AIBU No going back to school I’m furious.

Nor french - primary teaching there is very didactic and the whole system is more under the control of the govt. than it is here.
eg movement of teachers from school to school or area..
From my limited current experience of primary schools in the Tyneside area I agree with Trisher's posts.
Another thing . Most parents need to get back to work or their family will be short of food. No exaggeration.
My neighbour is a town councillor and they've had a huge increase in the number of people coming to ask for help from their foodbank.

Interesting suggestion, one class has a teacher live, while the other 15 are with an on line teacher in another room.
I can just imagine what might be going on in that classroom, or is a ‘spare’ teacher supervising the on line lesson.
Time tabling, under normal conditions, for a 1300 pupil school involved a 10 day programme with 6 columns of students doing different lessons for 5 individual hour lessons a day.
This matrix was to accommodate the compulsory curriculum as prescribed by the DfE.
Everyone plays a part in the countries economics, equating one with another doesn’t always work.

Grandad1943 I don't know much about truck driving and I wouldn't dream of suggesting that any driver wasn't working to full capacity or not being adaptable enough under the present conditions. Nor would I criticise the logistics people who are directing them.
Could you therefore just admit that you know b* all about how schools operate and stop casting aspersions on teachers who want to provide education for children in safe and secure conditions, but who are trying to do so with a lack of any extra resources.
Teachers have been and still are working hard to provide for the children in their school and to work out solutions for the future. Before this epidemic most teachers worked long days averaging around 48 hours a week. www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-49728831
They now have extra meetings to plan for the future, on line education and schooling for the children still attending. They will need to survey the building work out a system, assign children to groups and timetable their learning. Not to mention keep parents informed about it all. It can't and it shouldn't happen in a rush. It must be done properly and carefully. Perhaps instead of criticising you could take your expertise into your local school and offer to do a risk assessment for them. If when you have done that you still have criticisms they will at least be based on a little knowledge.

J52 in regard to the post @18:21 today, should it be that there is a second group under tuition in a different classroom then good order could be maintained by a teaching assistant or even a volunteer.

There is, without doubt, growing anger among many parents with the complete lack of any substantial plans or even ideas coming forward from the teaching profession in regard to reopening schools.

You state J52 that people should not equate different industry problems in the present crisis. However, my company has been involved with a number of distribution centres where up to eight hundred work and in that we have assisted those centres in bringing forward safe Covid-19 working practices. That has taken place in a situation where the vast majority of those workers are constantly on the move.

As the old adage states "where there is a will, there is away.

To have witnessed that take place in those centres has been an uplifting experience for all of us within our company and many others in further companies involved in workplace safety.

Now, let us see where "the will" in the education profession really is?

How dare you suggest that teachers haven’t ‘the will’. I find such posts offensive and with no insight into the long hours that most teachers put in, both in ‘normal times’ and during the present crisis.

Getting on a little soap box, putting forwards unworkable suggestions and denigrating professionals only serves to underline a complete grasp of the issues.

Ignorance is truly bliss.

trisher in regard to your post @18:44 today, I entered this thread because we had received a request from an Academy school enquiring if we could assist them in planning for Covid-19 safe working and teaching practise. As you can imaging we have been extremely busy in our normal industrial safety work in the present crisis, and we do not normally undertake public safety work in such places as schools.

However, the matter was handed over to one of our Assignment Team controllers who contacted, I believe, the deputy head and after a short talk told her he would attend the school on the following Saturday morning as that was the only free working time he or anyone in his team had.

The reply was that she was not there on a Saturday......nuff said.

I've posted on another thread Schools going back and along with a few others commented on the funding for implementing the guidelines for primaries.

After I retired from teaching, I became a governor and was on the finance committee until I relocated 400 miles away a few years ago. Every year we planned to keep the budget out of a deficit. We had to plan 3 years in advance and prioritise. This is the decision the school then would have been faced with knowing the following:

Based on my last year as a Governor: Year 1 - Year 6: 9 classes (some were split years / total of approx 260 children. 55% free meals. No library or IT suite. One small playground (breaks already are split). No hall. Separate building for dinners (on a rota / dinners are brought in).

What we would discuss is based on the Planning Guide for Primary Schools (see Gov.Uk) :

9 more classrooms needed. Could we find more buildings? Doubtful as there are two other primaries in the town needing more space.
Could we find more staff? Supply agencies will be inundated with requests? Any teachers not currently working would need DBS checks (they take months to do). Do we stop all special needs support and use teaching assistants to take the other classes?
Breaks? Dinners? Resources? Toilets in other buildings? Health and Safety? Safeguarding? Cleaning? How will this be funded?

Some GNers have said schools could have split days. The guidance states: ^Schools should not plan on the basis of a rota system, either daily or weekly, as they do not provide the consistency of education and care required for the youngest children, who also require more support with remote education.

As I've posted before, the two Primary Schools where my family are working have been working hard preparing.

The schools are both back at work with only one teacher absent due to a chronic illness that makes her vulnerable

The problem these and many other schools are experiencing is a lack of pupils!

