John Lyon’s Remote Education Provision
Updated Monday 25th January 2021
During this latest period of remote learning, the School is continuing to deliver a very high level of education to all its pupils. Building on experience from the first lockdown period, the School’s teachers, and indeed its pupils, are now highly proficient in teaching and learning remotely and will build on this further over the next few weeks.
The School continues to follow our normal school day beginning with either tutor time or assemblies. Academic lessons run as per pupils’ normal timetables whilst a specially devised programme of extra-curricular activities is available throughout lunchtimes and after school. Physical Education and Games lessons are facilitated with indoor workout whilst pupils are independently logging their progress outdoors towards the ‘Run Away from 2020’ 100km challenge.
Live sessions are accessed through Microsoft Teams meetings with pupils often sent links to further subject-specific resources and engagement activities. Pupils are encouraged to share their camera’s view to engage fully with the sessions. With an awareness of how much screen time pupils are likely to experience during this period, where possible, teachers are setting some tasks to be completed away from the computer, using pen and paper. This additionally helps to maintain high hand-writing dexterity. Pupils are likely to need to capture this work for its submission so may additionally need access to a camera or camera phone.
Homework is set and accessed through Teams’ Assignments feature which assists pupils in planning their tasks to stay up-to-date. Teachers continue to provide feedback on pupil work and guide them as to how they can improve further. Pupils are encouraged to respond to feedback and correct their work using green pens/font-colour as normal. Grade cards, written reports and parents evenings will continue as per our normal schedule with each year group receiving one of these each half term.
Our learning support and pastoral teams remain fully active throughout this period and continue to provide support and guidance to pupils, and their parents, who have additional learning needs or are finding remote learning a more challenging environment to master.
We look forward to returning to classroom teaching soon but recognise some disruption may continue for some time beyond this. Where pupils are required to self-isolate following either a positive test or contact with someone else who has tested positive, they are similarly able to join live lessons remotely through Teams. Resources distributed in-class are also available digitally.