Whole school bubbles being made to self-isolate?

This was so predictable I find it hard to believe that he government didn't know exactly what would happen. But then with this absolute shower who knows?

With the season of winter colds and coughs just getting going, and anyone who has these being told to stay at home, get a test (impossible at present) or isolate for a fortnight, cannot see many schools managing to stay open after half term.

Our world beating test and trace system, like so many other of this government ideas is a shambles.

Surely, if every school in the country had facilities to arrange immediate tests for any pupil or staff member with ANY symptom, this would help to ensure some form of proper continuity of education for our young people.

It really should be as simple as that. In the over-whelming majority of cases the results would be negative and it would be simple colds, coughs, etc.

trisher, I've got several theories.
I think that they were convinced that that the Unions would kick up a stink and that schools wouldn't open.
Then they could blame all the lazy arsed teachers and what Gove referred to as 'the blob' for letting the kids down.
They basically washed their hands (pardon the pun) of schools.

Difficulty is if teacher has one group in class and a group at home they can't teach both. DD was working all her hours on the home schooling - she did a lot P1 - and could not have also been teaching face to face.

What none of you have commented on is the widening educational gap between families who can support home learning and those who can’t. One reason for the government being so desperate to get schools functioning was the increasing amount of evidence to suggest that some children are being permanently damaged by being out of school. These children are being failed by the inadequacy of testing and tracing. I can’t see much in the way of a solution.

GrannySomerset
They haven't exactly got a track record of caring about disadvantage youth.
What happens to the promised laptops for kids who didn't have them? Nothing
What happened to the promised catch up tutors over the summer holidays? Nothing
They don't give a stuff about actual education. This has shown up the truth about schools.
Child care with a bit of social work chucked in.

ElaineI

Difficulty is if teacher has one group in class and a group at home they can't teach both. DD was working all her hours on the home schooling - she did a lot P1 - and could not have also been teaching face to face.

That's why online specialists have been paid by the government to produce teaching materials suitable for home learning. The government knew very well this would happen.

GrannySomerset

What none of you have commented on is the widening educational gap between families who can support home learning and those who can’t. One reason for the government being so desperate to get schools functioning was the increasing amount of evidence to suggest that some children are being permanently damaged by being out of school. These children are being failed by the inadequacy of testing and tracing. I can’t see much in the way of a solution.

Do you really think so? I'm afraid I don't. As Franbern has pointed out, this government has made significant cuts to the support available to disadvantaged families over the last ten years and schools in disadvantaged areas have had their funding cut in the latest formula.

The government promised that all pupils would have access to a laptop, but in most cases, they are yet to materialise.

Getting pupils back to school was a PR exercise to curry favour with the public - unions and "leftie" teachers could always be blamed if it all went wrong. Parents wanted their children back in school, so they could return to work.

Child care with a bit of social work chucked in.

Exactly!

The thought of all the mixed contact that goes on in secondary schools horrifies me. Primary not so much because they stay in the same classroom for most of the day.
My elder GS in Y6 does one week in, one week home learning but he’s old enough to be left whilst his parents work.
Should we have kept schools closed?
Many children and parents were already out meeting up with friends and potentially spreading the virus and despite organisation by schools for start and finish, many parents still gather in groups whilst waiting.
Keeping schools closed would have meant parents at home with no work and no money. Some children don’t have equipment to work online, others had the equipment but working online was not what they did with it, especially as time went on.
Some parents rigorously made their children do what was provided by the school or followed work on the government’s Oak Academy website, others didn’t either because they didn’t understand the work and couldn’t support their children or, as one mum said on air, “It’s not my job to teach them.”
So what should we do?

One reason for the government being so desperate to get schools functioning was the increasing amount of evidence to suggest that some children are being permanently damaged by being out of school.
And not just educationally GrannySomerset. You can have all the online learning you like but the real classroom with physical daily human contact is vital for a child's development and mental health.

FannyCornforth

GrannySomerset
They haven't exactly got a track record of caring about disadvantage youth.
What happens to the promised laptops for kids who didn't have them? Nothing
What happened to the promised catch up tutors over the summer holidays? Nothing
They don't give a stuff about actual education. This has shown up the truth about schools.
Child care with a bit of social work chucked in.

The school I used to work at were given money to provide 250 lap tops for pupils who did not have a device to work on at home. They are loaned to the pupils, not given to them, and if a pupil is in school, the lap tops are cleaned and stored, ready to give out if a year group has to self isolate. I'm not sure where the money came from, the Headteacher was very enterprising so might have sourced them from local businesses.

My DGS in Y11, told me that his 'bubble' is the entire year group. What's more, the wearing of masks in public spaces is not being enforced. Imagine if one child in each year were to have a positive test. Would the whole school be quarantined? It seems to me that their school has a remarkably laissez faire attitude. I wonder if it's a policy across the academy group or left to the school's management.

Ellianne

^One reason for the government being so desperate to get schools functioning was the increasing amount of evidence to suggest that some children are being permanently damaged by being out of school.^
And not just educationally GrannySomerset. You can have all the online learning you like but the real classroom with physical daily human contact is vital for a child's development and mental health.

