O/T. The Government's handling of Covid

[MadAmster]

I don't know if it happened in the UK as well but over here there were approx. 10% of kids who simply "dropped off the grid". When the online schooling started the schools couldn't contact the kids or their folks. They were mainly from Non-Dutch families and had, in the main, gone back to their original Eastern European homelands for the duration. It is not known if they will be returning.

[Geoff Parkstone]

I'm not sure if that happened here, but I doubt such people would be returning to post Brexit Britain if they did

[Geoff Parkstone]

Ref Bash Street Academy, are you suggesting that everything has to be dragged down to the lowest common denominator to meet the vaunted objective of equality of opportunity!? So the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater?

Plan forward, throw a disproportionate share of resource at those schools to enable them to align with the new normal. I refuse to accept that, in an era where most 10 year olds seem to have mobiles, notebooks, gaming tech, ipads etc plus probably access to laptops, a semi-tech based education cannot be introduced. All it takes is for mum to come off Facebook for a few hours a day 😉

Not only that, the schoolkids of today embrace that tech and would well be more inclined to learn from home/online than have to haul arse out of bed at 7am to get to school.

OK it won't work for the more hands on practical lessons eg art, DT, PE etc but that's for the days when in school.

I seriously think there is an opportunity here to enhance learning and make the process more attractive to pupils, particularly those in secondary school

[MadAmster]

OK it won't work for the more hands on practical lessons eg art, DT, PE etc but that's for the days when in school.

No idea what DT (unless you mean Detention) is.

[ramAnag]

Ref Bash Street Academy, are you suggesting that everything has to be dragged down to the lowest common denominator to meet the vaunted objective of equality of opportunity!? So the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater?

Plan forward, throw a disproportionate share of resource at those schools to enable them to align with the new normal. I refuse to accept that, in an era where most 10 year olds seem to have mobiles, notebooks, gaming tech, ipads etc plus probably access to laptops, a semi-tech based education cannot be introduced. All it takes is for mum to come off Facebook for a few hours a day ��

Not only that, the schoolkids of today embrace that tech and would well be more inclined to learn from home/online than have to haul arse out of bed at 7am to get to school.

OK it won't work for the more hands on practical lessons eg art, DT, PE etc but that's for the days when in school.

I seriously think there is an opportunity here to enhance learning and make the process more attractive to pupils, particularly those in secondary school

No, of course I’m not, but there are, hopefully, two issues here.

One...to do with the here and now...and a second which concerns the future.

As regards the future I agree with you - and MA - that there is much we can learn about education and employment practices from the pandemic.

As regards the here and now we have a situation where there would appear to be some sort of correlation between the poorer parts of the country and the areas where the Covid ‘spikes’ are highest. These are also arguably where children are most dependent on formal ‘attendance based’ education but where a full return to the pre-virus normal - i.e. crowded classrooms - is likely to be completely counterproductive. Just to add a further complication, they are also likely to include more homes where parents are least likely to be employed in work which can be done from home.

So...I agree with your final sentence, but we should never forget the value of intelligent, well motivated, competent and caring parents which, believe me, are by no means a ‘gimme’, and we also cannot ignore either the social function of schooling or the extent to which the ‘child care’ aspect of education actually enables much of the economy to function.

P.S. DT = Design Technology aka CDT (Craft, Design Technology).

[Geoff Parkstone]

No idea what DT (unless you mean Detention) is.

Design Technology

[Ram59]

This latest u turn from the government is going to cause even more chaos. Students who have accepted insurance places will now want to change back to their original universities, who in turn have possibly accepted other students in their place.

France, who went down a similar path in accepting teachers assessments, forced universities to make extra places available in excess of 10,000. Bearing in mind that the French teachers were only half as generous as our teachers in their assessed grades, the UK figure is to be far higher.

As RA correctly pointed out, this could be offset by fewer overseas students. This in itself causes more problems for the universities, as the overseas students pay proportionately more for their courses.

[ramAnag]

‘Latest’ being the operative word, R59.
In answer to the original point of your thread...this now seems to have degenerated into ‘government by U-turn’.
In their defence you might suggest it demonstrates a lack of intransigence. There again it might equally suggest a complete lack of competence and some seriously dreadful decision making.
If it wasn’t so serious it’d be genuinely funny.

Should we open a book on the next one? My guess? Children not attending schools in September won’t be subject to fines...but that’s three weeks away, could well be a couple more before then.

[Ram59]

Are we now going to hear from teachers who assessed their pupils more accurately, complain that their students have suffered for their 'honesty'.

I firmly believe that the theory of a fair algorithm was the correct way to go. But, they've had months to come up and test this algorithm and they have failed. There were always going to be a few students who slipped through the net, but the numbers were far too high.

[ramAnag]

Are we now going to hear from teachers who assessed their pupils more accurately, complain that their students have suffered for their 'honesty'.

I firmly believe that the theory of a fair algorithm was the correct way to go. But, they've had months to come up and test this algorithm and they have failed. There were always going to be a few students who slipped through the net, but the numbers were far too high.

I think the problem with using algorithms, Ram, is that there is not likely to be any relevance in the performance of, for instance, the 2019 cohort for the 2020 cohort.
I had a huge difference of opinion over this with a very influential member of the Derby City Council hierarchy years ago.
Having congratulated the school on its results this one person asked me what we could expect in future years.
I told her it didn’t work like that...that we were talking about children not commodities, and that the performance of that years’s cohort had absolutely no bearing on the the anticipated performance of an entirely different set of kids at least a year later.
It clearly didn’t compute and she wasn’t at all happy with the answer or my refusal to make a prediction, but, imo, it was like asking a farmer to predict his harvest for 2020 based on the evidence of his 2019 crops...utterly meaningless and totally flawed.