In school, we use many different approaches to ensure our children succeed. Many of which stem from Rosenshine’s principles of review, question, sequence/model and practice as well as other metacognitive theories. We wanted to maintain these in our asynchronous and live teaching. When we tailored our remote curriculum offer, what our children need was at the heart of it.

This is why we decided to include pre-recorded sessions so children could stop and rewind videos or re-watch them at another time, if they were having internet problems, for example. We found that this helped our parents as well as they could pause moments in sessions. Our staff brought their classrooms into their home to make lessons as engaging as possible by using strategies that we use in school to create high quality live lessons.

We understood that we needed to teach children how to work online and teach them new routines and expectations such as pausing videos and entering a Zoom meeting on mute. As a school, we decided that there would be a consistent format to our lessons to help children settle in to this new way of learning.

Trying to find different ways to assess the pupils quickly and well was a key priority. we needed to know what the pupils were taking in during live or recorded sessions, what they were retaining and how it informed the next sessions or future sessions. We used online submission of work to help teachers assess children’s work via Purple Mash. As time went on, teachers began to experiment with 2survey to help assess using online low stakes quizzes, just like we would do in class.

A key priority for us during national restrictions was inclusivity and making sure that all children received a good education. We found that we needed to work hard to close the technology gap by providing devices and free internet to those families that needed support, offering school places or paper packs. We tailored our approach to families needs. In our community one size doesn’t fit all and we made sure that our remote learning offer embodied that. This is one of the reasons why we decided to have a mixture of live and pre-recorded sessions as we have many families who are large, may have unstable internet or work. We also decided to stagger our live lessons so sessions wouldn’t clash. In a recent parent survey, parents stated that they found this useful during lockdown. Our EHCP children had individual learning packs and online learning groups we formed for those children who were not able to access the curriculum with their peers.

Our community is very diverse. Engagement and communication is key. For our parents to understand expectations and how to use systems, phone calls, how to videos, Zoom calls and home visits were used. Children had had the opportunity to use Purple Mash from September in school as part of their computing lessons and we set weekly homework so they were familiar with using the system. To monitor engagement over the lockdown period, we kept digital registers for live lessons and online submissions. If we felt there was a decline in engagement with a family then a follow up phone call with the class teacher/ PSA or a home visit would occur. Every child in school would at least get one phone call weekly from their class teacher to discuss their progress and any issues. Children and parents were also able to email teachers via Purple Mash. The feeling of ‘community’ is very important to us and we didn’t want tot lose that. So we held whole school competitions and Key Stage assemblies, a whole school celebration assembly weekly and chat times twice a week where children would have the opportunity to share something with their peers or learn a new skill.