Headteacher blog 5/2/21

We have been putting a lot of effort into remote marking systems over the past couple of weeks, responding to feedback from parents that suggested that this area was a less strong element of our successful remote learning provision. Teachers in Years 1 and 2 have been trialling the use of short video feedback by email and this has been popular with our younger pupils. We have also established a more methodical system for managing submission of work from KS1 families. In Key Stage 2, we discovered that many children (and, presumably, their parents) didn’t realise quite how much feedback they were already getting on their work so we have improved notifications and have given the children activated GMail accounts to receive some of their feedback. We have also rolled out audio ‘Mote’ feedback for junior children: quicker for teachers and engaging for children. I hope that families have seen some improvement in feedback recently.

We hope to be back as a whole school, if it is safe, on March 8th. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. It is a strange time and it is difficult to plan ahead. If we knew that Lockdown was until Easter, there are further enhancements to our remote offer that we could make but if we are going to be back in three working weeks then the investment of time and money is probably not justified and any positive impact would have too little time to be manifest. Teachers are working at full capacity – or beyond – juggling traditional teaching methods and the new, and I do need to be mindful of their capacity to take on many more new ideas or expectations. Sometimes we probably do need to be kind to ourselves at work and at home: that’s good enough.