Remote live teaching of students during the Covid lockdown may not be equitable, it’s claimed.

St Ninian’s teacher and ’digital leader’ Mrs Rachel Smith and Education Minister Dr Alex Allinson responded to concerns raised by the parent of one year 10 pupil about the lack of teaching while children are stuck at home.

The parent, who contacted Dr Allinson about her concerns, said: ’My son has logged onto Google Classroom everyday to access work which has been set by his teachers.

’This work involves reading the work provided, researching, and submission of work to his teachers.

’My main cause of concern is the lack of actual teaching. There are currently no online classes, where the students can be taught by the teachers.

’Children are expected to teach themselves, which is very difficult if they don’t understand the initial concepts. Chemistry, physics, maths, etc are impossible for many children to learn without a teacher explaining and teaching first before they are expected to do the work.’

The parent said some schools were providing live remote teaching and suggested students in year 10 and 12 are prioritised so they are not disadvantaged in their GCSE and A level exams next year.

Dr Allinson said: ’We’ve always used online resources and remote learning to help students. Now we’re trying to gear that up. We are constantly learning and developing new techniques.

’As we go forward what we need to do is work with teachers right across the board to try to make sure we have some common ideas and learn from other people’s experiences.’

Mrs Smith said St Ninian’s has roll calls. ’That’s optional, no students has to be in a lesson at any given time. In terms of live teaching, the issue for our school at this moment in time is that it is not very equitable.

’If you are online in a Zoom lesson it really uses a lot of high bandwidth. So if you’ve not got great WiFi actually you can’t access that lesson.

’Also we don’t understand what children’s home lives are like and to actually say "I need you to be in a lesson at 11am on Tuesday morning" for some students and for some parents that could be really difficult and really stressful.

’At St Ninian’s our staff are trying really hard to structure the learning with clear instructions, with voiced keynote power point presentations so that they can explain that learning to those students. They can send that as a video via Google Classroom to our students and they can access that learning when it suits them.

’They know we are online during their timetabled lessons so they can come to us during those times get help with an issues or queries they might have.

’For us, for the moment, we find that to be the most equitable way forward. I understand different schools have different context so they may feel live teaching is the way forward for them.’