• As a department, we are really in the swing of things now and have got a very good system up and running where every single member of the team is contributing. This makes the whole team feel useful and allows us to play to specific team members’ strengths.

• We have established a really straight-forward, but really useful, way to differentiated literacy and numeracy tasks. We base each week on a new ‘theme’ and work as a team of specialists to create reading, spelling, writing and numeracy tasks.

• The bespoke weekly work plans we are creating for specific pupils – these are proving to be a God-send for certain pupils and their parents.

• Google Classroom – although please also see ‘negatives’ as this can be a ‘catch 22’.

• The allowances given to ALN pupils to only access our depts. work, if needs be (which covers the whole spectrum of subjects – we are very grateful to teachers and SLT for this, as are the parents).

• The system we have set up to check-in with pupils, on a weekly basis.

• Ability to create hard copies of work for pupils who, with best will in the world, struggle to access the laptop. Living close to an excellent post office is a real positive with this!

• Zoom/Google Meets – both proving helpful for transition meetings.

 

Negatives:

• The ‘big’ one for me is not being able to hear my pupils read. I know George, Eddie and Beth feel the same. It is impossible to teach pupils how to read without this, even with wonderful tasks being made. This is a real concern for me.

• The hearing impaired children – deaf people are so disadvantaged by this pandemic. They need to see our lips to be able to communicate with us. The Czech pupils with HI must be floundering, even though we are posting differentiated hard copies of work to them every fortnight. This is also a big concern.

• The bespoke weekly work plans are proving to be brilliant, but they take a very long time to make, e.g. 1 hour per plan, approx. The more children we start making these for, the bigger the task. I think that, as a dept, with all LSAs on board, we could ask them to produce several a day, but even then this will not reach all of our ALN pupils.

• Not being able to teach skills such as body language, develop empathy, facial expressions…all these things are huge for many ALN pupils. We do our best, via worksheets, but there is no comparison to being there in person.

• The ‘theory-based’ heaviness of work – this is really hard to get around via distance learning, unless there is some form of face-face communication.

• Instant praise and constant reassurance – many ALN pupils need and thrive off this. Again, this is near impossible via email etc.

Negatives