Year 12 and year 10 pupils have been particularly hard hit by the current lockdown. They’re in the middle of the GCSE or A-level studies and have basically recieved no proper teaching since March. Sure, the schools are making a half-hearted attempt to teach via e-mails and setting projects for the students, but without proper interactive lessons it’s very difficult to maintain motivation and focus. So I wrote the following letter to the Headteacher and Head of 6th Form at my son’s school, Farlingaye in Woodbridge.

Dear Dr. Sievewright, Mr. Lampard,

Before I retired from over 40 years working in the telecommunications industry, I spent several years in a team researching how to improve teleconferencing and audio conferencing products.  We looked at how key parameters such as delay, audio quality, audio spatialisation, video presentation and other parameters impact on how well people interact and communicate, what works and what doesn’t and a load of other issues.  It’s an interesting blend of technology and psychology.   Sadly, it all appears to have been a waste of time.

Now when lockdown was implemented back in March this year I thought, this where this technology can really make an impact.  Meeting face-to-face is a bad idea, so let’s do it via the internet.    No problem, there’s a host of systems out there that may not be perfect, but are pretty good. There’s Skype, Zoom, Google Groups, Microsoft Teams – mostly available at little cost.  All students need is a simple smartphone, tablet or laptop plus a cheap headset,  and remote lessons are sorted.   It’s almost trivial.   

Except, somehow it’s taken you over 3 months to arrange any online teaching.   I’m amazed.  I appreciate these are difficult times, and I know some work has been done via e-mails.  There’s been project work and you recently started doing one day a week for year 12 students.    But without some interactive lessons with their teacher, how are the students to keep motivated?     

If I was a teacher and traditional lessons are not possible, my thought would be ‘how can we teach remotely?’  Especially if I worked at a technology academy. The key is in the title, ‘teacher’ –   I’d find a way!  Even if it meant filming myself and putting it on Youtube.    I note that many private schools have been doing on-line lessons for many weeks now, as have some state schools, but Farlingaye – nothing.

So can you please explain to me why year 12 students at Farlingaye are being treated so badly.

Best regards,

Peter Hughes. 

This was the response I very quickly recieved – so quickly it must have been a question several other have asked already!

Dear Mr Hughes,

Thank you for your message to Mr Lampard and me, which I received today. I would like to address your question about why the school has not moved to a universal offer of lessons on an online interactive platform during lockdown. The fact that we have not provided such lessons routinely is not because we have been unaware of the potential of the technology available. Rather, it has been as a result of a decision-making process involving extensive discussions within the Leadership Team, evaluations of the risks and opportunities such lessons could offer, and research into the decisions being made within other secondary schools and the reasons for them. At the beginning of lockdown, the Leadership Team unanimously decided not to offer video lessons for the following reasons:

1. We have, from the first day of the lockdown, been open to the children of key workers and students in other specified groups. Staffing this provision has involved up to 60 different teaching staff coming into school on a rota basis. Many of these staff, as well as many others, have also been heavily involved in the more recent face-to-face delivery of sessions for Y10 and Y12 students. If staff had been asked to focus their attention on delivering interactive lessons, and providing marking and feedback to students based on the work being submitted through them, they would not have been able to support this vital in-school provision.

2. At the start of lockdown, the NEU and other UK teaching unions advised against the use of live video lessons, and indeed the NEU – the union representing the great majority of staff at Farlingaye – advised its members not to provide them. This was primarily as a result of safeguarding concerns linked to the interaction of teachers and students online, and to the potential for harmful use of ‘captured’ images of staff or students. As we have investigated and trialled the use of interactive teaching on Microsoft Teams during this term, we have been able to build in safeguards that we believe will remove most of these safeguarding concerns, and the many trial online sessions we have run over the past few weeks have not brought up any major issues. This experience will help us in the future to deliver interactive sessions safely.

3. The safeguarding professionals with which the school works regularly endorsed the NEU position, as they believed that using video lessons could lead to problematic situations for students, families and staff. We have continued to take this advice on board as we have developed our use of technology.

4. There was – and still is – significant inequality of access to online resources of our students and their households: some of our students live in houses where there are no suitable devices for engaging with interactive lessons, or where the only device that would be suitable is being used on a rota by several different family members throughout the day. (Improvements to this situation have been made during the lockdown, partly because the school has loaned out more than 50 laptops to students who had no or limited access to one at home. As a result, we have been able to start to move towards a more universal offer of interactive online teaching that does not involved live video.)

5. Our teachers are in a very wide range of domestic circumstances and many have been looking after young children or other dependents at home during lockdown. The demands on staff with dependents at home has made committing to extended interactive teaching highly problematic. For those with young children, their access to childcare provision as key workers in the early days of lockdown was varied and uncertain, and many of them were extremely uncomfortable about sending their very young children into places without PPE plans or published risk assessments, and without any clear assurance that maintaining social distancing was possible. As you will be aware, the guidance from the government for a significant period of lockdown was ‘stay at home if you can’ in order to protect yourself, your family and the NHS. Our offer of flexibility to staff has been linked strongly to this guidance and to the concerns of staff, and we felt it has been vital for ongoing staff wellbeing.

6. At the beginning of lockdown, staff would generally not have had the training or – in some cases at least – access to the technical set-up required to deliver interactive lessons effectively and safely from home. Again, the situation has improved as we have been able to provide progressively more advice and guidance for staff on how to use technology appropriately for teaching (though, of course, this has been made more difficult by the restrictions relating to large-scale training programmes placed on us by the COVID-19 crisis).

I cannot comment on why some private schools (though not all) have been delivering video lessons during lockdown. I can only assume that they felt the issues described above did not apply to them, or were not sufficiently significant to guide their decision making. I think it is worth noting that the vast majority of state secondary schools made the same decision as we did regarding video lessons, and I know that – in many cases certainly – their decisions would have been based on reasons similar to those above.

As we have been able to implement and trial restrictions on students’ access to features of Microsoft Teams, and equip students and staff with the necessary technology and understanding of how to use it, we have been able to broaden the scope of its use in delivering interactive sessions. Many students across the school have already benefitted from this trial use, and the information we have gained from the trials will – in the event of a lockdown being re-implemented next academic year – allow us to use interactive sessions much more fully and consistently, and in a manner that is safe for all. It has also moved us forward in how we can and will use Teams in our teaching, even in situations where we have full face-to-face access to students.

I hope that this email will provide an explanation that is clear and useful to you. However, if you would like any further information relating to this matter, please do contact me again at Farlingaye.

Kind regards,

Andy Sievewright
Headteacher
Farlingaye High School.

OK, so these are unprecidented times and everybody’s got problems. But really, it’s a bit lame isn’t it. For starters, just how much safeguarding do Year 12 students really need?  At 16 years old they can get a job, join the army, sleep with whoever they like, decide what sex they are, get married and leave home. Those over 17 can also drive a car or a helicopter.
Conferencing products hard to use? Oh Please! They’re designed to be easy to use by techno-phobic people like senior company managers, so a typical teacher should have no trouble.   Youtube and the rest of the interweb is stuffed with ‘how to do it’ videos.
Shortage of kit: easy – all you need is a laptop, or a smartphone at a pinch, and if all fails we could have had a whip-round.
The unions giving problems is a little more difficult, but really it comes down to the teachers willingness to teach.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Yes, there a few problems to overcome, but really, this was a chance for Farlingaye to rise above the pack, to show what it’s made of, to shine, to innovate, to make something happen. But no, just use some lame excuses and take part in a race to the bottom.

I’ll leave you with this Alex Cartoon.