Our Mission Statement highlights the importance of regularly reviewing what we do to ensure the very best provision for every pupil here at St Mary’s.
In order to help us in our ‘commitment to continuously improve’, we regularly ask members of our school community to respond to surveys or questionnaires.
The responses from these surveys and questionnaires help us to understand what we are doing well and how we can further improve our provision for children at St Mary’s and their families.
Please find below the latest results from our Remote Learning Survey.
Remote Learning Survey February 2021
Remote Learning Survey February 2021
What did we learn from our July Survey and what did we do to improve our provision?
As you can imagine, there are many differing views on remote leaning and a variety of responses were received from parents about the school’s initial response to lockdown.
Although many parents who responded to the survey told us that they were happy with what the school initially provided for Remote Learning, we understand that this was a very difficult time for many families and, as lockdown continued, working with children at home became increasingly challenging for some.
While many of these views expressed are very positive there are some important points made by parents that we have been able to use to improve our Remote Learning provision should any further lockdowns occur. Please see below:
Some parents felt that lessons were too short – some felt they should be shorter.
This is a difficult one to balance. We based the live lesson times on how much time teachers would expect children of a particular age to sit and listen to the them at school. Younger children cannot sit and listen well for longer than ten or fifteen minutes, whereas older children can manage twenty to thirty minutes at a time.
Teachers (Y1 – Y6) were asked not to spend more than thirty minutes directly teaching during the live lessons as this would be too difficult for most children. However, many teachers stayed on line after the initial explanation of the work so that children could ask questions about their work. We also had to bear in mind families with two or more children at school, who may be sharing a laptop or other device.
We will talk with teachers about how well they found children could concentrate online and whether there is any advantage in reducing or extending live lesson times.
Some parents didn’t seem sure that their child knew how to stay safe online.
This is a very important aspect to address as it is essential that children are kept safe when online.
Teachers will recap this learning with children now they are back at school. E-safety lessons are age appropriate. Teachers regularly talk with children about the importance of staying safe on line, what they should do and not do, and all the ways they can protect themselves.
Later in the year we will organise session with parents about e-safety and how to protect children on line. We have done this in the past and only a handful of parents have joined us. We will ensure that we publicise this well so that many more parents may consider coming along to hear this important information.
Teaching assistants should hear readers and help small groups and individuals or they could work one to one with children online.
This is a lovely idea and some of our support staff were able to do this regularly as they were not required to be on the school site during the week. Some of our staff worked with children one to one, heard readers and helped groups.
Many of our teaching assistants were required to be in school supervising the children of key workers and vulnerable children each day.
Thank you to all of our teaching assistant staff for all of their help supporting our children.
We will consider spreading out this teacher assistant support across classes if we have to return to remote learning again.
Publish the work/ tasks a week in advance
I understand why this would be helpful for some parents. I will speak to teachers and ask them to do this as far as possible. However, it is not always helpful as a teacher to plan a whole week’s activities in one go. Often plans must be revisited regularly and sometimes changed completely depending on how well the children have understood the concept being taught on a particular day.
Splitting the class into two groups for learning – by ability
This is an interesting point and one we did discuss when setting out our remote learning policy. We wanted the class to remain as a unit – able to see each other regularly and interact with the teacher as they would in class.
The is definitely some advantage in splitting the class into ability groups at times and we will consider this and how it might be achieved.
Thank you to all our teachers for their wonderful efforts teaching remotely during lockdown.
Have a time at the end of a day when children could log on again if they wanted to clarify difficulties.
This was suggested by a child and is a very good idea. We will certainly discuss how this might be achieved.
Remote Learning Survey July 2020
Remote Learning Survey July 2020
What did we learn from our July Survey and what did we do to improve our provision?
As you can imagine, there are many differing views on remote leaning and a variety of responses were received from parents about the school’s initial response to lockdown.
Although many parents who responded to the survey told us that they were happy with what the school initially provided for Remote Learning, we understand that this was a very difficult time for many families and, as lockdown continued, working with children at home became increasingly challenging for some.
While many of these views expressed are very positive there are some important points made by parents that we have been able to use to improve our Remote Learning provision should any further lockdowns occur. Please see below:
Some parents felt that their child spent too much time looking at a screen during lockdown.
We will address this in any future lockdown by asking teachers to provide lessons where children can move away from a screen to complete tasks. This can include a variety of more creative activities and lessons where work can be completed away from the computer screen.
Teachers will also be asked to provide activities where the printing of worksheets is not always necessary.
Some parents didn’t agree that their child knew how to stay safe online.
This is a very important aspect to address as it is essential that children are kept safe when online.
In September, teachers will spend a number of lessons going through the e-safety curriculum with pupils, appropriate to their age. They talk with children about the importance of staying safe on line, what they should do and not do, and all the ways they can protect themselves. Teachers will go over this work with reminders throughout the school year.
Later in the year we will organise session with parents about e-safety and how to protect children on line. We have done this in the past and only a handful of parents have joined us. We will ensure that we publicise this well so that many more parents may consider coming along to hear this important information.
Although many parents felt that the tasks for children were good quality, appropriate and easy to access, some felt that more work should have been provided for children and this should have been easier to find.
Teachers were asked to provide three tasks for children each day in English, maths and one other subject. We felt that this was a good amount for the majority of children and any more would have put additional pressure on children and families. Many teachers used videos and audio to help explain concepts and this was well received but parents felt it could not replace the interaction with the teacher.
Going forward, we intend to keep our provision to three tasks a day but supplement each task with a live session with the teacher. This means that children will benefit from three opportunities each day to interact with their teacher and their class mates. Teaching sessions three times a day will also help to give children a routine for each day as well as the opportunity to ask questions.
We aim to update our website and make our Class Pages more consistent as we understand the difficulty this brought for some families with more than one child. This will happen during the summer term.
Parents very much welcomed the introduction of the Google Classroom live lessons and said this was beneficial for their child. However, some parents felt that the introduction of Google Classroom sessions came too late and even more opportunities to meet the teacher and classmates would have been better for their child.
We agree with this and very much took this on board when we were designing our provision for remote learning in September. We ensured that each child would have three live sessions a day so that they could regularly meet their teacher and their class mates. Tasks could be introduced and explained to children by the teacher and they would be given the chance to go off and complete their work. They could then meet again with the teacher and any difficulties could be addressed.
