Should a bubble or a group of close contacts or a year group bubble be required to work from home:

• Work will be available to students on EPraise (our online homework platform) which they can access immediately.
• There will be a check on which students need to borrow a laptop and these will be loaned out as swiftly as possible. Whilst they are awaiting these, students can continue to access the work on EPraise.
• Live learning will be provided with the teacher teaching the students in the class and live streaming the lesson to students at home via Microsoft Teams.

When teaching live (synchronous) lessons, we teach the same curriculum remotely as we do in school.

Where we have to make use of resources to teach offline (asynchronous) lessons, we teach the same curriculum as we do in school wherever possible and appropriate. However, we have needed to make some adaptations in some subjects. For example, we may focus on different artists in art or different products in design so as to ensure that students who don’t have access to specialist equipment at home aren’t disadvantaged.

We expect your child to stick to a good routine and will therefore ensure that they are provided with a comprehensive timetable to structure their day.

This will be made up of

4 hours and 50 minutes on Monday and Friday. 

5 hours and 40 minutes on Tuesday to Thursday.

This includes 30 minutes for tutor time and 25 minutes for daily reading every day.

Live lessons:

Live lessons will be provided through Microsoft Teams so your child will need access to Microsoft Office 365 on the internet. A video showing how they can do this is available here and there is a troubleshooting video here.

Offline lessons:

Where lessons aren’t delivered live, the teacher will provide work through EPraise.

A video showing how students can access this and submit their work can be found here.

If your child is unable to access our remote education offer, you should contact the school using the closure@novahreodacademy.org.uk email address explaining whether it is a request for help with: equipment, usernames and passwords or online resources.

We use a combination of the following approaches to teach pupils remotely:

•  Live teaching (online lessons)
• Pre-recorded teaching. For example, recordings made by our own teachers or United Learning and Oak National Academy staff.
• Online textbooks
• Commercially available websites such as Seneca Learning, Hegarty Maths and SPARX

This video establishes our expectations of our students during online lessons.

This poster from the National Online Safety organisation provides clear guidance relating to the support which parents can offer at home. 

A register will be completed for each online lesson by the teacher.

Our attendance and hub team will carry out wellbeing checks on any students who aren’t engaging with online learning daily to ensure that we are able to help students and parents/carers where there might be barriers and to increase levels of engagement as well as to avoid gaps emerging between those who are engaging and those who are not.

Feedback can take many forms and may not always mean extensive written comments for individual children. For example, whole-class feedback or quizzes marked automatically via digital platforms are also valid and effective methods, amongst many others. Our approach to feeding back on pupil work is as follows:

Teachers will check for understanding during lessons using:

• Microsoft Forms or EPraise quizzes which are marked automatically.
• Handwritten quizzes which students can submit using EPraise or their class notebook on teams and which teachers can give whole class feedback on.
• The chat function on Teams which teachers can immediately respond to.
• Common Interim Assessments set by our Faculty Leaders which teachers can give whole class feedback on.

We recognise that some pupils, for example some pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), may not be able to access remote education without support from adults at home. We acknowledge the difficulties this may place on families, and we will work with parents and carers to support those pupils in the following ways:

• We will invite those students identified as vulnerable, in line with government guidelines, into our Frontline School provision to ensure that they have access to the support they need.
• A TA will be posted with each group at Frontline school and a member of the Hub team will be allocated to each year group.
• Our teachers will make their online lessons as accessible as possible.
• Our Hub and SEND teams will make periodic wellbeing and education checks for students who don’t take up our offer of a place at Frontline School and those students whose level of need falls outside that established by the government. The frequency of these checks will be established based on the level of need.
• We will use out attendance to online lessons data and carry out a weekly wellbeing check which will be completed using Microsoft Forms to identify any further students who may become vulnerable whilst unable to attend school.

If you would like to discuss this further, please contact our SENCO, b.wilkinson@novahreodacademy.org.uk