Is your day disrupted?

Over on Reddit a post from a UK secondary school teacher caught our eye, as did the comments.

In-school truancy.

Disrupted classes.

Year 7 and 8 not settling into secondary life, so going rogue.

Are your staff constantly saying “year 7s don’t know how to behave”?

Let’s take a birds eye view of this; kids who’ve been in and out of their primary school over the last 2 years. Home schooling that might have not met the mark or even been completed. Children who are already anxious becoming even more so after moving schools.

What’s our solution?

Nothing new. Just the adaption of personalised and differentiated learning that has long been at the heart of YouTeachMe.

If you’ve got internal truancy going on how can YouTeachMe help?

With a child’s account on their phone you can send messages and videos to those kids. What type? Well that’s up to you. But you could send them mindfulness videos, messages to help with anxiety, activities for them to do that are not academic. That’s all whilst they are in school, helping them to manage the daily routines. The nurturing stuff that’s perhaps not possible if they’ve not made a connection with pastoral staff or their form tutor. You can communicate with them without being face to face. Words of encouragement and support.

Then let’s think about the kids who are so behind; you knew this from primary school handover reports. Tackling this is easy with YouTeachMe. You can use our secondary maths taught in a primary style from our library. Or you can create catch up videos yourself. This can be done at home, or they can be in the usual classroom or an alternative setting to help them settle down to work.

Then those who are anxious; ones who can’t be in a classroom so that’s why they are ‘skiving’. That’s easy because you can have your curriculum on video, and they can ‘keep up’ whilst being in a safe space.

When a secondary teacher talks about safety for everyone concerned, using technology to help improve everyone’s school day could be just the ticket to help children be the best version of themselves. Without the trauma of confrontation.

All YouTeachMe requires is WiFi and a device; be it a phone, tablet or laptop. It might not solve the issue of truancy to full effect, but it can certainly help with some of the issues being faced in secondary schools today.

Book a demo to see if this is the tool you need to help with your secondary school.

Get sporty!

Are you wondering what more than new PE equipment you can spend your PE premium on?

Did you carry over your underspend for your PE premium?

Have you got outsourced PE provision but want to elevate your staff’s sporting knowledge?

Do you find your pupils are more settled and ready to learn the more physical activity your school day contains?

And more to the point why all the questions!?!

YouTeachMe is approved for use on PE premium expenditure; that’s right we are AfPE accredited. That means UK schools can spend some of the £320million PE premium on bringing in YouTeachMe to their school.

But why would you do that? Here our top 10 reasons:

  1. You can send home videos for children to watch BEFORE the new round of PE topic begins. This means learning starts before the first PE lesson.
  2. Staff without specialist knowledge can run after-school sports club at your school using video resources from our library.
  3. You can make PE accessible to all abilities in your class with personalised teaching when they need is, as often as they need it.
  4. There’s professional coaches providing lessons for your teachers to use.
  5. Lawn Tennis Association coaches have worked with YouTeachMe to produce a wide range of  videos from introductory skills to advanced techniques.
  6. Primary PE leads have produced videos teaching key knowledge and skills across a wide range of sports, helping your teachers to deliver quality teaching and learning. 
  7. Save workload for your teachers; the PE Lead can create videos for your team to use in lessons, or they can select and share the ones we’ve already made. 
  8. Create excitement for activity by producing short 2 minute inspirational videos to help all children remain active.
  9. Find the sport you want to understand how to teach, like hockey, watch the videos as a class OR share them with your children to help them progress in the lesson.
  10. YouTeachMe can be used in the classroom as well as remotely or at home. Wherever there is WiFi you can press play.

Want to learn more about PE and YouTeachMe? Book a demo or drop us an email (paul@youteachme.co.uk)

Managing absence

Yesterday was the big ‘masks off’ day meaning no more masks required in classrooms and corridors (although some schools have overridden this). This week healthcare professionals have highlighted children are currently the biggest group in the country infected with Omicron.

So where does that leave schools?

We ran a poll on Twitter (we have a reasonably good following from school leaders and teachers across the UK) and the outcome was 53% of schools are running a staff absence rate between 10 to 30%, scarily 6% have a rate of over 50%!

Twitter Poll Results

Then we asked a local infant school leader to tell us what’s going on in her school

“It is difficult to hear the media celebrating the ‘return to normality’ when Covid continues to have a huge impact on school, not just with staff positive cases, but with absence for those staff who are not vaccinated and are required to self isolate.

Huge pressures on budgets paying for agency cover while staff are positive and/or isolating due to vaccine status just adds to the months/years of inconsistency of provision for children and uncertainty for leaders. It does not feel like we’re anywhere close to normal, yet nobody is talking about it.” Tamara Dale, Headteacher of Ridgeway Infant School, Derby.

There’s been lots of stories of child in the hall from 3 classes being taught by one teacher. Not ideal for anyone.

Ofsted have been out and about conducting inspections on schools across the country. Not ideal either.

Pupil progress is still expected.

Ensuring your pupils are meeting the ‘secure’ or ‘mastery’ grading is still a pressure on teachers across the country.

How is that achievable?

Schools are adept at navigating oceans with big waves in boats with holes. That’s before the pandemic.

Our belief at YouTeachMe is that technology should make your life easier AND achieve things thought impossible.

If we said it’s POSSIBLE for every child in that hall from three classrooms to still have personalised teaching delivered to them each day, would you believe us?

Ask Paul Rose how YouTeachMe makes the impossible possible via paul@youteachme.co.uk

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