davidgillon | A Surprisingly Difficult Logistics Problem

Long talk with my sister on the phone this afternoon, other than a bit of a rant about Dominic Cummings it was mostly about her working week and how they're prepping the school for kids coming back. The bit that turned out to be more complex than I would have ever imagined is getting the kids from the gate to their classrooms (bear in mind here we're talking about 4yos in some cases, so leaving them to wander the length of the school on their appropriately socially distanced own is a bad idea). Most schools are going for handover from their parents at the gate, but they've decided they're going to do handover in the cloakrooms - one cloakroom per two classrooms, which works handily with splitting classes in two. So parents will be admitted individually, at a set time, to take their kids to the appropriate cloakroom and then exit via the car park. They've also decided they'll need two teachers per class of 10, so four teachers per year group, so it's just as well they're planning to stagger the return of the year groups (and AFAICT even that's assuming a one third absence rate to get down to numbers the classroom space can handle).

Amongst all this Andrea decided the county's provided signage would terrify the kids so drew up some of her own, which the head passed back to the county for potential use. Next day she told Andrea she hadn't heard anything, so the county was probably not going to do anything with it, only to have to correct herself ten minutes later "I just had an email saying they've passed it on to Public Health England for possible use"!