Businesses offer support to homeschooling employees

23rd March 2020

Like over three quarters of a million other families globally, we started our morning with the Joe Wicks half-hour workout. Before I sat down at my desk, I had done kangaroo jumps, squats and bunny hops with my 9 and 11 year olds. 

We have set up a ‘school room’, written a timetable and my husband and I are like a relay team, taking it in turns to work and teach the kids. We teach some core learning in the morning with more relaxed subjects such as cooking, art and gardening in the afternoons. By 3pm we’re finished and the kids can do whatever they want whilst we work all afternoon and into the evening. Everyone will find their own routine that works for them with varying styles of teaching and actual ‘schoolwork’.

What does this have to do with business? Everything.

Businesses are having to support employees to do their jobs well whilst also having to manage children. Millions of parents today faced a hefty challenge – to become superb multi-taskers who can don different hats in response to every eventuality. Employee, teacher and parent. 

So, businesses have to be flexible adapting usual HR policies to respond with understanding and empathy. Business West appreciates that it is difficult to balance work at home and have introduced an agile policy to allow employees to amend their working hours, perhaps working outside of normal ‘business hours’.  A brilliant example of how businesses are reacting proactively to support employees in the current situation and one I am grateful for.

How businesses are adapting to help employees who are home-schooling

There has been a huge cultural change and education providers and those focused on our young people are stepping up. There has also been a shifting focus from education providers to parents.

Companies such as The Body Coach (aka Joe Wicks) are offering free services to help people and businesses at this challenging time. His main business is a paid for weight loss and exercise plan, but he’s starting to work with kids and is now offering free workouts trying to create a positive world movement, encourage kids to exercise and helping to manage the mental health of stressed families everywhere. Oh, and it’s not bad PR either.

Schools, further education colleges and universities have had to react very quickly in the last week and I take my hat off to them. Having to close down schools, set up learning provision for millions of students in such a short space of time is a staggering achievement. And I think parents up and down the country today will have an added respect for teachers having had a small insight into how difficult it is to teach and how much they do. 

Bristol Chamber members, International House Bristol teach English and other foreign languages. Starting today (23.3.20) they have introduced online teaching via Zoom, keeping students and teachers safe. They have also made their terms and conditions more flexible so clients can cancel courses due to coronavirus more easily. UWE University is adapting by moving to online teaching via Blackboard. 

At our local primary school, the Year 6 school group have come up with an inventive idea of sharing teaching. Each parent will take it in turns to teach a group for an hour to help us share the load of home-schooling. I’m due to run an English & French session, my husband is doing environmental science, and another dad has volunteered to do computer studies. And we’re hoping to make it an interactive experience for the kids too. We all have different skills and expertise. What we don’t have is crowd management for the u12s!

Some schools have extended maths and English online programmes such as Doodle Maths and this app has the added bonus of letting primary school age children send text messages to each other. Our other class teacher has set up a YouTube Channel and today read the next chapter of their guided reading book. A great hit in our family.

Free apps, online services to help you home-school

I’ve been astounded by the number of companies jumping to offer support and advice to parents right now and have a list of companies/apps/online streams I will be trying out:

Twinkl – a global educational publisher if giving free access to all teaching and learning materials

Oxford Owl - free ebooks

Western Approaches - free live history lesson from WW2 Bunker in Liverpool

• Coding for kids – you tube tutorials and SoloLearnTynker for kids and Cypher

Scouts – 100 free activities. Girlguiding will offer a programme of activities and badges from home

Perlego -  300,000 educational books for free until the end of the academic year

Go Sketch – Bristol business – reduced all online courses by 75% 

Audible Stories -  free audiobooks

BBC Teach - free live lessons

White Rose - free resources for teaching maths at all levels

This is simply a snapshot – many more companies are stepping up to respond to this challenge.

In conclusion

Day 1 in the homeschooling house – done. We’ve survived (just!). I’m working at 8pm and will soon have to put the kids to bed before wrapping up work. It’s exhausting but it’s been OK and everyone seems reasonably happy and will take it one day at a time and right now, I’m just hoping it gets easier as we find and settle into a new routine. I’m thankful for the school help with resources, the free live lessons and exercise programmes. I’m grateful for flexible working. So a big thanks to all businesses, schools and education providers who are coming to our aid, adapting their services and giving us support at a time when we need it most. 

How was your first day managing the work/homeschool balance? 

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