COVID-19 Information for university and college admissions teams

Details: Published: Wednesday, 30 September 2020 15:39

In line with government guidance, St Thomas More School closed to all but children of key workers and vulnerable students on March 20^th 2020. There was a very small number of students in the current Y13 cohort that met the criteria to continue to attend school.

Overall, students were not present in school for 15 weeks of planned teaching time. Alternative provision was put in place via remote learning, using google classroom and email, with a few staff using LOOM/ZOOM lessons. Staff worked hard to maintain a rich learning experience, but online learning cannot replace the experience of the classroom where skills can be rigorously developed and misconceptions addressed and so we are working hard on the recovery curriculum throughout this Autumn term.

Generally, take up of the online provision was good, but as google classroom was not an established way of working within the Sixth Form and this was a learning process for both staff and students. However, technology was a major barrier for many of our students, who did not have access to laptops or had to share across several family members. We were able to provide a very limited number of laptops to some students through the bursary, but often students reported that they were completing assignments on their phones or were unable to fully access our provision.

Y12 students were offered two weeks of face to face lessons with their subject teachers. Attendance was strong, but with a number of multi-generational households with family members who were in the high risk categories, some students were advised to continue to learn from home.

Our normal UCAS launch was able to go ahead in part during the Yr12 keeping in touch days in July and support has been undertaken virtually, we are now able to support students in the normal way in school.

We would normally have undertaken UCAS predicted grade exams in July 2020, we took the decision to undertake these internal assessments at the end of September instead; these internal assessments have been used to support the UCAS predicted grades, but they have been significantly lower than we would usually see in the July of Yr12.