The Prime Minister made his announcement about the national lockdown at 8pm last night. The Department for Education sent its daily coronavirus update email to schools (which normally arrives at around 1pm) at 10.50pm last night. Read more about the national lockdown.
We think it’s right that the government has taken decisive action to keep school communities (children, families, staff and others) safe. We appreciate this is a rapidly moving situation and that decisions have to be made quickly in light of the changing data.
The timing of this decisive action has placed huge demands on us all:
- You‘ve had to make last minute arrangements to sort out childcare or work arrangements (thank you for doing this).
- We‘re still working hard to sort out safe bubbles for key worker children and arrangements for home learning.
Safe bubbles for key worker children
This is our priority right now. Sorting this out will mean we can have more children in school, meaning those with a genuine critical role to play can carry on with their jobs.
Thank you for working with us today – only a handful of children have been in school.
We asked that you complete an online form if you’re a key worker who needs a place in school. Across Sphere Federation (and in other schools across the country), the demand for places has been huge – much higher than last time.
The Prime Minister’s message is that schools are closed and must move to remote provision. Whilst he said that schools were safe, he also said schools may ‘act as vectors of transmission, causing the virus to spread between households’. We need to protect the children who are in school – and staff – and that means keeping numbers low. The new virus strain isn’t known to be more harmful, but it is known to be much more easy to pass on – this makes it even more important to keep numbers low in school.
Because of the very high demand for places, and following communications with other schools in Sphere and beyond the federation, we need to restrict places.
We need everyone to think carefully about their childcare needs. We have a duty to open to children of key workers, and to children who may be vulnerable in some way, but we also have a duty to restrict numbers to stop the spread of the virus.
Arrangements for home learning
This is our other top priority right now.
Sphere Federation schools have had provision in place for home learning for some months now. On 15 December 2020, the Department for Education published guidance on providing remote education information to parents – we’d done this weeks earlier and met all the recommendations in the guidance.
The problem is that neither the Department for Education’s guidance, nor our own current home learning guide and policies, factored in another full national lockdown.
We’re working hard to put in place provision that will go over and above the Department for Education’s requirements.
Our plans will include seven daily learning sessions, each lasting around 30 minutes. We think these shorter ‘bursts’ of learning will be more accessible for children than longer sessions. Six of the sessions will be delivered by Sphere Federation teachers who work in the same phase as your child, with the seventh being a daily Maths lesson from White Rose Maths, which we use in school. (There will be an extra lesson each week, Religious Education, available especially for children at St James’ CE Primary, but open to all.)
We know some of you will want to see live Zoom lessons happen. We don’t currently plan to do this for various reasons, including the fact timings are inflexible (families with two or more children may not have enough devices, or good enough broadband, to access the lessons at the same time); and we still need to have teachers working in the classrooms to support children in school (it’s hard to deliver a Zoom session while there are children in the classroom). We do plan, however, to provide daily ‘drop-in’ Zoom sessions in the afternoon with the child’s class teacher – an opportunity to review and reflect on the learning that’s happening. Our teachers are also keen to read any emails you send with updates about your child’s learning, and they might call you at home for updates, too. (Do let us know if something like this would help support your child’s learning.)
And we know some of you need access to electronic devices. You might have heard talk of schools being able to provide devices to support home learning. These devices are supplied by government and are extremely limited – quite possibly even more so now. If you’re struggling to access the online learning, please contact Miss Hague. We can provide paper-based learning as an alternative, for example.
The daily lessons will begin on Friday this week – a good opportunity for your child to begin to familiarise themselves with their new online teachers.
We’re working really hard at the moment, so please bear with is. Nevertheless, if you do have any questions, comments or concerns, do get in touch. We can’t guarantee we’ll be able to get back to you as soon as we’d normally like, but we’ll do our best.