 Hello everyone and welcome to this session. I'm delighted to have Thirindu with us who's going to talk about Welcome to Emergency Remote Education in the UK parents perspective. Now Thirindu is from University College of Estate Management and she also chairs up the online learning research centre there. So wealth of experience and without further ado I'm going to hand over to the window. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome everyone to this session where I will present to you on our work about emergency remote education in the UK from the parents perspective. I'm Thirindu and I'm from University College of Estate Management. Slides are already shared on slideshare and I have tweeted it, tweeted the link so you can find them easily. E-learning in challenging times is a collaborative project I'm working on with Professor Shirley Williams from University of Reading. This project idea was conceived as the UK went into lockdown in March 2020. I myself as a parent to primary school twins found that what we then called home schooling which we are now referring to as emergency remote education a very challenging activity with full-time work. This sparked the idea to explore what other parents thought, how they felt and what was it like for parents during this time period. We have collected data from the UK and Sri Lanka using mixed methods and in this presentation I will only concentrate on the UK study. ONS the Office for National Statistics have conducted lifestyle survey which is generally a monthly survey that they run on a weekly basis during the lockdown to get a picture of the lockdown in UK. However there is very little opportunity for qualitative data in those surveys. In our survey we have given the opportunity for open-ended responses to be able to overcome that weakness. We conducted the initial studies data collection in the summer of 2020. Then following the January 2021 lockdown we repeated the questionnaire in spring 2021. For the first survey we had 234 responses out of which 232 were usable. Comparison survey had 147 responses and we are still analyzing that one. The large majority of responses were from people living in England and especially from the southeast. In this study we use the term parent to refer to a parent okara of a young person. Normally after presenting all about a study we hear about the limitations of that study. However I think if I give you the study limitations before I give you the headline findings you will be better able to understand and interpret the results. First of all this is a self-administered survey. There are many limitations associated with this form of data collection which are inherent in this study. Also the survey was only available online. Therefore to take part in the survey you have to have access to the internet and possibly some level of digital skills. We publicized the survey using Twitter blogs and other social networks and by emailing the link to local schools. The sample size is 232 not a bad sample at all but considering the number of households with children in school it is not at all representative. As you can see the majority of respondents were female. Most households consisted of two adults. The large majority of households 92.5 to be precise had at least one adult working full time. 45.5% of households had at least one adult in part-time work. During the March 2020 lockdown most households almost 80% had at least one adult working from home. There were about 35% of educator households that is at least one adult working in teaching and learning-related occupation. There were about 16% of households with children having special educational needs. Not all respondents indicated which ear groups their children belonged in. However as you can see here more responses were received from parents of children who are in GCSE classes or getting ready for GCSEs possibly because this group of children and parents wanted to be heard. Education before the lockdown was looked at as a baseline. Most parents of primary school children worked with them at home especially helping them with reading. Second school children were mostly working on their own but asking for help especially in the case of project work. There are many school types in the UK. In England alone this has increased over the past years. Quoting from Courtney's paper, conservative labour and coalition policy that school type diversity following market ideology would improve the system has produced a 30-year period of diversification internationally unparalleled. Some of these school types have lot of autonomy. They can set their own curriculum and or school type school times. The reference to this paper is given in the slide and in case you are interested in various school types in England you can refer to that. What we found in the survey is that there were schools that did not give any homework due to their longer extended school day. So at least some children prior to lockdown have not done any school work at home so there was an uneven starting point on working at home due to the various school types. We asked about the resources available to households and 76.5 percent felt that they had enough space at home for everyone to work while 21.7 percent felt otherwise. Most households had enough devices among them but 10.9 percent said that they did not have enough time on shared devices. Internet connectivity was almost universal but limited data allowance and poor connection quality were problems that households faced during the lockdown period especially when parents wanted to work from home at the same time as children joining synchronous lessons and or gaming. I have included some quotes here 81.3 percent had printers at home but people who did not have printers faced lot of difficulties and some have had to hand copy worksheets that schools have sent assuming that those could be printed at home without a printer I had to write out worksheets. We did try to buy a printer but the reasonably priced ones were sold out. As far as I know school did not offer to provide print out work for families without printers. Just over half the parents felt that the schools provided sufficient learning materials. Very few were happy with the opportunities that their children had for interaction during the lockdown. While some schools have offered fully online school day some children have been left with no contact at all with their friends or the teachers. Various software tools have been used for communications and some of them I have listed here. Here I have shown some quotes from the survey to give you a flavor of the type of responses we received. Parents of children who were meant to take exams felt that their children were abandoned when the exams were cancelled. See the last quote here the biggest barrier was that there was no sense of presence from the school or the teachers it was like school evaporated overnight 71.71 71 percent of children spent less time learning than they would have at school. There was no relationship between the time parents spent homeschooling children with the time children have spent learning or the number of children in the household or the time and the time parents spent homeschooling them. In fact the survey responses showed that when there were older children at home they have helped homeschool their younger siblings. Children's progress that is what parents perceive as progress during lockdown homeschooling period showed that only 24 percent of children had made good progress. 