‘Those old, derided classrooms, with ordered desks and a teacher at the front, now resemble for many the warm embrace of the familiar. Let’s look forward to returning to what we know, and what our students value. Let’s work tirelessly towards the day when the laptop is shut down, the face mask is taken off, to reveal a very human smile. Today, the personal is radical. The revolution can wait.’  David James  TES

The last six weeks have been an extraordinary period in our history, fraught with challenges and no more so than for children. As lockdown has continued, schools have been challenged like never before to find different ways to educate their pupils and students. What never seemed possible before, in terms of moving lessons from the classroom, quickly became so with a remarkable increase in teacher (and parent) training, on-line programmes and curricula and a rapidly growing number of providers. The pity was it took a virus to force us to look at what is possible and how technology can make a difference to learning after twenty years tip-toeing round the edges. 

Of course, it has not been straight-forward. There has been justifiable concern of growing inequality during the lockdown, especially for those who respond best to the discipline of a classroom and the presence of a teacher or whose home circumstances mitigate against learning. Schools up and down the country compelled to go on-line have been forced to re-invent the wheel or to choose from the smorgasbord of courses on line – or both.  New courses like EtonX and an extended BBC bitesize (delivered through the Oak National Academy) have changed the landscape.  Parents have struggled through their own limited knowledge of technology and especially when space and the number of children have restricted learning opportunities. And many students, no doubt, used to education being about push factors, about imposed structure and discipline, find they are rudderless without the means to motivate themselves. That said, I suspect that most parents and guardians have used the time locked up at home to consciously or unconsciously rethink what they understand by education and, in passing, will have developed a grudging admiration for their children’s teachers. Possibly their children will be learning about getting on with parents and siblings or other family dynamics and be better able to discuss what’s happening about them; VE day and Captain Moore, or climate change and the connectedness of the world. Or perhaps there will be making fresh observations from their daily walk, seeing old things anew – and all of that will have immeasurable benefits. Through all of this, there have been lessons we can learn, a few of which I touch on below:

1.      Schools are, first and foremost, social communities where children grow up and experience that journey with their peers – and teachers. It is the social experience that dominates their day; in their minds, education is what is happening when they’re making other plans – to paraphrase John Lennon. 

2.      The importance of education out of the classroom, through families or friendship groups, in growing values, attitudes, tastes, habits, passions has been more evident than ever before.

3.      Schools are not just in the business of educating children, but their parents and communities also. By building better links with parents through technology, we have changed the relationship between home and school and the idea of schools being their for the whole family is something we should build on. Many parents are now much better connected to their children’s schools and may even understand what their children are learning. Better communication and explanation can only help take this further so parents feel better informed and involved and don’t just exist as critical outsiders.

4.      Parents and children will have experienced the realisation that education isn’t bound by four walls. Many children and families will have experienced education without the limits of a curriculum, whether by pursuing creative activities, through walks, banter, debates and a reappraisal of what they feel is important in their lives.

5.      We have a curriculum that needs reforming which may involve changes to the way we teach. Lockdown as led to questions about why we teach the way we do and why do we teach what we do, ie who selects. The changes need be dramatic, but in the wake of the failures of national and international responses to the pandemic and the inevitable changes in our economic activity that will follow, we need to reassess what we teach children. This need for an appraisal  of our curriculum is long overdue even before covid19, but debating the cost of human lives in when to end the lockdown (which is really what the debate is about) is focusing minds. 

6.      Eton College’s pledge to raise £100 million to improve equality of opportunity was an initiative that received a lot of publicity and rightly so. However, we need to do more about challenging selective education and understand that students can become better rounded people as well as high achievers in non-selective schools (something we seem as a country to be set against despite it working well in many other countries). We need to weigh up what is gained and lost by selective schooling and not muddle the issue by factors such as poor discipline or class sizes.

7.      We have found out that there are other ways of assessing students, even if not yet that reliable or desirable.  But we shouldn’t just revert to the norm. Simon Henderson made that point  when he wrote, ‘If teacher-assessed grades are broadly considered to have worked then we should look again at our national exams and see if they are really necessary.’   Maybe the time isn’t right, but the school closures have asked the question whether we are making any concessions to the way children live and learn and whether there is a better, more accurate and more inclusive way of assessing learning. 

