School Days Sophia Waugh

Weeks have passed, and the corridors are still empty.

Statistics tell us that only one in 20 vulnerable children invited into schools during lockdown is attending. At our school, numbers vary between six and 12 a day. On Good Friday (we were of course open in the holidays), only one child came in.

After a few weeks, I began ringing the children in my tutor group. One mother said, ‘Oh he’ll be so happy to hear from you. He has kept saying that it would be so awful if anything happened to you.’

I was ridiculously pleased – until I realised the flip side of his concern was that he had me in the old-and-at-risk bracket. Still, you take what you can get in this game.

Work has been set online – we’ve used an online company to deliver lessons, and we write tests for the children based on the lessons. There has been a good uptake. Who doesn’t like an online quiz, after all?

I also set my tutor group a task to write a lockdown diary. Those who wrote it at the beginning of the lockdown were pretty chirpy. There wasn’t much mention of work; more talk about missing friends along with some happy comments about enjoying doing more with their family.

Those delivering their diaries now are more morose. They talk about finding it hard to organise themselves. They talk of frustration and family arguments. Some are moving between parents; some can’t see one parent because of illness. The adventure is beginning to wear thin.

In school, we try to do more than sit them in front of a computer for five hours. So each member of staff has to come in with some activity to do with the children in their off-screen time.

I decided to do some cooking. I feel strongly that the decline of cooking and eating together is part of the decline of the family – and of society. My plan involved having them all at a table eating together.

I ran into trouble straight away. One boy told me he did not want to cook and was allergic to cottage pie. What part? I asked. He opened with ‘All of it,’ finally narrowing it down to the white, fluffy stuff on top. The potato? Yes. Did he eat chips or crisps? Yes. So he was not allergic.

I came to a compromise with Potato Boy: we would have not mashed, but sliced potatoes on top of the pie. And as the children peeled, chopped and stirred, something wonderful happened. Every one of them was engaged, talking about the ingredients and taking pride. We – staff and children – were laughing, talking and working together as equals.

‘Look at that!’ exclaimed Potato Boy, ‘Who would not want to eat that?’

They went off to their sports hour while I pushed tables together and laid them: cutlery, plates, glasses and jugs of water.

And then it all went wrong. They were brought back to the canteen to see the fruits of their labours and me, the Deputy Head and the TA all smiling, ready to eat with them. While cooking, they had forgotten that we were teachers. But now, not one of them would sit at the table and eat with the grown-ups, even though they outnumbered us four to one.

They looked positively frightened at the idea. Neither would they try the food they had taken such pride in cooking. In ones and twos, they slipped away. A few came back towards the end and tried a tiny bit, but they ate it at a fair distance from us.

There was a tiny glimmer of light at the end of the day. As we saw the children out, Potato Boy stopped beside me. ‘I did come back and try some potato, miss. It was all right.’

He hadn’t. He hadn’t come near the food. But I took comfort in the fact that he was trying not to hurt my feelings. And I know that if, in the future, I am teaching English to this boy (who is already very tricky at school), we will have a shared cottage pie in our past which will help me begin to forge a relationship with him. And these things count.