28/1/21
Dear Parents / Carers
Thank you to everyone who completed our home learning survey; your feedback is very much appreciated. On behalf of all the staff, thank you for your recognition of the effort we are making to ensure your children continue to learn while at home. Where individual staff have been praised, your positive feedback has been passed on. We would also like to thank you, the parents, for the huge efforts you are making to support us to offer home learning to our children, in often difficult circumstances.
One of the main issues raised by parents was the difficulty of working from home or going to work while supporting your children’s home learning. We really do understand how difficult this is, and the pressure it is placing on families. Please know that we are here to help with any difficulties, and all we would ever ask of you and the children is that you do what you can. We understand if you don’t have time to complete all activities, every day – just let your child’s class teacher know if possible. The work we post attempts to replicate the school day, but we understand this is not feasible for every family, every day and will always consider individual circumstances.
The wellbeing of our children and their families is so important to us, and we know that home learning has caused stress and anxiety for some of our families. If this is the case, please contact your child’s class teacher if you haven’t done so already; they will be happy to offer support, advice with learning, or even just a chat! You can email us at windyrl@gatedu.org to ask for a call back, or ring the school office.
Some parents requested that online work be posted earlier to enable planning for the following day. As a result, we will now schedule all work to be posted to Google Classroom at 6pm the day before so parents can see tasks for the following day and plan for it if they wish to.
Some parents have also requested more live teaching. It has been difficult to strike a balance in terms of staffing and what is right for the children, while struggling with technical issues in school. However, we have reviewed our offer and will be offering a third live session for Key Stages One and Two. The third live session in the afternoon will be used to address any questions from the morning’s learning and offer input for the afternoon. Reception currently have three, and this will continue. These changes will take effect from Monday 1st February.
The revised timings are as follows:
Nursery: (when not self-isolating) live lessons every day 10am
Reception: continues with 9:00, 10:30, 11:30 live sessions
Year One: Mon – Fri 9:30, 11:00 then extra sessions at 1pm on Tues, Wed, Thurs afternoon
Year Two: Mon – Fri 9:30, 11:00 then extra sessions at 1:30pm on Mon, Tues, Wed afternoon
Year Three: Mon – Fri 9:00, 10:30 then extra sessions at 12pm on Mon, Tues, Thurs afternoon
Year 4: Mon – Fri 9:30, 11:00 then extra sessions at 1pm on Mon, Tues, Thurs afternoon
Year 5: Mon – Fri 9:30, 11:00 then extra sessions at 1:30pm on Tues, Wed, Thurs
Year 6: Mon – Fri 9:00, 10:30 then extra sessions at 12pm on Tues, Wed, Thurs
Although some parents requested longer live teaching sessions, we do not have enough staff to stay online for long periods. This is because each live session needs two members of school staff for safeguarding purposes. The second member of staff has usually to cover two live sessions in an hour, as well as their duties in school. We hope that adding an additional session, with opportunities to ask questions which have arisen during the morning, will help with this.
Finally, some parents requested that we record our live teaching sessions and make these available for children to access later. We have been advised by our Data Protection Officer that to do so would be in breach of GDPR, and so we are unable to offer this.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email windyrl@gatedu.org or contact the school office on 0191 4694954.
Many thanks for your continued support.
Mrs Hope
(ICT and Remote Learning Lead)
Letter to parents – feedback from survey Jan 21