zigzag

We glove up and go to the supermarket, I do our families shopping and my husband shops for my elderly parents. We are very lucky down here, hardly any queues and quite civilised. I will never again take for granted “popping “ into the shops!

Did you make your own starter for this?

Exactly, you just described my week! X

Oh remember those lovely days when all we had to worry about was the dreaded EY2s! I am a bit frustrated that I was advised by Nicci that I was registered for PAYE! I would have contacted HMRC when you did Mouseketeer and tried to sort it before the portal opened and everyone wants help! I don’t know what to do about it now!

Mouseketeer I tried logging on today after having the same trouble as you with the PAYE not being recognised and Nicci assuring me that I was registered, it’s not accepting it, so can’t access the furlough part. Have emailed Payroll and had no response. I am so sick of this now.😥

Wow, how did you manage that?

😂Couldn't be bothered to try and dig out the cake stand from my nightmare cupboard! You know the one that I have been meaning to sort for the last five weeks!

This is the first ever birthday cake in 27 years that my husband has made for me! Probably the last as well!

Yes via email, so I have kept a copy!

My funding people have assured me that they will not be redistributing any of our funding!

I am so confused. I refuse to input anything until I am sure it is correct. Firstly I don’t understand why we are working it out on February fees/wages as it was only a three week month. As new children join us over the summer term our fee paying income would increase but as I understand it I cannot account for that, is this correct? Has anyone got a clear, correct and definitive way of working all this out? And has anyone successfully logged into the portal and completed it? I am losing sleep over this and am on the verge of throwing my hands in the air and dumping it on the committee to sort out, which I actually think they should be doing anyway. I don’t understand why we keep getting calculators sent to us when they are not relevant to our situation. I have just emailed my LA and asked the question that as we are closed is any of our funding going to be redistributed. If it is, I am not sure how we will cope.

Yummy, looks delicious. 😋

I have no words 😶 and this is my current state of mind on this issue 😢😬😡😲🤯😳😱💩

I feel so overwhelmed by all this at the moment. Trying to understand the furlough is just making me so anxious, I haven’t even tried to access the site or anything yet. I have had one contact with the chairperson and now feel totally abandoned and lost. I just cannot see how on earth we can return safely. I for one am hoping it is much later rather than sooner.

I haven’t been brave enough to try yet! The EYA are meant to be brining out a calculator, so am waiting for that!

We have been paid by our LA already for the whole summer term, which is one less thing to worry about.

Anyone tried to get online yet? I am dreading it and think I may leave it a couple of days! If anyone does manage to successfully work out what the hell we are meant to be doing and gets through the system, please share!

Looks rather scrummy, please can you send some this way! It’s my birthday on Thursday and am challenging my husband to make me a cake! Watch this space.....

Sadly maths and me do not go together and trying to work figures out this morning was super frustrating. In the end I contacted our chairperson (who is a maths whizz) and said “help” (hard for me as I hate admitting defeat and asking for help) I gave her our funding income for February and our paid income for fees, this is what she’s come back with, but don’t ask me how! Ok so that works out at 34% of our income. If we transfer that to wages we can claim 34% of our £1533.68 monthly wage cost. which is £521.45 a month.

So I am a bit baffled here. Our income for February from paying parents works out as £330 as of course we had half term in February. So I can’t actually see that I can be bothered to try and go through the furlough process to claw back such a small amount.

