The three schools have rewritten the shared timetable. Six periods a week for grades three to six, and an honest note about the lessons the connection loses.
The three schools that share an English teacher have rewritten the timetable between them, and from next week our link lessons are on Monday and Wednesday mornings.
Why it changed. The largest of the three schools moved its own timetable, and since the teacher is appointed there and teaches us over the link, our slots move with theirs. All three principals agreed it on a call and none of us is entirely happy with the result, which is what a shared arrangement looks like.
What we get: six periods a week across grades three to six. Grades three and four have two, grades five and six have four, which is weighted towards the older children deliberately because of the move at the end of grade six.
What has not changed, and will not. An adult from this school is in the room for every single lesson, without exception, and writes the teacher a note afterwards about who followed it and who did not. That was the condition all three principals insisted on when the arrangement started and it is the thing that makes it work at all, because a teacher on a screen cannot see the child at the back who has quietly stopped following.
The honest part. The connection fails in about one lesson in twelve, and a failed link lesson is a lost period rather than a rearranged one, because the teacher is with another school for the rest of the day. Over a year that is roughly three weeks of English. We record every failure and the three schools report them together, which has produced some improvement and not enough.
And speaking practice over a link, in a class of twenty two, is poor. We do what we can in the other periods with the teachers we have, all of whom are teaching English without having trained in it, and we say so to every family rather than letting a report suggest otherwise.
What would fix all of this is an English teacher living on this island. Three small schools have been asking for years. Until then this is a great deal better than nothing, and the children know her, like her, and she has visited us twice.
