walks (scheduled last week of term 😆) so was assuming they had to be timetabled but would be forgotten about!

Signing in! Thanks staff.

Our HT has planned a whole Speech Day in July - pupils, parents, staff,guest speakers, governors, all together in the hall. She is mad.

I am praying like mad that some restrictions stay in place after June 21st, because I know she wouldn't react well to my asking for a Zoom link.

Shiny new staffroom - thanks Staff.

School is open - got a reply to an email to site staff. Now need to try and motivate myself to carry in the books I've marked and drag home the next lot I need to mark. Needless to say I don't really want to but am thinking it would be better psychologically to not start the term with a backlog already.

Might have to have a g&t to get me moving

ffs - bloody speech day I had forgotten about that. 2.5 to 3 hours stuck in a hot hall. All the speeches will be how well we coped over the past year blah blah blah

Watch what you say on here folks. This on Twitter

I’ve just seen a grammar school teacher on another forum saying that their Year 11s were told the content of their assessment papers and allowed to have a copy of the text AND a set of crib notes with them. Please tell me that’s not what everyone did or I may cry.

Piggy, that's not what we did. We didn't even let pupils 'have another go' at a paper they had done badly on; everyone took another paper or no-one. We were trying to head off parental complaints of unfair treatment right from the start.

Sorry, didn't read Piggy's post carefully enough before posting

@Piggywaspushed

Post references withdrawn post.

I’ve never been on Twitter before!

It wasn’t a lie though. Exactly what we did. The only issue that I may have to clear up is though we are a grammar school, the girls are mainly tutored to pass the 11+ and then their parents don’t continue to pay for tutors. I can see why they do it. Not many good schools in Wolves. I would consider my school a ‘nice girls’ comp’. Where I want my DD to go to.

Maybe I should start a thread about how grammar school kids are at a disadvantage? Last year we awarded grades fairly. The local comp achieved better than us 🤔

I just can't get my head around Twitter at all.
Probably just as well - otherwise I'd spend even longer online than I do already.

Urgh activities week. Thankfully ours is condensed down to 3 days this year but it's still a logistical nightmare and half the kids don't bother coming in as they don't see the point

Please god say we don't have a sports day!

Thank you for the Staffroom. 💐

Yes, that's why I put it here for you mother to warn you.

I think lots of schools did versions of what you did and there is nothing that said you couldn't.

In another 'covid! Nothing to see here!' moment, we have had 4 PCR confirmed covid cases since Friday just in sixth form.

I don’t understand this mother-the exam boards themselves posted all the questions for all to see, no matter what school they went to and schools were told to say what topics/content they would be tested on.

You have done nothing wrong. Ofqual, the exam boards and DforE have.

@ChloeDecker

I don’t understand this mother-the exam boards themselves posted all the questions for all to see, no matter what school they went to and schools were told to say what topics/content they would be tested on.

You have done nothing wrong. Ofqual, the exam boards and DforE have.

As I said in another post, pupils need to be concerned about parity within a cohort, not about competing against other schools. Our pupils all sat the same assessments, same conditions etc. Do you remember me posting a month ago about a teacher teaching the extracts for Lang exam rather than just hand them out? Well Yr 11 had to do another assessment. My school have been hot on ensuring all pupils in the cohort have been tested as fairly as each other.

The whole thing is a farce - it's in no way standardised and there's no way it could be unless every head in the country got together and agreed what they'd do. The whole thing has seemed like the objective was to take all onus and responsibility and accountability off of exam boards and the DfE and dump it on individual schools and teachers. Presumably to avoid them having to deal with appeals even though exam boards are still being bloody paid, not paying markers and have done bugger all.

People on Twitter are v precious and often seeking affirmation of their wondrousness.

Unlike us lot on here!

As I said in another post, pupils need to be concerned about parity within a cohort, not about competing against other schools.

This.

It's slightly different for v small cohorts but for anything 30+ this is the message.

Well as long as you accept that each year at a school proportionally achieves the same marks. Which is a bit of a pisser if you're a new teacher at a shit school and no damn well you were set to get much better results for example or if you know your change in policies a few years back had finally fed through to decent ks4 cohorts.

I don't know. Nothing to be done anyway.

know!