This is a hot topic on FB keeping early year’s unique page at the moment. Someone has written the following letter to their MP. I feel we will be thrown under the bus. I wrote to my MP yesterday : I hope this finds you safe and healthy. I am a primary school teacher, teaching Reception. I am deeply troubled by the recent talk of schools reopening in May. I write to ask you to please raise my concerns (which many of my colleagues share) once parliament reopens. I am deeply sceptical of the very limited study which claims that school closures have minimal impact on the spread of Coronavirus. In the weeks before school closed, I spent most of my time and energy reminding my pupils to wash their hands. Which they did with varying degrees of efficacy, only to then put their hands straight back up their noses, into their mouths or into their pants, and then would touch door handles, furniture, each other or the pens and resources. Even where children are given their own pens to use all day (really hard to monitor or enforce in Reception) they forget, share, pass pens to each other, swap lids by mistake, put these in their mouths... Children (especially the very young) do not understand social distancing. They play together, they share resources, they hug and dance and hold hands. It is not possible to stop this and trying to do so is damaging to them. This is particularly true because most schools are not vast. They have corridors, narrow corridors at that, and small classrooms. There is not the space to seat children 6 feet apart. Carpet sessions cannot be delivered as children can't sit together on the carpet. In EYFS especially, children don't usually have table spaces and are generally taught between carpet sessions and free flow play based learning. You cannot be socially distant in EYFS. Paul Cosford of PHE has been quoted as saying 'children are at very low risk of getting complications from this disease.' That's all well and good, but children are not the only people who attend schools. Are staff essentially being sent in as cannon fodder? Does it not matter if/when we get the virus? What about the parents gathering in swarms to drop off and pick up children? What about the grandparents? Children are not alone at school, there are adults there. Children are not alone at home, there are adults there. Schools reopening will put adults and children alike at a hugely increased risk. Even if it were available, staff cannot wear PPE and teach. Children cannot hear teachers talking through masks. It cannot work. Cleaning supplies and sanitiser is hard to come by. It feels as if teachers are being sacrificed for the economy. Shielding for the vulnerable is not due to end/be reviewed until mid June. How are schools to run effectively, if at all, with huge numbers of staff absent? My children's school has dozens of staff shielding, including the head teacher. How can that be managed? I am working incredibly hard to teach and reassure and care for my pupils at a distance, and work hard when I go in for key worker children, and I find it terrifying. Every time I come home I wonder if I have brought the virus home to my own family, as my sister and her husband (front line NHS staff) have. It is scary. And that is for half a class worth of children. I miss my class so much and I would love to be working with them again, but only when it is safe. As a mother, I do not want my children at school until it is safe. Safe. Not slightly reduced risk. Please, please, speak for us. We are scared and we deserve to be safe. So do our children.

Has anyone thought about any practical steps we can take to reduce risk whenever we return? I guess we will get support and advice but I am thinking of; This is just early ideas that have been swirling around in my head. Reducing the amount of toys/resources we have available on a daily basis and all toys have to be cleaned at the end of the day. Parents do not enter the setting, children are dropped and collected at the door. Book bags and book borrowing will no longer take place. Children's bags on pegs with spare clothes in are not taken home but refilled in situ. Children with signs of any type of illness, temperature etc will be excluded.

Sunnyday I am dreading going back sooner rather than later. How on earth will we manage distancing with children, it just will be impossible and unworkable, not to mention the practical side of maintaining the cleaning of toys to a high enough standard. We all know how we are sneezed and coughed over in normal circumstances how do we reduce that risk? I am watching Denmark with interest as they have just opened all Nursery and primary schools. (Have you seen Whuan has had an increase of 50% since they came out of lockdown) Not to mention the same old problem of parents saying “well they are not well, but they wanted to come”. Just read this back when I posted it and it comes over as very selfish, when I think about what the NHS frontline staff are risking everyday. But I can’t help how worried returning to school is making me feel.

Wiltshire Council has been urged to reconsider plans to cut the amount of funding passed on to early years providers who have temporarily closed in response to the coronavirus crisis. Providers were contacted by the local authority on 9 April, informing them that settings that have closed will only recieve 80% of their early years entitlement funding for the summer term. Wiltshire Council says that the cut will help fund a new "incentive scheme" that will see providers who have remained open given an extra £100 a week for each child that they continue to care for. The Alliance has written to the local authority asking it to reconsider its position.

Did you see that Wiltshire are only paying 80% to their providers!