Home learning again in this ‘new’ year! | Kelly Brown

The hokey cokey of government policy has meant that many children - mine included - have been in school for a grand total of one day in 2021 before the latest lockdown measures were announced.

Some had inset days, so have not even made through the school gates at all.

It also meant that the school app parentmail went into absolute meltdown late Monday night, meaning that many official notifications didn’t even come in until after midnight.

And on Tuesday morning the parents of primary school age children up and down the country woke up with a sense of deja vu - because home learning was a reality again.

Many of us who have had to self isolate have managed to get by for the odd couple of days or weeks with Google Classroom being our new friend, and those with older children have seen their schools switch to (planned) virtual lessons.

But the complete lack of notice has caused confusion and anxiety, not least for the poor schools.

Parents whose jobs fall into the ‘key worker’ categories, suddenly renamed ‘critical workers’ for reasons I can’t explain, have been filling in forms to secure school places or seeing if they can juggle things to keep their children at home.

Those who do not have been left with the task of seeing how they can again attempt to juggle work, child care and home learning without it descending into utter chaos or feeling like a total failure.

Because no matter how hard we try we know our children, given the choice, would really rather play with their toys or technology than sit and do school work.

We know that there is no way that we can do a proper day’s work while also helping our children with their learning.

We know there will be confusion because our children are taught to do things in a different way to what we were (making our ‘help’ less than helpful).

We know there will be tears (from us parents probably) and the sense that whatever we try to do is wrong because in the end we just can’t do it all.

And we also know that finding a supermarket delivery slot will again be finding gold dust!

Let’s just hope this really is the last time we have to go through this, and then this new year can finally start being a happy new year after all.

Second national school closures and home schooling