Homework Club: continuity in the time of Corona

The abrupt closure all educational settings at lockdown left the more than 100 children who use our Homework Club without any access to educational support.

It soon became clear that local state schools did not have the resources to offer remote learning, so our Homework Club Manager worked tirelessly to develop an online provision, run on Microsoft Teams, that offered the same extensive Safeguarding and GDPR capabilities as our normal Homework Club.

Meanwhile, our Volunteer Manager retrained our volunteers to deliver online tutoring, rather than homework support, to the children. While some students were sent weekly assignments by their schools, these came without the usual support and guidance given through the classroom, leaving many of the children unable to understand or complete the work.

Our team did extensive outreach with local families to make them aware of our new offering, and we ran a fundraising campaign to secure more than £10,000 to purchase 50 laptops to support families with no access to appropriate IT devices to take part in the lessons.

Online teaching provision

Our Virtual Classroom uses the Atom Learning platform, along with Oak National Academy and Oxford Owl, and follows the national curriculum guidelines.

The children are matched with volunteers based on the needs of the children and the strengths of the volunteers, and the children are taught in small groups, tutorial style, or even individually, if required.

Until the start of summer, the programme ran three days a week with about 50 children attending each week, with some attending all three weekly sessions. To ensure we were supporting all aspects of the children’s development, after lessons we ran activity sessions using play, imagination, movement, music and more. We even assembled and distributed art kits to the children so we could do a group art activity after one of the lessons. For most of the children, these lessons were the only educational support they received in five months.

Alongside the children’s lessons and activities, we ran online groups for the parents to give them the chance to ask questions and get support from our Magic Mums team, who specialise in parenting and family bonding skills.

At the beginning of summer, we decreased the frequency of the sessions down to once a week to give the children a break from the ‘classroom’ and our team a chance to recharge before the start of term, when the Virtual Classroom will resume.  

Looking forward

To ensure the safety of our volunteers and to support schools in their efforts to maintain ‘bubbles’ at the start of term, we won’t resume our in-person Homework Club until we’re certain it’s safe to do so. From September, we’ll resume our three-times-a-week Virtual Classroom, which we hope to run alongside Homework Club, once we can open it again. This will allow us to support children when they’re not able to attend in person.

The Office of National Statistics has reported that only 13% of primary school children in the UK received any real-time online lessons during lockdown (July 2020), so we’re incredibly proud of the determination and resilience of our Homework Club team to establish Virtual Classroom, which proved an essential source of support to both children and parents.

We’d like to extend our sincerest thanks to everyone who donated to our Virtual Classroom campaign, enabling us to purchase the laptops that made this programme possible.