Skeleton schools - behind the gates during Covid 19

A day in the life of a Primary school headteacher - my day really begins at the end of the previous day, when I read through the Head Teacher’s Pack; a document sent nightly by the local authority containing daily updates of children across the county as well as any new government guidelines.

On average, we currently have 5% of our normal attendance, which is anywhere between 4 – 10 children a day. I’ve had to send a couple of emails recently to parents who have classed themselves as key workers who in fact aren’t! Most of the children’s parents work for the NHS but some come to us from vulnerable families - families in poverty or parents who struggle to cope, for various reasons. Coronavirus is creating a difficult situation for everyone but for some children, school is a safe place which offers a respite from home life. It’s these kids that could really suffer at a time like this.

The children and teachers keep to the social distancing guidelines and we all spend a big part of the day wiping surfaces and washing our hands! The children aren’t currently doing lessons as they did before; we want to take it easy on them at a time like this, especially with so few of them. The older ones will often take themselves off to a quiet desk and go through a workbook while the younger children mainly do arts and crafts and story time. As Einstein said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

For lunch we currently have in-house catering, which we are covering cost for but that the government will eventually finance. 

In terms of what the children understand about COVID-19, they say, “We know that there are bad bugs out there, and we need to wash our hands to stop the bad bugs. We especially need to keep the bad bugs away from Granny.” It really doesn’t need to be any more sophisticated than that.   

To protect pupil confidentiality, the head teacher interviewed has asked us to withhold their name.