Lessons from Lockdown

The Educational Legacy of COVID-19

Tony Breslin

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000360769
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Politique d'éducation

Lessons from Lockdown explores the impact of COVID-19 on our schooling systems, on the young people and families that they serve and on all who work in – and with – our schools, and asks what the long-term ramifications of the pandemic might be for the pedagogy and purpose of formal education. Drawing on the voices of more than a hundred pupils, parents and professionals, it reveals how teachers and learners are adapting practice in areas such as curriculum modelling, parental engagement, assessment and evaluation and blended and online learning.

In this timely new book, Tony Breslin draws on his experience as a teacher, researcher, examiner, school governor and policy influencer to assess what the educational legacy of COVID-19 could be, and the potential that it offers for reframing how we 'do' schooling.

Whatever your place in this landscape, Lessons from Lockdown is a must-read for all concerned about the shape and purpose of schooling systems in mature economies – schooling systems and economies set on recovering from the kind of 'system shock' that the pandemic has delivered.

1

Schools during lockdown

The debate during the later stages of lockdown about schools ‘reopening’ brought a wry smile to the faces of many in the school workforce. Why? Because, for the most part, schools across the UK did not close. Throughout lockdown they had remained physically open to the children of key workers and those deemed ‘vulnerable’, and not just during term time, but across the Easter and half-term breaks and, in many cases, on bank holidays.

They had also remained open, or rather had opened, as virtual institutions, issuing assignments to students online and delivering teaching and tutoring so as to support home-schooling, not in the conventional sense of the term but as the means of delivering an education to all of those not on the school site.

Prior to this, ‘home-schooling’ had been the preserve of a small (albeit growing) minority of parents. Some of these families had grown exasperated with a system that had failed to address a particular need, perhaps around attachment or autism; others saw it as an only option after exclusion or as a remedy to ‘school refusal’; still others simply rejected (on behalf of their children) the nature of the schooling that they saw before them, judging it variously as impersonal, industrialised, authoritarian and overly structured. Their critics wondered about the capability of some self-selected members of the home-schooling community to deliver an education for their children and more broadly about what they saw as the enforced loneliness of the home-schooled child – the ‘self-isolation’, if we might borrow a phrase from the lockdown toolbox.

There is not space here to explore, on either side, these critiques but the point is that home-schooling was a minority pursuit, even if a wider group often speculated on what it might be like to join this community of self-educators. Lockdown changed all that. Lockdown redefined and reappropriated home-schooling for the mainstream. The implications of this appropriation are likely to be profound and long term, with the probability that a minority of those who have ‘discovered’ home-schooling during the lockdown are unlikely to return to mainstream schooling, even if mass home-schooling during lockdown is a dilution of such practice pre-lockdown (Fenshaw-Smith, 2020). One experienced former head teacher and local authority-based school improvement specialist observed: ‘We’ve already got an increase in elective, home education referrals, and we are one of the three or four counties with the highest percentages of home-schooling in the country’ (Graeme Plunkett, senior school effectiveness officer, Cornwall Council, focus group – secondary education, 15 July 2020). As if by way of explanation, one of the parents who spoke to us put it this way:

We’ve been in a fortunate position where my wife was previously a (primary school) teacher and she’s taken it upon herself to teach our younger two (primary age) children. She’s put aside the work that’s been emailed to us (by the school) and come up with her own schemes of work. She’s staying up late, preparing what’s going to be done for the rest of the week … and she’s enjoyed it. The children have enjoyed it to the point, actually, where we’re discussing what we’re going to do in September. And should we actually continue home-schooling? Or should we send the younger two back?

(Parent and education professional, focus group – secondary education, 15 July 2020)

Of course, only a minority of children and young people have the benefit of having a parent who is a qualified teacher and, in any case, many other parents approached the prospect of schools reopening, in either June 2020 or August or September 2020, depending on the year group their child or children belonged to and whether they were based in Scotland or elsewhere in the UK, with a yearning for some kind of restored normality, newly clear about the challenges teachers embrace daily. This kind of comment from the parent of a Year 6 child who returned to school on 1 June, and who happened to work as a member of the support staff at their school, was not uncommon: ‘When they went back to school, it was just such a relief for me as a parent, but it was good for the children too, to see the kids talking to their friends and playing together’ (Parent, focus group – parents, guardians and carers, 22 June 2020).

And while some families enjoyed the greater time together that lockdown afforded them, the need to balance the demands of home and, for those working at home, those of an employer or those of a business operating from home, was always a challenge, as this professional, a qualified teacher and company secretary reveals:

Some parents wanted to be excited about helping their children with virtual learning, but were challenged to do so as they were working in demanding full-time jobs (albeit from home). Whilst there was understanding for virtual meetings interrupted by children, in the end, many parents felt that it was difficult to be everything: parent, worker and teacher, especially in instances where the parent is stale in their knowledge or unfamiliar with the subject – or the technology.

(Parent, written submission, 31 August 2020)

The point is that there are no standardised tales of lockdown, just a multitude of experiences, patterned as always by factors such as social class, ethnicity, family structure, parental occupation, mode of employment and so on.

Early experiences of lockdown

If there was a commonality of experience, it was that of those working in schools during the early weeks of lockdown. For this was a system-wide shock, not the single school shock of, say, an unexpectedly poor inspection result, a disappointing set of performance data or the departure of a popular head or principal.

