Meet the mums bypassing the unions to set up their own free summer school
Two friends, with very different lockdown experiences, tell Luke Mintz how they have joined forces to fill the educational void
For the last four months, Linden Kemkaran has been forced to watch the “slow mental decline” of her 14-year-old daughter, Sophie*, as the weeks and months roll by with no teachers in sight. Sophie’s school, their local state grammar in Sevenoaks, Kent, has been shut since mid-March. At first, Sophie was simply emailed at the beginning of each week with a list of tasks to complete in her own time – a tough ask for any teenager who struggles to find motivation.
Then, Sophie’s teachers introduced the occasional Zoom lesson, but with laptop cameras and microphones switched off due to safeguarding concerns, some of Sophie’s classmates quickly worked out they could “check-in” to class then spend the next 40 minutes playing Fortnite or browsing TikTok.
Kemkaran has found it “really hard” to watch, but accepted the malaise as an inevitable part of lockdown. Until, that is, she spoke to her friend, Anna Firth, a Conservative district councillor, whose son, Piers, attends the £6,730-a-term King’s Rochester School on a music scholarship.
In contrast to her daughter’s rather dismal experience in the state sector, Kemkaran discovered privately educated Piers was enjoying a wall-to-wall timetable of online lessons, including morning assemblies and orchestra.
“I’m not anti-private schools at all; I firmly believe in freedom of choice,” she says. “But it’s just not fair that state school kids have lost out.” So together, Kemkaran and
Firth have taken matters into their own hands. Following the advice of the Prime Minister, who urged a “massive summer catch-up operation”, they and others have launched the Invicta Summer Academy – a countywide summer school, taught online, in which pupils aged between five and 16 will be offered free, daily lessons in maths and English, broken into five age groups, with a maximum of about 50 in each class. Pupils will also receive a once-a-week talk from an inspirational speaker; they have already signed up Lizzy Yarnold, the Olympic gold-medallist skeleton racer. To help those students without a computer, lessons will be “deviceagnostic” and can be done on a mobile phone if necessary.
So far, 250 children and 69 volunteer teachers have signed up, and Firth has already heard from parents in London, Oxfordshire, Lancashire and Surrey who are using Invicta (which is funded by a £30,000 grant from the Henry Oldfield Trust) as a model on which to build their own summer schools.
Experts say that projects like these may well be necessary across the country to fill the educational void left by coronavirus. Research by the Education Endowment Foundation suggests that a decade of progress in narrowing the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their classmates has already been wiped out in just a few months, while the Sutton Trust charity says that school closures have had the most severe impact on poor children, who benefit from the structured provision of the classroom.
“Different children are affected very differently by lockdown,” says Russell Hobby, chief executive of the Teach First charity. “Some kids have had a great time – they have all the support they need, they have all of the devices, their parents may have bought in tutors to work with them, they have access to outside spaces.
“In other cases, children may not even have a room in which they can work quietly; they may not have a device on which they can access those wonderful online lessons.”
The matter is so serious that some top teachers – including exheadmaster Sir Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted’s former chief inspector, who famously transformed the fortunes of east London’s Mossbourne Academy with an ultra-strict regime – have called for schools to remain open throughout the summer holidays for some year groups. Downing Street poured cold water on that idea last month, saying that parents have a “reasonable “reasonable expectation” for schools to shut.
It leaves the job of bringing pupils up to scratch largely up to parents like Firth, a former barrister and academy governor. “I’m not suggesting that schools haven’t done brilliantly – I’m sure they have,” she says. “But we could be looking at a big attainment gap come September. Children can go a long way forwards and a long way backwards in two months.”
Indeed, for parents like Kemkaran, a return to normal schooling cannot come soon enough. The first battle of each morning is getting her daughter out of bed. Keen for a sense of structure, she tried in the early weeks of lockdown to implement a strict routine of schoolwork, chores and exercise. But her plans were eventually foiled by the apathy of her two teens (her 16-year-old son has just finished Year 11, and spends much of his time lifting weights in his room).
“After a while, I could see I had to relax a bit,” she remembers. “It’s hard for kids to motivate themselves every day to get up, log in, get their head in the right frame of mind and concentrate when there’s zero change of scenery. [In my job,] I’ve got people to answer to, but my daughter hasn’t. I feel that an awful lot of parents are worried about this.”
She is excited for Invicta to restore some structure to Sophie’s day – although she admits that her daughter is “quite happy” drifting around the house in pyjamas, and is “not delighted” to be doing schoolwork in July and August: a problem you might expect Invicta’s volunteer teachers to encounter from a number of their pupils.
But co-founder Stephen James, a primary schoolteacher and two-time Afghanistan veteran, who is overseeing Invicta’s teaching, predicts that many will be more enthusiastic than you might expect. “Some year groups have not been to school since March,” he says. “I don’t think it’s going to be a struggle to get them learning – a lot of them are crying out for routine.”
When teaching dozens of children online, he says, it is important to keep lessons ultra-structured. “In a normal class, you might bounce off the children or go off on a bit of a tangent. Zoom doesn’t lend itself to that. You have to break it down into its simplest form.”
James is frustrated with what he sees as intransigence from the teaching unions towards opening schools in the holidays. He says he knows one teacher in Greater Manchester who has received seven calls from different unions – who argue that the prevalence of Covid-19 makes it unsafe to fully reopen schools – imploring her not to arrange any summer classes.
“Every time the Government has come up with a solution, they’ve come up with a problem. Imagine that in the Second World War, if someone said: ‘Don’t help out, don’t join the Home Guard’.”
The Invicta founders do not expect children to join lessons every day, and Teach First’s Hobby also warns parents “not to overdo” summer teaching – “a day here, a day there, something like that. Time spent together as a family doing fun things is of huge value to young people,” he says.
But for the most part, their attention is focused squarely on September – when, if all goes to plan, schools across the UK will reopen fully. “I hope it will help children who really need it,” says Kemkaran. “I’m worried about my daughter but not overly worried – we’re in a fortunate position to be able to help her. But there are so many kids out there with very little or no parental engagement. [We should do] anything we can to level up and get those kids back up to speed before September.”
‘I’m not anti-private schools... but it’s not fair that state school kids have lost out’
‘There are so many kids out there with very little or no parental engagement’