Home Learning at the Harris Federation
One month into lockdown, Stephen Trask, Computer Science Consultant at the Harris Federation, sets out the progress our academies are making with electronic teaching.
These are unprecedented times. We are in the midst of a new reality, which affects every single member of society, on a global scale. The manner in which we educate our children, and our expectations of them, has shifted enormously in only a few short weeks, and at Harris, we are working tirelessly to support pupils, parents and teachers as we adapt to these shifts.
Technology, of course, plays an enormous role in remote learning; at Harris, we were already in the fortunate position of having extensively deployed our Microsoft Education platforms across our academies. This includes full access to
Office 365 applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It also includes membership of our Teams virtual learning platform, and features within Teams such as electronic assessment tools and OneNote – where pupils can jot down class notes and teachers can view them with ease. We had already invested heavily in infrastructure across our academies – in desktops, laptops, tablets, cabling, Wi-Fi connectivity, software deployment, training – and in the weeks prior to school closure we called upon the expertise within our Federation to ramp this up further and ensure that our pupils, staff and parents had the best possible options once society entered full lockdown.
However, technology itself must serve as a tool rather than an end in itself. Our academies benefit from being part of a larger Federation, but we felt it very important to grant them the flexibility to decide upon their own way of educating their pupils. As a result, some academies have rolled out full access to the entire suite of Microsoft products, and are actively using them on a daily basis. In some academies, teachers are recording snippets of lessons and using them as a starting point for the week’s activities. In others, there has been a greater emphasis on paper-based workbooks, with regular phone calls home to ensure that pupils and parents are coping. Many of our academies remain open for our vulnerable children, or children of key workers – and the experience of actually being in the classroom during these times is very different for staff and pupils alike. We recognise the need to be adaptable in these times, and that we may need to shift our approach and expectations as the weeks roll by.
This adaptability extends to the very notion of education itself. Teachers play a vital role in the ebb and flow of energy and productivity within a classroom; when the role of a teacher changes in such a sudden way, how does that impact education? Of course, it is different, and of course, it is hard – we fully understand the stresses that pupils, parents and teachers are under. Many of our staff are parents themselves and are experiencing first hand how to juggle their own job as educators with their other full-time job as parents and of course educators of their own children from their own particular schools. This is why, at heart, our focus is on wellbeing and coping. Curriculum content is hugely important, but it must be underpinned by emotional wellbeing – without that, not a great deal of curriculum content will be absorbed. We understand this, and we know that for many year groups within our academies, a large proportion of curriculum delivery in the coming weeks and months might be consolidated tasks, based upon previously learned content. And in these times, where coping is the essence of what we are aiming for, that is fine.
We also believe in the power of collaboration, and there are a range of excellent resources that we encourage our staff and pupils to draw upon. Many of these have already been produced within our academies themselves, and are shared across academies, but there are also excellent initiatives such as the new BBC Learning content, or national Maths Hub content, or work from the Royal Geographical Society, or at Primary level ‘Purple Mash’ self-paced computing resources. One beacon of light in all of this is the way in which professional educational content providers have stepped up, offering their services for free during this crisis, and it is so encouraging to see how members of our society want to help.
With that in mind, we want to offer thanks. Thank you to the pupils who have been struggling to make sense of this new way of working. Thank you to the parents for stepping into a very new and unfamiliar role. And thank you to all of our staff at Harris Federation – teachers, office-based staff, support staff, consultants and SLT. We really are all in this together.
