CORONAVIRUS

HEADTEACHERS IN Calderdale say the government needs to go back to the drawing board over how many pupils are attending school during knockdown.

Children with at least one parent classified as a key worker are allowed to remain in school.

Workers in health and social care, education and childcare, key public services, local and national government, food and other necessary goods, public safety and national security, utilities, communication and financial services and transport are all classed as key workers

But school leaders in Calderdale say this list should be revised so that fewer children are attending schools.

Mungo Sheppard, headteacher at Ash Green Primary School, Mixenden, said: “We’ve got just short of 500 children at the school and we’ve been averaging about 110 children per day.

“Of those 110, 25 are classed as vulnerable, for whom it’s safer to be in school.

“The big issue is about children of principal or critical workers, about 85.

“We had about 15-20 children in school altogether during the first lockdown, which is a huge hike.

“The only way schools can function in a safe way during the pandemic is for large parts of the rest of society to be closed down, so if households aren’t going other places than work and home, the fine, you can see that schools work.

”If it’s a list of 12 jobs instead of 100 jobs, and it’s all parents in the household, then you’d have had more people at home, fewer

of whom we have transmissions, and you would have to look at how you support families at home more.

“What’s happening at the moment is massively undermining the message of stay safe, stay at home - unless you’re three, unless you haven’t got a laptop, unless your mum or dad’s in one of these jobs or a job a little bit like it.

“How can that chime with the overarching message? It can’t.

“How can you have a stay at home and save lives strap line and then have a school, in Halifax, that has 258 kids in?”

Gugsy Ahmed, headteacher at Parkinson Lane School, Halifax, said: “We’ve got about 90 pupils in school this week and one of the things we’ve got to remember is the infection is still about, this new variant is about.

“Within our parent group, we have a small minority who are not wanting to take responsibility for their children. I’m sure there’s a small minority in every school that are not taking the advice to stay at home wherever possible, to educate their children at home.

“The online learning my staff are putting up is absolutely superb and done in a very creative way, it’s differentiated for the children. We ran ICT classes for parents before lockdown.

“I think there is an abdication of responsibility from a small minority.”

Another issue that appears to be adding to the numbers of pupils still attending schools is some families not having laptops or computers with which to undertake home learning.

“We’ve provided laptops and iPads wherever we can,” said Mr Ahmed, “the difficulty we’ve got is lots of our families are quite large families and where they have family devices, they’re perhaps not going to have one for all the children, so we’re constantly having to reassess our timetable and make the online registration at different times so the older children aren’t hogging the hardware.”

Mr Sheppard said: “We’ve been able to sort computers and technology for our pupils, supported by the local authority, but you get some families who say ‘they can’t all get on with the work they’re doing and I’d like them to come to school’. I know there are lots of schools waiting on laptops so families cannot access the learning.”

WHAT DO YOU THINK

Does technology need to be improved for more home schooling?

Contact us via EMAIL/ONLINE/TWITTER