Do you honestly think schools don't know that?!! The fact, which you seem to overlook every single time, us that schools CANNOT be "Covid safe", so the most rational solution is to opt for the best in the circumstances.

waiting the return of students from all over and living in mixed houses,,,,,,,,

Lucca

I’m assuming this is primary ? In secondary it could be about 200! I don’t know what the solution is honestly but I’m assuming these are government guidelines ?

So you prefer to wait until all 200 children have Covid?

What ? Where did I say anything g like that? I said I didnt know what the solution was.

I also said I assume these were govt guidelines but actually I don’t know what autonomy individual schools have. It’s an impossible situation.

annodomini

My DGS in Y11, told me that his 'bubble' is the entire year group. What's more, the wearing of masks in public spaces is not being enforced. Imagine if one child in each year were to have a positive test. Would the whole school be quarantined? It seems to me that their school has a remarkably laissez faire attitude. I wonder if it's a policy across the academy group or left to the school's management.

The government guidelines are that pupils and staff shouldn't wear masks, except in corridors and some other areas. In secondary schools, year groups are treated as a bubble and stay in a designated area of the school. The teachers move from one class to another and across bubbles. Movement around the school has been minimised. However, pupils are sitting within a metre of each other for hours at a time. Classrooms are poorly ventilated and the pupils will mix with other bubbles on school buses and outside the premises. Schools have been issued with guidelines, but it's up to the schools how they are implemented.

My daughter is a teacher in an independent school. They’ve been told that if a child has a positive test the whole class would not be sent home just the children in immediate contact with that child - the ones sitting next to him in class. The fact that she describes the children as being all over each other ( year 5s) seems to be ignored. The school have been sent 4 tests for the whole school which they are keeping for staff.

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

My two eldest grandsons are 19 and they are cleaners at our local schools in Bucks (7 different schools)
There is barely any social distancing, no masks, the kids all use the water fountain. They are playing sports and games together outside, they all queue as normal at the ice-cream van at the end of the day with parents in tow, mums with buggies and toddlers on scooters, majority acting as though this is all over.
My GS's dont blame the children, they have been sent back to act as normal, and when you're young, you feel invincible anyways, this is too much for youngsters to take in.
Teachers are doing their level best, but there is no way several of the schools near me can promote social distancing in the class, its unachievable!
This govt opened up the schools, not because they are worried about the childrens mental health, they needed the parents to be able to work again, despite the fact they themselves have continued to stay at home and pick up the perks.
It all opened up far too quickly, we tried to run before we could crawl.
I despise boj job and his incompetence for putting our children at risk. Yes, it might be low, and yes, kids will be bored and some even lonely, but they need to find out their magic money tree that miraculously appears when a Tory mate needs a few million for PPE that doesn't even work, and sort our schools out to make them safer again so our children can work safely and happily and have the most important thing in the world, no, not an education a CHILDhood!!

Do excuse my passion, but for ten years I have watched the Country I love fall to its knees under the Tory regime. Now, we can go and eat out, we can go to work, we can send our babies to school with a virtually unknown about pandemic, but god forbid we have two friends round for tea!

Tell on your neighbours, BE A spy! But of course, its fine for Cummings to do it, or for Boj jobs dad to bugger off whenever he pleases....

This is a farce, and I have ended several friendships over their defending of the undefendable. The Tories are in this for one thing: Money, and the rest of us can go hang.

Yesterday I popped round to take some magazines to my next-door neighbour. We stood in her hall and had a chat. We weren’t wearing masks.
Towards the end of our chat she told me two things I wasn’t aware of : firstly that one of the village primary schools had had to close because one of the children had tested positive for Covid19 and second, that her 12;year-old granddaughter, whom she looks after on a regular basis, together with her younger sister, while their Mum is at work, was quite ill with a very sore throat. They also live in the village and go to two other schools.
If the sore throat turns out to be Covid 19, I was wondering where that leaves me and my husband. Presumably, our neighbour will have to quarantine, but will we??
As I have said before, we think we both had it back in February, but I know I haven’t got any antibodies in my system, because I had a test a couple of weeks ago, so, presumably, my husband doesn’t have any either.
I was told by my acupuncturist this morning that an immunologist she treats told her that you should look at your t-cells, not your antibodies to see if you are immune, but I have no idea how you get your t-cells tested!

I’m a retired teacher, a school governor and a grandmother of 7, 6 of whom are school age. You cannot make a school Covid free. You can only take precautions. The schools I’m familiar with are doing their best under difficult circumstances. Accommodation is cramped at best and areas such as playgrounds and corridors become overcrowded. There should be more stringent guidelines as to how each school should deal with the situations mentioned in this thread when children become unwell. This is inevitable at this time of year. Also people are so aware of the possibility of Covid that they’ve forgotten about the coughs and cold we regard as normal.
I would like to say as well that I’m sick and tired of the criticisms levelled at the Government. The electorate voted them in quite overwhelmingly. If you look at other countries’ current positions we compare quite well with many of them. How many of us can say hand on heart that we would have known what to do in this situation? At least Jeremy Corbyn isn’t our PM!

An entire year of my GS’s school was sent home for two weeks at the end of the very first week of school! A child had a test after developing symptoms but the parents didn’t inform the school and still sent him in until they got the test result, which was positive. ?

How can people be so idiotic?

The local secondary school to my daughter has a “bubble” of 300. The entire year group. This is the same as growstuff’s local school.
I would think larger schools will all have 300 in a bubble.