The first lockdown exposed a vast and rather shaming gap between ambitious and unambitious schools. Good state schools, and most private schools, embraced remote learning. Yes, of course there were teething troubles. It soon emerged, for example, that it is much harder to maintain concentration for a long time while staring at a screen. So teachers adapted, breaking up the Zoom calls with exercises and projects, and asking students to keep their cameras on. Before long, they had settled into a new routine, complete with online assemblies, sports training sessions, music lessons – the works.
At the other end of the scale, tragically, some schools simply stopped teaching. Instead they sent out worksheets – and, incredibly, sometimes refused to mark them. A survey by the Children’s Commissioner found that half of secondary school pupils, and a majority in primary schools, got
no online tuition at all.
Why the contrast? For once, the educationalist blob cannot plead poverty: there is no extra cost to online teaching. The difference, rather, is attitudinal. Some schools see the virus as a challenge to overcome, others as an excuse to give up. The teaching unions, needless to say, are in the second category, and have campaigned furiously against any classroom activity – despite a mass of evidence that younger children do not suffer serious Covid symptoms and are unlikely to pass the disease to others.
Last week, the unions won, ensuring that even primary schools have remained shut. They then moved on to campaigning, in practice, against the online teaching that they had demanded as an alternative to classroom tuition. In its official guidance, the NASUWT stresses that “schools should not monitor teacher’s [sic] online lessons for performance appraisal and quality assurance purposes”. To that end, it makes bogus arguments about privacy and the misuse of material, but its bottom line is clear: no recording and, ideally, no live streaming.
The result can already be seen in many schools. A “lesson” will consist of a pre-recorded video and a PDF to complete. That is better than nothing, but it is not, by any normal definition of the word, teaching. Imagine if, pre-lockdown, a teacher simply showed videos and handed out worksheets without saying anything. Would anyone see that as acceptable?
Yes, the lockdown is a
massive headache for schools – especially smaller primary schools, which need to offer remote learning to the bulk of their pupils while continuing to take in the children of keyworkers. But we should at least start from the assumption that interaction is desirable – indeed, essential.
Parents know it. Over the summer term, the Invicta Academy was set up by Anna Firth, a mother of three and Sevenoaks councillor, and Stephen James, a Folkestone teacher. It offers free online tuition in maths and English to Kentish children (and children of Kent) up to Year 11. Now it is going national, keeping its formula of a teacher plus an assistant in each group to ensure all the students are engaged.
If you’re a parent and you feel your child isn’t getting enough personal attention, book in. If you work in a primary school, and are struggling to find the time and resources to meet the new requirements, look them up: Invicta offer a free additional resource. If you’re an official in one of the teaching unions, stop treating Covid as an opportunity to bash the Tories. And if you’re an education minister (I know most of you read this column) don’t let this situation drag on past half term.
A month can seem like an eternity to a child; yet the
disruption to our schools has now lasted for nearly a year. Some children will have a dent in their knowledge and development that they will never entirely hammer out. And all because of a disease which poses next to no threat to them. Enough is enough.
