pwhole
Well-known member
My friend is a teacher at the main school in an ex-mining town in South Yorkshire, and the school is fundamentally what keeps a very fractious and run-down town together. Many of the parents are frankly not capable of home schooling as their own education was so poor, being born just after the strike, and as job prospects in these areas are appalling (if you get one it'll be a shit one) there's not a lot of incentive for anyone to work even harder. Much of my friend's time in lockdown has been talking to the police trying to locate her pupils who have gone AWOL on their bikes instead of revising. So they desperately need the school to re-open as it's the glue for the social fabric. There's not many arty singletons and trendy well-off wood-burning stove families in that district. They already had severe deprivation in their education before Covid, due to their social circumstances, and this is just making it worse and worse. However, at her school when it was open, in the last quarter they had two cases of Covid, whereas the school in the next town had 97 at the same time, so much of it is about procedures, control and, probably, respect.
Just a personal gripe of mine, but in most of the middle-class neighbourhoods in Sheffield you have to wear a bleeding mask to protect your lungs from the stove emissions that fill every street from September to April. The areas that mostly kicked off about tree-felling on their roads - but I digress
Just a personal gripe of mine, but in most of the middle-class neighbourhoods in Sheffield you have to wear a bleeding mask to protect your lungs from the stove emissions that fill every street from September to April. The areas that mostly kicked off about tree-felling on their roads - but I digress