The Kids Have Been Fantastic

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else

Winston Churchill (possibly)

Both me and my wife are very lucky that we get to spend a lot of time talking to a lot of teachers. She is a local authority advisor working across schools in Kent and I, in between the full time teaching, am an SLE who works with schools across the country. All week the two of us have been speaking to teachers and each conversation has opened in the same way, “How has this week been?” and the responses have all been similar, “Tiring”. “Exhausting” “Full on” but always, and I mean always, followed up with some variation of the response “But the kids have been fantastic!” This certainly matches my experience this week. It has been tiring, it has been exhausting and it has been full on but, you know what? The kids have been fantastic.

There has been so much catastrophizing about education over the last year, but as soon as you step foot in the classroom, little of it has come to pass. Here are a few things that I have noticed.

Masks. When it was announced that firstly, pupils were going to have to wear masks and then secondly that this would be optional, it looked like a recipe for chaos. Would pupils wear them? Would they use it as an opportunity for mischief and disruption? Would mixed government messages pit teachers against parents and pupils? Well, no. In my experience, and the experience of those I talk to, almost all secondary school pupils are just getting on in class with a mask on. Every so often one pokes it down below a nose and needs a raised eyebrow and up it goes again. They can appreciate why masks are necessary and like adults, are generally sensible enough to comply.

Testing. It has been similar with testing. Our school is incredibly well organized, and this is reflected in the organization of lateral flow tests. When it is their turn to go for a test, they get up, head off, come back 10 minutes later, someone asks “how was it?” “Fine” they shrug, and so we go on. It hasn’t been anywhere near as disruptive as I feared, it doesn’t seem to be throwing up a lot of false negatives, all is good.

Lost learning. This was bound to be the big one. All year we have heard commentators wailing that an entire year of education has vanished in a puff of smoke and that pupils would have to cram after school and throughout the holidays to catch up. Turns out, that is a load of crap. I have no idea what people are testing to find “X months of loss learning” or where they have been testing it, but it certainly wasn’t in my classroom. As a group, my classes aren’t quite where they would have been if they’d been in class. They can’t discuss the topics they studied with the same fluency that they would have done if we had been in class together, but almost all have learnt geography and some have really flourished. A tiny number has learnt very little. This would seem to suggest that bespoke support is needed with any “catch-up”, not whole system changes. To be honest, these are probably the same pupils who should have been receiving more bespoke support anyway.

Lost Childhoods. The commentators who haven’t been wailing about lost learning have instead been wailing about lost childhoods and the trauma children will have suffered from spending a few weeks away from friends and extended families. I don’t doubt this will be true for a few children, mainly because, tragically, some children always suffer from horrible experiences. We need to look out for and look after these children, but again, it seems to point to bespoke support. Almost all children I have spoken to this week (and that is a LOT of children, turns out I have missed talking to them) have been a bit bored over the last few months. That’s it. It has been a bit boring. Most found constructive ways to cope with the boredom and found new hobbies, or spent more time on old hobbies. Their lock down experiences don’t sound that different to the kind of school holidays we had kids where there wasn’t a lot of money for activities and we made our own entertainment.

And the rest… To a great extent, if the last three months hadn’t happened, if this week had been the first week of the January term, I don’t think I would have noticed any difference. All of my classes have come back happy and ready to learn. They haven’t forgotten routines, they aren’t acting up or pushing back. They are, in the vast majority of cases, happy to be back and anxiety is an exception and not the rule. Our parents have also been fantastic. The number of parents who took the time at parents’ evening this week to thank us for everything we had done was remarkable. The press may have tried hard to demonize teachers but it looks like it failed spectacularly. Our whole community has come together.

This week has been an important reminder of the need to pause and breathe before rushing to assumptions about how people will have been affected by something. The press, and various interested pressure groups from all political spectrums and ideologies, make money and have influence if they can present a catastrophe that they can sell to people. Even better if they can sell a solution as well. This isn’t helpful. What schools need is the funding to offer bespoke support to those pupils in need. Some schools, and some communities, will need more support than others. Get schools the funding they need, get other agencies the funding they need, and then get out of our way to do what we do best; helping to support the kids, who have been fantastic.

Mark Enser is head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College. His latest book, Powerful Geography is available now. He tweets @EnserMark