I’ve just been watching my child’s teacher walk us through how the online learning they’ve prepared will work. And here follows a giant rant;

It’s not just the curriculum they’ve had to adapt which is a challenge in itself, they’ve had to design this entire online learning programme themselves - knitting together google classroom, google docs and a whole plethora of online resources.

It’s not like there’s some simple out of the box system they can use, where the kids can watch a video, type in their answers and have them marked all in one place. (and if there is I doubt many schools could afford it when they were already massively under-resourced)

They’ve had to teach all the kids how to use google docs, plan how kids can upload their work and how they can ask for help (just 1hr zoom a day). I’ve got clients who’ve spent tens of tens of thousands solving these problems. So teachers now have to be e-learning experts too.

It’s not just that, they’ve also had to learn to be you tubers - recording and presenting online presentations every day. If you’ve ever tried recording even a 5 min video in one take with no editing, you’ll know how hard that is.

If you’ve ever tried editing a video you’ll know how time-consuming that is!

Our school has 5 forms in year 6, so that’s 150 ten years olds to keep track of, to answer questions for. In our class, one boy asked 60 questions in the class chat on the first day.

On top of this most staff are still spending time in school putting themselves at risk teaching the same curriculum to kids of key workers, putting themselves in direct risk of infection every day - imagine having to be in the same room as the child of an ICU nurse right now?

They’re also caring for vulnerable children, whose parents aren’t coping (remember suicides are at their highest ever rates right now), who’s own mental health has suffered (suicide and self-harm in children is also on the rise).

These are the children who aren’t getting enough to eat at home and who often need much more support in the classroom. They’re having to support these families through some of the most difficult times of their life.

And that absolute fuckwit @BorisJohnson gave these already exhausted teachers no notice at all to pull this off because apparently the virus spiralling out of control was a complete surprise that nobody could have predicted.

What that man has done to this country is criminal - he should be put on trial for this. For the strain he has put on our most precious and already hugely under re-sourced schools and hospitals is absolutely unforgivable.

And he has the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands, and it won’t just be those who died of covid.

So be kind to your teachers, they're having a really tough time right now. Our teacher has been uploading videos at 7am. Once she's done that she'll be teaching children in school as-well as preparing the lesson content for next week, and answering questions online when she can.

It may feel frustrating at times because not all of them will be as tech-savvy as you, but this was not in their job description. Before this year many will never have had to have a video conference before, let alone one with 30 children.

If this is what they’d wanted to do they would have got a job in e-learning, or mental health or being a YouTuber. But instead, they choose to teach a class of 30 children, every day, which I couldn’t do even in normal times.

End of rant.

P.S All teachers should receive double pay for the whole of lockdown.