Dear Parents

 I know, the last thing you want to do is home school again. 

‘Anything but that! I’ll stick something up their nose twice a day, take any drug or vaccine offered, work from home, give up my exercise classes, even go dry January, February, March and April but please don’t make me teach my children again! Do you know how little they listen? Do you know how lazy they are? Why don’t they remember anything?’

Teachers know. Add in thirty farts and coughs and the risk of catching ‘it’ themselves and the fact that they too have lived through nearly two years of walking on quicksand and they could be forgiven for not performing at their absolute best. 

It’s ok, though, parent, the government have you covered. The absolute last thing they will do is close schools again. They will even send Ofsted in to make sure everything is still being done by the latest book.

They are panicking, though, as kids go back to the virus-breeding Petri dish and Omicron spreads like wildfire (because it’s airborn and more infectious) they know that loads of teachers are going to catch ‘it’, so they have a cunning plan.

Boris went on telly last night and although I haven’t watched it yet I am reliably informed that it was the clearest he has been.

They are going to keep schools open.

If that means combining classes, getting Geoff and Margret out of retirement with their OHP sheets and wild ideas about stretching year six to do a bit of long multiplication and abandoning the unimportant subjects, like music, then so be it.

What?

Sixty children crammed into a tiny room? That will definitely mean the teacher won’t catch it. (That’s sarcasm)

Unimportant subjects like music. Why is it always music? 

Now Parents, you should be as worried about this as I am.  What are the music teachers going to do? Does the virus know that it’s only allowed to infect the music teachers? Maybe the government plans to redeploy uninfected music teachers as maths or English teachers because children absolutely can’t miss a lesson to understand the language that is spoken around them every day. Singing a song, reading the words, making patterns with instruments couldn’t be crossover skills at all. I could have a large group of children making music together, I know how to do that but I do think it would be very unfair to your children (and me) if I suddenly have to teach 60 kids how to do whatever happens to be on the maths or English curriculum at the moment.

I am hoping that schools will be sensible, that your children will still get a broad and balance curriculum and that not too many vulnerable teachers die. But I’m being purely selfish here and I can be because my kids are grown up and so the prospect of home schooling is not a possibility.