Since our communities were locked down on Monday 4th January schools have been under pressure to provide education not just for the children attending school but also the children being home educated.

With a much higher proportion of families asking for places for their children to attend school compared to the March lockdown we know teachers in many schools are being asked to teach both the children in their classes and the children at home. This is resulting in an unsustainably high workload for the teachers. We have received requests from heads and teachers to offer support with this.

As a MAT team we are happy to offer to curate a home learning package which schools can choose to opt into to a greater or lesser degree. We hope that with the greater capacity provided by provision of this shared home learning resource we will free up classroom teachers to give more of their attention to monitoring and feedback contributing to better wellbeing. We also hope that some teachers might like to join us in creating the provision.

Schools and classes will have started some topics or curriculum themes and, of course, it’s not possible for us to follow each one of those individually. Schools will need to make decisions on what parts of their planned curriculum they are able to follow in these circumstances and which parts cannot be followed as planned. This may differ from school to school and year group to year group depending on the planned curriculum, it's appropriacy for online learning in the current circumstances and the capacity of teachers to balance their work between school based and remote learning.

Science will be focused on rich investigations the children can undertake at home and Maths will follow the White Rose progression using their resources. We will provide six video assemblies each week – three for Key Stage One and Three for Key Stage Two. We imagine that schools will want to provide a Head Teachers Assembly, which we have allowed for on Monday, and a ‘Reward Assembly’ which we have allowed time for on Friday though – in both these cases you might choose to share these on different days. You might choose to share these assemblies with children in school as well and, of course, you are welcome to do so should you choose to.

We propose to start the offer from Monday 18th January though we may be able to provide some elements of it more immediately if that would be welcome.

We do think that it is important that pupils retain daily contact with their teachers, so we have timetabled in two twenty-five minute meet ups, one at the beginning and one at the end of the day. The first gives the teacher a chance to welcome the class and let them know about the lessons and activities of the day. At the end of the day, we imagine the teacher sharing a picturebook or a chapter of the class novel depending on the age and stage of the children or talking through what has been learned that day. This is a chance to check in on children and undertake some informal assessment of engagement and attainment.

Proposed format for the week – We provide Maths and English Daily plus two more lessons drawn from across the National Curriculum. Maths will have year group differentiation though teachers, who know pupils best, might choose to set other work for specific pupils. English will be differentiated with different resources for Reception, KS1, Lower KS2 and Upper KS2.