Some parents are not willing to send the children in

Not much teachers can do about that

Grandad1943 most of the people I know who work in offices are still working from home. Their offices are open but they cannot accommodate safely the number of people who usually work there so people designated as key workers or who cannot work from home are going in. Other people go in if it is absolutely essential. When they do so they often find the office is not operating properly because of the social distancing regulations, for example a long queue for the lift can block the entrance and prevent entry. Do you believe that the office managers do not have the "will" to get people in to work or is this like it is in any school simply a question of it being impossible to bring everyone into a building under the present restrictions?
By September most schools will have worked out a solution but saying it can be done overnight is ridiculous.

Grandad1943 were you charging for the service? If so there's your reason. No money or they have found someone who won't charge

Once more on this forum, we witness the teaching profession take up personal attack on anyone who dares to question the motivation of the education industry.

By not engaging in constructive debate I believe many will agree such persons lose their argument. Perhaps that is because in the current crisis those persons have no argument in regard to the lack of action by their profession in regard to the reopening of schools?

trisher, in regard to your above post, had our company got as far as carrying out at least a primary assessment of the amount of work the school would have required from our company, then it may well have been we would have assisted the staff in bringing forward safe working and teaching practices free of charge or at least at cost to ourselves.

However, as I have stated in an above post, we have not at this point in time been able to even attend the school to assess what may be required.

It isn't an an industry, though is it.

Therein lies the difference.
I don't think anyone has lost the debate either.

trisher I do agree with most of your posts on this thread apart from the one about cleaners.

Callistemon, all employment is within an industry or sector, name it how you wish.

I suppose if you think of children as the raw materials which are put in at age 4 or 5 and churned out, educated, enquiring, with the ability to tackle the world 13 years later, then yes, it is an industry.

Callistemon, if your above post is addressed to me, I do not view school children as "raw materials".

I view those children in the same light as adults who work in factories, distribution centres, or even sewage treatment plants. They are all individual persons, who when involved in school or any workplace accident or incident will become injured, maimed, sick or even killed as we so often deal with in the course of our work.

The above we always try to prevent rather than having to investigate after an incident had taken place.

As I have stated in this thread, we do not normally undertake public safety work such as in schools, so I would not be aware of any statistics on School accidents or infections. However, we were/are prepared to undertake the requested assistance at the Academy School mentioned if we can get cooperation on assessing to the premises.

My neighbour asked me on Wednesday why the public were so 'mean' (her word) to teachers. I suggested ignorance and the media (and govt but I didn't mention them) perpetuating the myths about teaching. I explained that it was ever thus. She admitted she thought her husband was under the impression schools had been shut since March.

Will I direct her to this thread? Probably, not but it nicely proves my point.

Of course teachers are defensive. They are constantly slagged off by people who know nothing about school or education. A volunteer supervising a class of 15 for an hour? A case in point.

Pupils are currently getting Zoom lessons, so why would it be better that they were together in a classroom rather than safe at home? They're not in a position to ask questions, to correct misconceptions. In fact in a Zoom lesson, they can ask the teacher questions, and the others hear both Q and A.

We obviously have Doctor Who, who is going to miraculously make schools double in size.

Chardy, in regard to "online home zoom lessons", the quality of that teaching is very much dependent on the home environment the child is in.

Not all parents are supportive, or laptops and tablets may not always be readily available to a child. The parent relationship may not be stable and in that, all can affect whether any child can really learn at home in any meaningful way.

The schools need to fully reopen so as all children have a chance to learn in an equal environment. Therefore the obstacles prohibiting the education sector from fully returning to process once again have to be overcome.

But they are not adults Grandad1943 they are children and education is not an industry. Nor is anyone finding excuses we are simply trying to explain to you the incredible complexities of accommodating children and educating them. I don't know why the person you wanted to be in school on a Saturday couldn't be there and neither do you. Because he is a teacher you naturally assumed that it was laziness but there are hundreds of possible reasons including on-line education and childcare.
If you want to engage in a debate that's fine but can we begin by you acknowledging that actually you know very little about how schools operate, the complex problems that they face and the demands upon them. Schools have kept educating the children of key workers and vulnerable children, most have taken in more children but expanding further will take time and it may prove impossible, simply because some schools are coping with more children than the buildings were ever designed to accommodate.
Finally schools are not child minding facilities they are there to educate. I looked at the film of a primary school classroom the other day, bookcases taped off, tables set apart, toys and apparatus removed and I wondered what sort of education the children would have. It won't be the sort many parents want and that is why I suspect they haven't sent their children into school

Callistemon sorry about the cleaners. It was wrong. When I was teaching I knew some real gems who were the backbone and heart of the school. They were wonderful (and they always knew all the gossip!)

How are you going to fit them into the space available? Without a massive emergency building programme, the vast majority of school buildings are quite simply too small for safe distancing. As for putting half classes in rooms with laptops, it's just laughable. Most schools do not have laptops for half the pupils for a start and approximately 250,000 extra adults would be needed.

growstuff, try reading the thread thoroughly and you will find that the reason schools need not double in size has been covered. ??.

Anyway, this is the first night this week I have ceased work prior to 9pm, so I am going to settle down with a glass of wine and the movie 1917.

Will be working again tomorrow, so good evening all.

Back to mansplaining, eh?

When was the last time you were in a school building or wrote the timetable?

Well when you are in a hole best stop digging!
Anyone can write a timetable growstuff didn't you know that! Of course most teachers don't bother they sit with their feet up all the time!