From November our Home Learning content is changing. We are going to be using our own staff to deliver lessons. Find out more here.

Although I wish that circumstances for this were different, I am delighted to share with you all iSchool, our Home Learning Strategy. This sets out how we will continue to deliver a high quality education, keeping children as safe as possible during periods where they cannot be in school due to the pandemic.

Our overarching principles in putting this together alongside other colleagues across the MAT schools are:

We want the children in all of our schools to feel like they still belong to our community even when they are learning from home.

Learning from home should be a natural progression from learning in school.

Deprivation barriers are removed to ensure that all children have the same learning experience from home (and access to technology).

Home learning should be engaging and innovative and push the boundaries of what good learning looks like - we accept that this is a journey in which we will continually raise our expectations of what can be achieved.

Everything that we create will be shared as open source for other schools to use if they feel it is helpful.

We have begun to operate iSchool across the Trust with every child now signed up to Google Classrooms through not only their own class folder where they can receive work from their class teacher but also to their year group iSchool class folder where they receive centralised work. As we are in the process of developing IRIS protocols for delivering our own streamed lessons, we are utilising the Oak National resources to set work as part of iSchool through embedded links to assignments so that we can ensure children follow the work in a clear progressive approach whilst at home. Within iSchool we have also developed a series of help videos for parents, attendance forms and help sheets to ensure that there is clarity around home learning - this is an approach that we constantly refine and adapt to meet parental feedback and input.

A short video outlining our iSchool approach can be found here.

Parental guidance and help on using Google Classrooms can be found here.

Guidance for supporting your child's wellbeing can be found here.

Take care. Stay safe. Control the virus.

Mark