CLAS CATAS
Pupils a week. to work. virtual children councils unions ‘blended absolute experts, generation
AFEW days ago, a history teacher at a Glasgow secondary school gave her first ‘live’ class to online pupils hoping to gain a Higher in the subject next year. It took some setting up: messages had to go out to all 28 pupils to say it was happening, then reminders.
The lesson had to be tailored to allow for the fact it was being delivered via tablets and computers and not directly across a classroom – and hours were spent getting to grips with the technology.
‘It felt very strange,’ said the teacher. ‘There was very little interaction with the pupils. There was little or no expanding of knowledge. I felt like I was just sitting in a room talking to myself, to be honest.’
Most alarming of all, only ten pupils tuned in to their Higher history class. Of the 18 who missed it, only a few have even acknowledged their absence.
‘I’ve no idea why they didn’t turn up and I’m still desperately trying to communicate with them,’ said the teacher.
That is a complex process, too. The guidance at her school is teachers should first try to contact missing pupils via their online learning groups and, if they do not respond, email them directly.
There is no current latitude for teachers to bypass the pupils and go straight to the parents. Instead, non-compliers’ names must be passed on to a department head.
The staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: ‘I’ve sent about two group emails and two or three personal emails asking if there are any obstacles to their learning and I’m getting no responses from a lot of them. There’s really not much more that can be done short of turning up at their houses.’
Welcome to the new normal for a state education system which hardly inspired confidence even in the pre-pandemic era as Scotland tumbled down the international attainment tables and exam passes in core subjects plunged by 10 per cent.
Post-Covid-19, it is no longer a question of improving on mediocrity. It is one of averting a titanic educational catastrophe.
INDEED, to help convey the terrifying scale of the disaster in the making, another secondary school teacher likened it to the sinking of an ocean liner.
‘The ship has hit the rocks,’ he said. ‘The passengers are in the water and we’re trying to pull as many of them out as we can. The strong swimmers will do OK, but inevitably most of those will be from affluent homes and have strong home support.’
The physics teacher, who works in Edinburgh, added grimly: ‘A lot of the others will lose an entire year – or life chances entirely.’
Rather like the Titanic disaster itself, the calamity facing a generation of schoolchildren is compounded by the air of general confusion, by the lack of clear leadership – First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her deputy, John Swinney, the Education Secretary, were plainly on different pages this week – and by the dawning realisation that none of the rescue scenarios will save everyone.
Three months after every school in the country sent pupils home to safeguard them from coronavirus, the feeling grows among parents and educationalists that too little has been done – and far too late – to safeguard children’s schooling.
And, it seems, the more government scrambles to reassure parents the situation may not be as severe as its own senior members said it was, the more its authority evaporates. By the end of this week there were calls even from prominent Nationalists for Mr Swinney to resign.
Describing his back-to-school plans as ‘patchy’, former SNP adviser Alex Bell said the Education Secretary was ‘a hapless man in a serious job’.
‘Patchy’ is one of the kinder characterisations of the plans. The words used by parents are ‘ludicrous’, ‘unworkable’, ‘shambolic’.
When state primaries and secondaries reopen on August 11, some will offer youngsters just one day a week in the classroom.
That is all that can be managed, insist local councils such as Fife, if the two-metre social distancing rule is to be observed – and unions such as the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) and the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA) say that it must.
City of Edinburgh Council has told parents only a third of pupils can be accommodated at a time; Renfrewshire will offer only 25 hours of face-toface teaching a fortnight.
A mother in West Dunbartonshire with one son going into first year of secondary and another starting fifth year after the summer break has been told her younger boy will get one day a week of face-to-face schooling and her older one two days.
The childcare implications, she said, were a logistical nightmare.
While Glasgow City Council is still ‘finalising plans’, many parents have already heard from individual schools – including one working couple whose son is about to start at secondary.
He can attend five days a week, says the school, but only between noon and 2.30pm.
The boy’s mother said: ‘We’re lucky because although we both work full time we have the option to work from home. But the vast majority don’t. It will be completely unworkable for a lot of parents.’
While the First Minister may have expressed dismay at the scale of the local authorities’ ambitions for the new school term, union chiefs have urged caution by outlining a raft of safety issues.
The problem now for Miss