As February gave way to March, and news of the struggles to contain the virus in Italy began to dominate UK press coverage, the view that COVID-19 was merely another far-off concern began to wilt. Some parents started to withdraw their children from school, teacher absence rose as members of staff took on shielding responsibilities or became fearful for their own vulnerability, long-planned and richly anticipated school trips planned for the summer and autumn were postponed, as were parents’ evenings and school-based training sessions for school governors; and the teacher union conferences, a long-standing feature of the Easter break, were cancelled. The headline of a Daily Telegraph piece on 14 March 2020, penned by the paper’s education editor Camilla Turner four days before the closure of schools was announced and as the Easter holiday approached, gave an early hint of the juggernaut that was about to hurtle around the bend: ‘Extended Easter school holidays on the agenda as heads meet ministers’ (Turner, 2020b). The impending closedown would certainly produce more than an extended holiday break. The following Wednesday, 18 March, the closure of schools and the cancellation of written public examination papers was confirmed and pupils, parents and teachers, especially those children and young people about to transition to junior or secondary school or into further or higher education said tentative goodbyes, unsure whether this was merely an interruption or the closure of this phase of their education. For some, it would turn out to be the latter. By this point, recorded UK deaths from the virus had reached 104, while the number of confirmed cases stood at 2,626. As this book goes to press the number of deaths from the virus is, albeit gradually, approaching (and after a downward recalculation during August), 42,000.

Figure 1.1 makes clear this reality and shows the pattern of deaths across the lockdown, while Figure 1.2 shows how the number of confirmed cases (in part a product of the scale of testing) changed across this period. Figure 1.3 reveals the level of hospital admissions, an indicator of the seriousness of the illness suffered.

Figure 1.1The pattern of deaths from the virus across lockdown.

Source: Department of Health and Social Care (2020b).

Figure 1.2The pattern of recorded infection across lockdown.

Source: Department of Health and Social Care (2020a).

Figure 1.3The pattern of hospital admissions across lockdown.

Source: Department of Health and Social Care (2020c).

At a human level, the following account from an experienced primary school deputy head, who was required to self-isolate just before the closure of schools was confirmed, is instructive:

He [the head teacher] called me in and said, ‘Diane, I’ve got to tell you something, I need to send you home!’ Well, I said the most bad swear word, the worst ever swear word, that I’ve ever said in his office! Because I’m on that, you know, I’m on the, the list, the vulnerable group, the listed flu jab people. And I was absolutely furious. There were three other senior managers who he had to have that same conversation with, and we all picked up our belongings and our Surface Pro and we schlepped out of the school. For me, those initial days, knowing that closure was coming very shortly – well, I felt really, I didn’t want to be feeling as useless as I was feeling; ’cause I felt that you feel a bit of a sense of responsibility, you know.

(Diane Rawlins, senior deputy, Arbury Primary School, Cambridge, focus group – primary education, 14 July 2020)

Rawlins continues:

There were just lots of different emotions that we went through in those early days. I was answering emails at the speed of light. I was juggling everything all at once. I was anxious that what if somebody needed me? Normally they’d just drop into my office and, of course, that couldn’t happen anymore. So, I needed people to know that I was there for them. I might not be in the building. But it was really quite strange for me.

And for children and young people, the experience was just as disconcerting:

With the situation changing so rapidly, the announcement on Wednesday 18 March that schools would be closing and our examinations cancelled came as a shock: although exams are far from a pleasant experience, I did not experience relief in response to the news. Rather, I feared for the future, for what would become of my university offer for the following academic year; I grieved the loss of the final months at my sixth form, and I struggled through the hasty goodbyes. I recall one of my closest friends and I agreeing that ‘it wasn’t supposed to end like this’.

(Amy, Year 13 student, Hertfordshire, written submission, 27 August 2020)

A teacher, reflecting on how sudden the experience was for highly motivated students in examination groups in schools with a strong focus on academic success, offered this stark comparison: ‘If this were drug therapy, this was [as] violently “cold turkey” as it gets’ (head of department, East of England, research interview, summer 2020). Another of our interviewees, Nick Johnson, who is a parent, vice chair of his children’s school governing board and chief executive at the British Educational Research Association (BERA), notes that there were other poignant reminders of what we, our children and our communities were missing during lockdown:

My phone is synched to the school calendar and it pings daily with alerts for all of [the] things that aren’t now happening … parents’ evenings, performances, transition meetings – these are the things that make the school what it is.

(Nick Johnson, chief executive, BERA, research interview, 13 August 2020)

Many of us will have had similar alerts throughout lockdown. Partly because these alerts often go across year groups, they are also a reminder of something else – just how much schools and all who work in them do for our children, just how many meetings and gatherings schools convene and how many relationships they nurture and mediate; again, one of our research participants puts it better than any paragraphs of explanation we can offer: ‘What is a school if it is not a complex set of relationships?’ (Philip Preston, school governance trainer, Herts for Learning, focus group – primary education, 14 July 2020). Our policymakers would do well to take note: post-lockdown, the challenge is not simply to reinstate systems and address gaps in learning (vital though this is), it is about enabling the rebuilding of the relationships that make these systems work, and that enable our children not just to succeed, but to flourish.

Scaling-up schooling

The initial attempts by policymakers to ‘get children back to school’ will go down as a case study in how not to ‘do’ public policy. On Wednesday 18 March, at one of the daily news briefings that became a part of the typ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• About the researcher
• 1 Schools during lockdown
• 2 Parental engagement and the experience of learning at home
• 3 Economics, education and inequalities
• 4 Breadth, balance, the curriculum and its assessment
• 5 Making the grade: The class of 2020
• 6 Catching up on ‘lost’ learning
• 7 Pupil well-being and emotional recovery
• 8 Leadership and governance
• 9 Inspection, research and system performance
• 10 Recasting the learning blend: Technology and pedagogy
• Next steps
• Appendix A: research methodology
• Appendix B: research participants
• Appendix C: recommendations
• References
• Index