Education

We Need To Take The Chance Coronavirus Has Given Us To Reboot Education


It has wrought devastation and destroyed lives, but, as we tentatively emerge from lockdown, the coronavirus pandemic has provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reboot education.

But this isn’t about the role of tech in education, vital though that is. Tech has both proved its worth during the lockdown, and has shown that it is not (yet) ready to replace the teacher in a classroom.

Rather, it is a chance to refocus education, away from a relentless pursuit of exams and qualifications and towards an approach that gives child mental health and well-being equal prominence.

Next week will see hundreds of thousands of children in the U.K. expected to return to school, in the first phase of the release of lockdown.

And while the actual numbers who will turn up are very much in doubt – many schools will not be ready to reopen for several weeks, while many parents may decide it is not yet safe for their children to return – school will look very different for those who do go back.

Fewer students in a classroom, an emphasis on hygiene and hand-washing, an attempt to enforce social distancing, doomed to failure though it surely is, and new routines around what they can do and where they can go will be the norm for many children.

But for children who have been without the structure and regularity of school for almost three months, and without meaningful face-to-face contact with other children, readjusting to the school environment is going to be a tall order in itself.

As I wrote earlier this month, the emphasis should be very much on easing children back into school and encouraging them to reconnect with their friends, rather than going straight to a full timetable and trying to simply pick up where they left off in March.

But this does not just have to be a one-off, to be discarded once life settles down to whatever passes for normal in the post-Covid-19 world.

Instead, we have the chance to embed this approach so it is as much a part of the purpose of education as absorbing knowledge and passing exams.

Earlier this week, one of the U.K.’s leading children’s charities called for a positive change in the school system in response to the pandemic.

Support for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged students should not just be about ‘catching up’ academically, but should also involve support with mental health and well-being, according to Javed Khan, chief executive of Barnardo’s.

And the Government should go further and take the opportunity to refocus education, putting child welfare on a par with academic achievement, he added.

‘The Government should also take this once in a generation opportunity to rebalance the school system, recognising that children rely on school to keep them safe and well, just as much as they need it to pass exams,’ he said.

This is no small undertaking, however. The vested interests in favour of reverting to the status quo pre-lockdown are formidable. The accountability system that justifies exams is entrenched.

And the scale of the task is apparent when the Education Secretary talks of running summer schools to help children catch up on the education they have missed, and the official line is that next year’s exams will go ahead as normal, with no change to the content children will be expected to learn.

This kind of concrete thinking sees education as a series of tasks to be ticked off, in the well-meaning but ultimately mistaken belief that exam success leads to happiness and personal fulfilment.

Also concrete is the insistence that a priority when children return to school is reestablishing previous rules of behavior, fulfilling psychologist Alison Gopnik’s contention that one of the main things children learn at school is how to be good at school.

But if we have learned anything from the lockdown it is that school is so much more than a place where teachers pass on knowledge to their students: it is a place where children learn social skills and emotional regulation that are crucial for their emotional well-being.

Of course some schools put a focus on mental health already, but even in those where this goes beyond lip-service, student well-being is inevitably squeezed out by the twin demands of the curriculum and an emphasis on making the school run smoothly, sometimes as an end in itself.

Now we have the chance to go beyond that. To make promoting well-being as fundamental to schools as passing exams, and to make sure we don’t waste the opportunity we have been given.



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