43.6 percent were at a point similar to where they were when the schools closed initially. But most alarmingly 32.3 percent had gone backwards. In fact ofstead the regulator for school standards in England published a report in September 2020 after the schools returned quoting from their report pupils had fallen behind with their reading fluency and comprehension. Schools needed to revise letter sounds that had been covered in remote lessons because pupils had not had the practice they needed to support them in remembering the new sounds introduced. Off-site report reference is given in the slide if you want to have a look. There is strong evidence of association between the amount of learning material provided by the school and the progress made during the homeschooling period. Parents providing additional resources and the progress made during the lockdown period. The more materials the better chance of making progress it seems. Various difficulties faced in homeschooling gathered from the survey were categorized under themes and these are shown here. There were instances where children were expected to read books with uploaded screenshots. Some applications did not work on tablets. Many schools did not provide work plans or schedules. Even when they were provided they came during the work day which meant parents had to take time from their work to organize the kids. Some parents did not know new methods of teaching such as number partitioning in maths while others had problems with grammatical constructs which the parents were not aware of. Time was of great value as parents had to fit their work, homeschooling, chores, parenting, basically everything into the available hours of the day. Lack of motivation was caused by uninspiring work given to children, not having social interactions, not receiving feedback, lack of purpose after exams being cancelled and so on. Many talked about the changing role of the parent and how stressful this has been especially where teenagers were involved. Even though it is not talked about much during the pandemic parents had to play multiple roles and this was not easy for them nor for the children in some instances as some of the quotes show here. I read the last quote for the first three weeks both myself and my wife juggled working from home and homeschooling. This was a real challenge however I was then furloughed from work. I had hoped that this would make things better but over time the relationship between my son and myself deteriorated. As a challenge of trying to manage him and complete his school work became almost impossible. It was severely impacting not just both of our mental states but that of our daughter too. I have been talking for a very long time now so I have a poll for you all. We asked parents what their children missed most in the lockdown. This was an open-ended question in the survey but after analyzing the responses we have identified the themes and here are the questions presented to you is to rank what you think the children missed most in the lockdown. You can use your phone to scan the QR code or alternatively go to slider.com and insert the number shown in the slide. I'll give you two minutes to give your response. Yes you're absolutely right children missed their friends foremost but they also missed the structure and routine of the school extracurricular and physical activities. However very few children had thrived through the lockdown. Looking at these responses holistically they were children with special educational needs who have struggled to manage school due to their conditions. You can see from the quotes I have shown below. Both parents and teachers have struggled to support homeschooling. Teachers have had to do in-class teaching for the children who were in school as well as provide materials for online learning and not everyone had the skills or resources to do this when the UK first went into lockdown. Some parents had to take out new broadband connections as they realized homes working and homeschooling was not possible with the existing services. Higher proportion of the children who had sufficient resources either provided by school or provided by parents made good progress than the children who did not. We are writing this up as a journal paper to bring it all together. I would be very interested in your questions today so that they can help shape the way we present our paper. As the next step we would like to compare the homeschooling experience of first lockdown and the second lockdown that is the January 2021 lockdown. Has it got better? Has it got worse? What has changed? The initial analysis shows that the experience had been better for parents in January 2021 lockdown in some ways. The amount of learning materials provided has increased but on the flip side parents who have been working have been unable to help children when they needed help for example to connect to their lessons as these were happening synchronously during the birthday. Thank you. If you have any questions I'll be happy to take them. Sorry I can't hear you. I'm so sorry I'm muted. So I just wanted to say while I'm waiting for any comments to come in I was really really interested. Do you think that the results are representative of the general population? It's difficult to say because this survey was not done as a random sampling or anything and we only promoted it online so basically as I said in the very first few slides there were lots of problems with the way we collected the responses but as a parent myself this gives me the qualitative responses gives me the idea that what I was going through was similar to what others were going through? Yes and it's certainly it's very representative of what my friends with children were going through. I was just what do you think the big lessons maybe that we could learn from this as educators ourselves? I think one lesson that we have to learn is that we weren't ready so if something happens touch wood it won't we have to be more prepared in the future so for example as you can as you may have seen from the some of the things that I've talked about some lessons have been posted as screenshots and basically if you think about it a child who needs accessibility help will not be able to take accessibility help with that sort of material. The thing is we need to raise awareness as learning technology professionals of these issues and support others who are coming into work with learning technologies but at the same time I also want to say that at the time we went into lockdown we were not prepared so I'm not blaming anyone I'm just trying to say that what we need to do is be more prepared next time should it happen. Yeah and I think that's a really really good message for all of us that as educators and as professionals we need to be prepared ourselves and help others. Well I think that's everything Thurindu's so I do now is I'm just going to thank you very very much ask if you've got any final words that you'd like to say and if not we'll just wrap all of this up. Thank you.