SROOM TROPHE
at school one or two days Parents unable to go back Teachers struggling to fill lessons. Thousands of completely disengaged as flounder. And teaching hostile to change. The SNP learning’ plans are an shambles — and, warn risk scarring an entire of Scottis
Sturgeon is, from the beginning of lockdown, caution has been her middle name.
Will she and Mr Swinney now defy the teaching unions by insisting on a bolder, larger scale and potentially riskier back-to-school approach in August?
If the raft of education reforms detailed in their last manifesto is anything to go by, possibly not. Most were either quietly dropped or watered down in the face of union objections.
NOT that all their concerns about holding classes during a global pandemic can be dismissed out of hand. What happens, for example, when a pupil threatens to cough on a classroom teacher, asks Seamus Searson, general secretary of the SSTA.
He said: ‘We know it’s the way children can be and we can’t afford to have this sort of looseness.’
Will his members be given face masks? Many think they should.
He added: ‘There are a lot of people – teachers and parents – who also want children to wear some sort of face covering when they are at school.’
Then there is the question of childcare. What happens to the school-age children of teachers who are back at work full time when their sons or daughters can attend classes only part time?
Mr Searson said the disruption over the next few months will be so severe that the spring 2021 diet of school exams should simply be cancelled now.
Others insist that they go ahead – and demand the restoration of normality to schools in as short order as possible.
It all adds up to a chaotic picture littered with competing perspectives. The only thing no one disputes is the scale of the disaster unfolding across state education.
At the heart of the concerns is the new regime of ‘blended learning’ – a combination of face-to-face and online lessons – which has won little favour among teachers, pupils, their parents or educationalists. ‘It is being used to try and persuade people that what is going to take place in August is something more than just part-time schooling,’ said Keir Bloomer, a former local authority director of education and one of Scotland’s pre-eminent experts on schooling.
‘What actually happened over the past 12 weeks is pretty depressing.
‘The amount of support given to children and their parents in learning at home is quite small and most of what there is has been the initiative of individual schools and not down to any effective national strategy.’
A study published this week by University College London’s Institute of Education found that, across the UK, the average pupil is doing school work for only two and a half hours a day during lockdown, while a fifth of pupils are doing next to nothing.
It also found that Scottish schools were among the UK’s poorest performers in engaging pupils with online lessons.
If that is the scale of the problem now, how much worse will it be by
August when, as well as preparing online lessons, teachers must return to ordinary class work too?
Mr Bloomer said: ‘This is taking place at a time when teachers have not for the most part been teaching, so they have time to do things like set assignments, mark them, give feedback – and even so, what has happened has been very disappointing.
‘Come August, they’re going to be teaching again so they won’t have time to do these things. So who is going to support this blended learning?’
THE physics teacher who spoke to the Mail said face-to-face video lessons were ‘discouraged’ in Edinburgh by both councils and unions for the protection of children and teachers.
He said several councils had gone further, banning live audio sessions and allowing only ‘textual’ contact by email or work groups.
‘Even with what I’m doing, I have about a sixth who have disappeared entirely and another sixth who log in to calls but have done no work at all. And these statistics are pretty good by comparison, I’m told.
‘Things may actually get worse in August because if we’re using up our contact hours with half or a third full classes in school then there won’t be much – or any – time left for the kids at home. Contact will go back to text only unless teachers can work out how to simultaneously stream classroom lessons back to homes.’
He added: ‘There are lots of problems with online distance learning. Some kids have no access at all while some only have their phones or shared access to something larger.
‘And, of course, some are sitting with full-spec laptops or PCs on desks in quiet rooms of their own. The attainment gap is being ripped wide open.’
As for exams, this year’s and next, they represent just one more facet of the mounting chaos.
HE said he and his colleagues had no idea what the Scottish Qualifications Authority would do with the estimates schools had submitted for the 2020 exams.
He added: ‘We are concerned that in August we will have the appeals process from hell. Everyone is calling for an early decision on the 2021 exams but realistically I do not expect that can be done until the autumn.’
‘It is already too late to go for some sort of truncated exams – we’ve all started the new courses, and started from different places – so it’s either cancelled exams and estimates again, or full exams and then the mother of all grade boundary adjustments as the kids will just not have been taught properly. C-pass at 35 per cent all round?’
No less fraught is the issue of social distancing.
In recent weeks hundreds of teachers across the country have been involved in dividing classrooms into two-metre square blocks to calculate the number of pupils who can be in them at a time.
The irony is few of them believe for a second that the rules will be adhered to – and if the safe distance is reduced to one metre in Scotland as the Northern Ireland Executive agreed it should be this week, then the classrooms will need to be measured all over again.
For Mr Bloomer, the social distance guidelines are a nonsense in schools and should not even be considered.
For the EIS, however, they are sacrosanct and calls for a relaxation should be opposed unless there is a ‘significant’ reduction in the infection rate.
Mr Bloomer said: ‘Teachers will do their best of course and will reduce the amount of close encounters that go on but they will come nowhere near to eliminating them so … this notion of a partial return to school based on social distancing relies on a premise which is in cloud cuckoo land.’
Furthermore, he said, there is already considerable international evidence that re-opening schools and running them as normal does not result in a second wave.
‘Many countries now have their schools open. Some of them
opened with social distancing and have since abandoned it. Some opened without – Sweden never had it.
‘There has been no upturn in the infection in any country that has opened its schools.
‘Neither is there any certified case of a teacher catching the disease as a result of the schools reopening.
‘So I conclude from that that the risks are quite low and I would suspect that they would be significantly lower in August than they are now.’
Mr Bloomer added: ‘It seems to me there is excessive caution here.’
The consequences, he warned, are utterly dire.
‘There is quite a lot of research in this country and elsewhere which indicates that across long holiday periods children fall behind and that disadvantaged children fall further behind.
‘This is true across the Scottish summer holidays, traditionally about six weeks.
‘Well we have now had no school for double that length of time and I suspect that the effect of that is not linear but exponential.
‘Across a five-month period that’s very serious loss indeed.
‘If we are going to have part-time education with minimal support for home learning for any significant part of next year then that is going to be much worse.’
Mr Bloomer added: ‘This is an education setback of very, very serious proportions. Young people in the last years of their school career will probably never make it up.’
The teachers the Mail spoke to this week did not dispute the huge scale of the crisis.
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