8.      This has been an opportunity for schools to look at when they start teaching in the morning. Many schools in lockdown have shifted their school day; others realised that students were accessing lessons much later in the day and well into the evenings and have adapted their programmes so students can work to their own timetables. Some schools have indicated that they are going to keep to this when schools re-open. Evidence is growing that children would benefit from an hour of exercises / yoga , music or other cultural / sporting activity before starting formal lessons at 10.00am

9.      Schools are run on the basis of minimum hours / days in class.  Students learn at different paces / times and perhaps (another lesson from lockdown) so we should stop measuring time by the number of hours spent in a classroom rather than by the quality of learning. Three focused hours of core learning each day could be enough to allow time for a more diverse personalised curriculum, other on-line or on-site lessons, vocational training or a range of cultural and recreational activities.

10.  As we begin using i-phones to track the spread of coronavirus, we should accept that i-phones are here to stay until they are replaced with even more sophisticated technology – and start to teach children to work with them, to use them as teaching aids and not set against them

11.  Most children will be pleased to get back to school, even if only for social reasons. But there will be a significant number who will not welcome a return. There could be a variety of reasons, but three main ones I would suggest will be (a) social acceptance, bullying, learning difficulties, issues with mental health exacerbated by classmates, discipline issues and the camaraderie of the peers.  (b) The relevance of the curriculum and what they are learning, especially for those who learn differently or have learning issues and (c)  the feeling that they can achieve much better without classroom distractions and discipline issues. ‘Disruptive learning’ isn’t a fad; it’s a reality in many classrooms as group work is defined by the attitude and behaviour of the worst member of the group  Some students have stated how they have enjoyed lessons from their teachers on google classroom more than the same lessons delivered by the same teacher in the classroom. Many feel they can learn better without interruptions and at the best times for them. We cannot change classrooms just for the few, (and nor should we), but we can listen, learn and adapt.

12.  We have learned a good deal more about how children learn when the content is relevant, interesting and personalised. So many children have been learning so many things, from learning a musical instrument to gardening woodcraft, astronomy and cooking skills – and enjoying it.

13.   This is the time for other ideas such as Kate Raworth’s economic doughnut, decolonising the curriculum and the recent activities of extinction rebellion to be considered. Our curriculum is overloaded – perhaps it is time to revert to cross-subject groupings such as sciences / social sciences / humanities, even a modified trivium? Whatever we choose, we may need to move away from some subject boxes (should Geography and History exist as separate entities without Economics, should Philosophy and Ethics play a more central role in schools?  We have learned that schools can operate off-line and some very well indeed. Rather than throw this advantage away, we have the ideal situation for bringing in more blended learning, where a greater range of subjects can be offered in all schools. To say that ‘teaching remotely is a pale imitation of what we do’ is to dismiss how useful distant learning has been for those who struggle with school. By using remote learning flexibly as an integral part of teaching, schools can be more inclusive – surely an important aim of education. The role of teachers has broadened with some showing they are better producing on-line lessons that they are in the classroom. This could be the time to allow teachers to become on-line providers and tutors, providing the personal support for on-line courses

14.  We have learnt that there are many in the forefront of education who would choose to ignore all the above. They are ideologically resistant to change, using the club of professed excellence to snuff out new ideas often driven by self-interest. They do not welcome debate and speak in binaries. That is not how change will happen.Their bubbles have contracted the longer the lockdown has gone on. 

15.  Lurking beneath this pandemic is a far greater crisis with potentially far greater consequences: climate change. We need to change our behaviours, our ambitions, our idea of co-existence if we are to survive this – and this needs to be reflected in our schools. We have to stop thinking about education as creaming off the top so schools can boast about their clutch of Oxbridge places and start teaching children to value jobs that have social worth: nurses, carers, cleaners, fire and ambulance workers, drivers, teachers and doctors. Schools need to be for all, not for a diminishing minority who profit from an out-dated curriculum and inadvertently contribute to growing inequality.

And, no, the revolution cannot wait. Despite the siren call of the classroom desperately awaited by many children and even more parents, we will be all the poorer if we have not learned some lessons from the lockdown. What is exciting is that a growing number of schools are changing. Despite all the debates and articles that deal with education only in binary terms, we have to accommodate new ideas for the sake of our children. Going back now to how we did things before would be both wasteful and retrograde.

6th May 2020