School Days

The current educational tizzy is all about ‘lost learning’, but the very phrase troubles me.

We can discuss lost income, lost keys or even – channelling Lady Bracknell – lost parents, but lost learning is far too nebulous an idea to quantify. If you don’t have something, you can’t lose it. In a way, it takes us back to the never-ending argument about content/knowledge versus skills, an argument that was at the root of all our planning of teaching through lockdown.

In the first lockdown – which came out of the blue and which no one believed would last as long as it did – we focused on what is called ‘consolidation’. In other words, we went over and over past learning to din it in to the most unwilling of heads.

At the beginning, most of it was done through online packages, involving lessons followed by quizzes to check understanding. This was all very well, especially for those who actually engaged, but we soon became aware that many children skipped straight to the quizzes, ignoring all the lessons aspects.

Little did they know that we could track exactly how long they spent on each lesson – even if we hadn’t worked it out through their plummeting results. Only towards the end of the first lockdown did we begin to look at new content.

I did hope, though, that my Year 10s, a second set at the beginning of their GSCE ‘journey’, would realise the importance of working as we went along. So I set off merrily to teach Jekyll and Hyde, their 19th-century set text. And it all seemed to go swimmingly. They were in the classes and answered questions. Some even delivered work regularly. By the time school reopened, we had finished the book and I was looking forward to spending the next two weeks teaching them how to write literary criticism.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘How many of you have honestly not read the book?’

After a silence, a few tentatively started to raise their hands. A few minutes later, all but about three of the class had a hand in the air. And then their charming spokesperson ventured, ‘If you don’t mind, Miss, perhaps we could start it again.’

To what extent had they lost their learning in those months? You could argue that the few who had done everything they were asked to do and then had to do it all over again have gained learning by repetition, but you could also argue that they are the ones who have lost the learning they would have done when we moved on. You could also argue that the majority had not ‘lost’ learning but had wilfully ignored the opportunity to learn.

So what are we to do to repair this loss, not so much of learning, as of knowledge? Start over, of course. We must absolutely not see this as a reason or an excuse to downgrade the quality of our content or teaching. We have to take a deep breath and aim to mend the damage done. We have to adapt our lessons (yet again) in such a way as to lure the students back into the habits of work – because that is what has really been lost, which is much more dangerous for them than their having missed a chunk of work.

On my last lesson before the Easter holidays, I set this class an extract from Jekyll and Hyde to analyse. At the end of the half-hour given for the work, they set their pens down wearily, but triumphantly. ‘That’s the most I’ve written for months,’ the spokesman said, ‘and it was really satisfying’.

Maybe the lesson he has learned from losing learning is how much he actually enjoys it. Maybe.

‘I was getting bored with sitting around at home doing nothing – so that’s why I decided to take up meditation’