Helping the PM understand how schools function.

Caveat – Just as there are no ‘standard’ children, there are no ‘standard’ schools. There are similarities though.

Schools are filled with people. Adults and children.

At the beginning of the day there are lines of parents dropping their children off, these children will immediately run to their group of friends and huddle.



As it gets closer to the time of the first bell, the students, still in huddles, will meander closer to their classrooms. As their teachers greet them and call them into the rooms mild chaos occurs, they pour into the classroom, find the allocated spot for their backpacks, grab their books and equipment and sit at their desks. Then learning happens.



According to an administrator I asked, there are expected space allowances for students in a classroom in Australia. Classrooms need to be approximately 35 square metres with an allowance of ¾ a square metre for each child to sit. Staff Rooms also have a minimum space requirement of 1.5 square metres per person/desk.

Obviously, there are going to be variations, particularly with some of the beautiful old buildings, but these are the standards.

One of the many inaccuracies of the PM’s messages is the one about teachers being more at risk in the staff room than they are with the students. Again, he is obviously clueless about how schools function.



Teachers are rarely in the staffroom en masse. There will be short times in the morning as they get ready, though they are more likely to be out photocopying things for their classes, speaking with students outside the staffroom, doing yard duty or on a phone calling a parent. From the time of the first bell until the end of the day, teachers will rotate through the staffroom as their timetable and class load dictates. Any assumption that teachers are all sitting around cosily in the staffroom is stuff of fiction.

It is extraordinarily rare for a school to have rooms that are regularly spare. In secondary schools there are science labs and other tech spaces that may be empty sometimes due to safety issues, but general classrooms are rarely empty.

This begs the question, if we need to do physical distancing, with the suggested limit of 10 students to a classroom, where are we going to put the others?

I listened to the WA minister the other day. She was saying that they had been in touch with ‘all’ the schools and that ‘all’ the schools had plenty of spare space that could accommodate a return to school while maintaining physical distance. She mentioned halls and covered verandahs. She did not mention how teachers were going to manage to teach individual classes when 2/3rds of their students were spread through an assembly hall or arranged on the verandahs of buildings.

I know schools have changed since I was last teaching, but I haven’t heard of whole scale rewiring of halls and verandahs to provide points for computer and device use.

But even if we could manage all of those inconveniences, what do we do with the students?

It is possible the PM’s ignorance comes from only having 2 girls, maybe they are remarkably compliant. But I had boys and have taught mainly in co-educational settings and I can assure you that physical distancing would be almost impossible to maintain.

What most parents and teachers know is that children are grotty. They are snotty and grotty, and they can rarely keep their hands to themselves, far less keep distant. In primary it is likely that the genders may stay away from each other to avoid getting girl or boy germs, but that does not last long.

What most parents and teachers also know is that schools are like petri dishes. The snottiness and grottiness are what allow our children to build their immune systems. School children get sick. Mildly mostly. Then they have some immunity. But this only works safely if the population outside of the school, and the adults in the school are already immune. Mostly this happens through vaccination.



It seems to have slipped the mind of our PM that we do not have a vaccine for this virus, and that, as stated above, we really don’t know what it is going to do.

At the end of the day, all those students enter a rugby-like scrum to gather their bags and belongings together before tumbling out of the buildings en masse and racing to be funnelled through the gates to the waiting parents.

While the speed of the end of day evacuation may vary according to age group, the pattern is much the same in each space.