Schools reopen: crisis or opportunity?
At long last, millions of children finally returned to school in England this week; but it won’t have been school as they know it, said Jill Kirby in The Daily Telegraph. Not only are secondary pupils being asked to wear masks in their classrooms, “their education remains contingent on what amounts to an experiment”. In order to be allowed to attend, children (and teachers) must undergo three tests on the premises. They will then be asked to test themselves at home, twice a week, for the rest of the term. It’s a vast enterprise, but it is still not clear what it is designed to achieve. Perhaps it is to reassure teachers and parents that infection rates are low. But it may have the opposite effect: the more people you test, the more positive cases will be found. And since lateral flow tests are known to be less accurate than lab-processed ones, many of these will be false positives. Given the success of the vaccine roll-out in protecting the vulnerable, why are we embarking on a scheme that risks forcing entire households into self-isolation, just when most families are desperate to get back to normal?
Count mine among them, said Sam Leith on UnHerd. For parents, having children at home has been exhausting; it has also been deeply worrying. Even children lucky enough to live in stable, well-off households have been scarred by months of lockdown, with all the anxiety and loneliness that has entailed. The impact will have been far worse on those living in homes where there are very real tensions, and where there may not be enough food to go around, let alone laptops. What this crisis has shown, said Ed Dorrell in The Independent, is that children don’t just go to school to get an academic education: they go there to grow into well-rounded adults. The Government is anxious about “lost learning” (and is considering reforms such as longer school days and shorter holidays to address that); but teachers may struggle with a competing need to restore pupils’ battered confidence and lost social skills.
We have an opportunity to make a positive out of this crisis, said The Sunday Times, by “building back better”. It makes sense to rethink a school year designed in the Victorian era, and shorter summer holidays would benefit poorer children in particular. But the reforms shouldn’t stop there. Schools should have more flexibility to reward the best teachers; and teachers should have more freedom to teach around the curriculum. Finally, we must accept that the relentless regime of testing is a “blight” on the system. Getting children back to school was the first step; now let us focus on the bigger goal, of “giving them a more complete and fulfilling education”.