NSW school parents brace for three months of homeschooling

With lockdown likely to continue, fatigued parents are bracing for news that schools will not reopen at all this term.

Fatigued parents battling to homeschool their children have braced themselves for news that schools will not reopen at all this term — meaning families now face spending a quarter of the year cooped up together in lockdown.

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell on Monday told teachers to get the AstraZeneca vaccine in a bid to protect them from coronavirus and end the disruption to the school system.

Minister for Education Sarah Mitchell. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

But NSW P and C president Tim Spencer said a substantial amount of disruption was now almost inevitable with the government highly unlikely to reopen schools at all this term.

“The situation is not where we want it to be … it is likely that it will be a full term of home learning which is considerably longer than last year,” he said.

“They will have 10 weeks being at home with their kids with an extra two weeks before that on school holidays when they aren‘t able to go anywhere. That is three months of being locked up in the house and it is a stress on everybody, it is going to put great stress on households.”

Premier Gladys Berejiklian played down speculation schools would be closed the entire term and said the government wanted to ease the pressures of home schooling.

“We are considering all those issues this week and as soon as we have a response to what life will look like beyond July 31, we will make that clear,” she said.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams Pool/Getty

Secondary Principal Council president Craig Petersen said Year 12 students were now suffering “incredible anxiety” because of the uncertainty of the HSC trial exams.

“We want the decision to reopen schools to be based on health advice, we don’t want it to be because learning from home is too hard or because of political pressure,” he said.

“Last year the government was saying schools are safe places, but this time around we are seeing infections in students. We have seen staff infected … it is a different narrative this time.”

Ms Mitchell said she continued to advocate for the priority vaccination of teachers but said they should take the freely available AstraZeneca in the meantime.

NSW Independent Education Union secretary Mark Northam however urged the government to expand the Pfizer vaccine across the state.

“It is self-evident that if you want schools to be places of education and learning, then you have to waterproof those school communities and the very first step is to vaccinate the staff.”

Teachers Federation president Angelo Gavrielatos said the risk from the Covid delta variant and infections among children had increased a teacher‘s chances of contracting the virus.

Originally published as NSW school parents brace for three months of homeschooling