Home Learning and Critical Workers

Dear Parents,

Many thanks for your support over the last 24 hours as we have responded to the latest Government announcement about the national lockdown.

Home learning

The home learning provision we will be offering is centred around the SeeSaw app – hopefully this will now be familiar to most of you following its use last term. Each day, there will be links to activities and further links to videos that offer explanations of lesson content. Teachers will offer feedback using  SeeSaw, with more detailed feedback on one piece of work per day, and will create short videos of themselves to encourage and motivate the children. Oak National Academy and White Rose maths video lessons will be used - they are recommended by the Department for Education and were created by the government, at huge expense, to support home learning during the current pandemic. Parents will be able to use class emails to ask their child’s class teacher questions.

Some parents have asked why Crossdale doesn’t offer live lessons. I have asked all schools in Equals Trust this morning if they offer live lessons – no schools that have replied offer live lessons and all intend to use the videos that Crossdale children will be able to access. However, we are reviewing the potential use of Teams or Zoom to create an opportunity for classes to connect, for children at home and at school.

Critical Worker Status

Many thanks to those parents that completed our critical worker survey so promptly, allowing us to plan our critical worker provision. It is clear that far more parents have identified themselves as critical workers this year compared to the previous lockdown. Today, every teacher is in school teaching their own year group bubble and, with some support from a teaching assistant, managing home learning at the same time. Numbers last year meant that we could dedicate some staff to teaching in school and other staff to supporting home learning – this is not the case at the moment.

As we get advice and guidance about bubble sizes and risk assessments, the larger numbers may become hard to manage alongside supporting home learning – we hope not! If numbers do continue to grow, we may have to ask critical workers to obtain a letter from their employer to confirm their status. In the meantime, please only book the critical worker provision if necessary to fulfil your critical worker role.

We will send a critical worker booking form for next week later today. For the rest of this week, we are expecting those children identified on yesterday’s survey in school. Many thanks for your help with this – please call us if you would like to discuss critical worker provision.

I hope you and your families remain well during these challenging times.

Kind regards,

Peter Cresswell