Playing catch-up is not a perfect position to be in, but young minds are resilient

After many weeks of to-ing and fro-ing about the reopening of schools, Scotland – always accepting that anything, as they used to say in the credits for Stingray, can happen in the next half hour – is moving ahead with a phased return to the classroom. While, in a so far unlooked-for blast of caution mixed with existential doom-mongering, those south of the border are being told that a March 8 re-start is variously “prudent” (copyright: B Johnson) or “a recipe for disaster” (copyright: Everyone Else).

With the original assumption that schools were going to be out (thank you, Alice Cooper) for much longer than was initially thought – and what a surprise that was – we have heard and certainly will continue to hear much about the detrimental effects of interrupted education, remote learning and home-schooling on the lives and prospects of our young people.

To say this is serious is an understatement. Their future is everyone’s future, even the shorter-term prospects of old timers like me who won’t be around to bear the brunt of it, if we’re lucky enough to keep going that long.

Everything that can be done should be done to take up the slack here and bolster educational provision and planning for those who have found themselves in circumstances beyond their control. With goodwill and practical application, it’s surely not beyond the wit of man (and woman) to put such support in place both for the delivery of learning and improvements in mental health? You wouldn’t think so but there are times when you wonder.

Playing catch-up is never a perfect position to be in but making up for lost time is not impossible – young minds are nothing if not resilient. If we give them and their teachers the tools and the time.

That much is self-evident. So can it be jaundiced (wha’ me?) to muse that even with this disruption, these young people just might eventually do as good a job as those currently elevated to the loftiest ranks of power to which one can supposedly aspire? In particular, those who, presumably, had every care, not to mention shedloads of their parents’ interestinglyacquired dosh, lavished on what is regarded as the highest level of elite education?

As point-scoring speeches are made about the potential horror of finding badlyeducated, ill-prepared, under-qualified people swamping the jobs market in a few years’ time, is it disingenuous of me to remark that, for those of us living through the current crisis, it might be a bit difficult to spot the difference?

And speaking of sorting the sheep from the goats, I wonder if you saw the lovely story at the end of last week about the Lancashire farmer who is making increasingly distant ends meet by hiring out her herd of goats to photobomb Zoom meetings? Never mind re-arranging your bookshelves or editing your wall art to try to make your background – and, by extension, you – look more interesting than you actually are. At a fiver a time, I call that value for money.

Perhaps someone should mention it to Michael Gove (see last Monday’s column). If he ever gets the heave-ho from his day job as Chancer of the Duchy of Lancaster and all-purpose, cardboard cut-out stand-in for Boris Johnson at meetings the latter can’t be bothered to attend, he could maybe hire out the feisty feline at a competitive rate to swell his Universal

Credit award?

Following in the footsteps of so many creative and intrepid people in areas of the economy virtually destroyed by the effects of the Covid pandemic, Rossendale-based farmer Dot McCarthy said it started as a laugh as she tried to find new ways to keep her business going and her colleagues in jobs when their usual income stream from events and visits was sharply shut off by coronavirus. More power to you, Dot.

Now people literally all over the world, from America to Russia and China, have got her goat(s), two of whom – Lola (named after the showgirl character in Barry Manilow’s Copacabana) and the rather more sedate Margaret – have their own international fan clubs and are regularly personally requested by otherwise jaded executives and even family groups staying in contact at a distance.

Interesting, perhaps, that they are females of the species. In another fascinating development in that great Donald Trump tradition of inserting male feet into misogynistic mouths, one Yoshiro Mori, head of the Tokyo Olympics organising committee, has opined that if more women appear on boards and in meetings, the proceedings will inevitably “drag on”. These pesky interlopers will – they just can’t help it, you know, it comes built in – have far too much to say for themselves.

Apt then, that Dot McCarthy reckons her imaginative departure into the hitherto uncharted world of goat-hiring is more fun and more lucrative than her previous job of selling manure. Instead of, like Mr Mori, talking it.

Me, I think it’s the best possible advert and showcase for the advantages of the nanny state…

LEARNING: After weeks of to-ing and fro-ing about reopening, Scotland is moving ahead with a phased return to the classroom.