The last months have been particularly challenging for those working in the education sector. The ongoing pressure to find innovative, yet practical, solutions for learning continues as teachers face the possibility of local lockdowns and some of their students learning remotely while others remain in the classroom.
Teaching in its traditional form is no longer the only option for any school. We have to be flexible and adapt to an evolving situation. At Plumcroft we have had to think carefully about the Autumn term and beyond. Attendance in the first week back was above 93 per cent and so the vast majority of our 900 plus pupils were back in school. Planning for learning in school was therefore reasonably straightforward when combined with an effective Assessment and Gaps Analysis process to ensure we met the individual needs of all children that returned to school. However, we still needed robust and live distance learning capacity for any children needing to self-isolate or in the event of a partial or full school closure. The challenge is to continue learning, provide structure, and maintain standards for every child. We have many Pupil Premium, Free School Meals and English as an Additional Language pupils at our school, so effectively supporting all groups is a key focus in our planning.
Utilising EdTech
Fortunately, we had the experience of the last few months to guide our planning for the Autumn term. When schools closed earlier this year, our attention quickly turned to how to engage pupils remotely and the different edtech tools available to support us to do this effectively. Having already dismissed the idea of photocopying work packs for sustainability reasons, it was the teaching team who drove the research into what digital platforms were available. We were already using a number of tools produced by Renaissance Learning, one of which is myON. myON is an online personalised literacy platform that offers each of our students unlimited access to over 6,000 digitally enhanced books. Our teaching staff felt it could be a great tool to engage pupils in a variety of online learning from home. We are also using robust online learning systems such as Mathletics, Spellodrome, Bug Club and 2Simple.
We explored myON as our core delivery platform as the ‘Projects’ function allows teachers to set project work even when pupils aren’t together in the classroom. Each of our teaching year teams created projects suitable for each class during school closures. We also created the Plumcroft Distance Learning Portal on our website to provide parents with regular updates as well as well-being support, music lessons and videos from staff. We have had fantastic feedback on these two systems over the past few months and they have formed a core part of our planning for this September and beyond.
Planning
From a school perspective, using an online system helps us to track engagement in the event that some of our pupils stay in the classroom and others learn from home. If pupils are learning remotely we can use the data from the system to identify the pupils who aren’t successfully engaging at home and plan a suitable intervention to avoid long term learning loss.
This is one of the main reasons why we are going to assign projects through myON going forward. The system allows us to assign work on an individual basis as well as a whole class basis in an efficient way. myON itself has such a vast range of books to cater for so many abilities, not to mention interests, that we are able to offer our children projects that are fun and interesting. We have been using this system throughout school closures so our pupils are already engaged with learning online in this way.
One project we set during school closures was the NHS Nightingale Project. The whole school took part and the children were assigned age-appropriate books to read along with a variety of tasks, including art projects that could be supervised by parents at home.
The completed tasks were submitted online enabling the teachers to provide valuable, motivating feedback that is beneficial to both the child and to parents and guardians.
For our teaching staff, this system can be used to support both the children in the classroom who can complete the work together as well as those learning from home who are still engaged in the activities being done in the classroom. The projects set can range hugely from research tasks, poetry and art tasks, to more formal writing tasks. We have also found that being able to set the children more creative-based tasks has the advantage of engaging most children, from the more academic ones, to the harder to reach pupils.
Managing future scenarios
My long term hope is that despite the fact we may face a number of obstacles, from potential local lockdowns to the worry of Covid-19 cases in the classroom, we can ensure that whatever happens all our pupils remain engaged and connected to the school and keep learning. Our teaching staff are working hard to plan lessons that can be adapted and delivered both online and in the classroom as they make their way through the curriculum and edtech will be a key delivery tool to aid this process and protect the education of those who may have to continue to learn from home.
Every school will have a different experience of the last months, but my advice would be to learn from what worked and embrace the ‘blended learning’ approach so learning both in the classroom and at home can be normalised for teachers and their pupils as we as a sector navigate the ongoing uncertainty of the pandemic.
Richard Slade is the head teacher of Plumcroft Primary School, in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, London.
