Covid in the house…
So we’ve managed to escape the dreaded Covid until this week when, finally, one of my children tested positive. It’s brought the whole pandemic back into sharp focus again. It’s also got me thinking about the infinite number of ways that Covid impacts on the lives of young people. Here are a few examples just from my life and work this week…
My daughter’s school is under insane pressure from Covid right now. Staff absences are the highest that they’ve ever been and the school is struggling to stay open. There are also multiple classes having to isolate from the rest of the school now. When there are more than 3 (I think) positive Covid cases in one class, it is considered by Public Health to be an outbreak. So, while bubbles might be a policy of the past, the advice now is to try and keep any class with an outbreak as separate as possible from the rest of the school.
The logistical implications of this are nigh-on impossible for the school to manage. But the impact on the children is painful to watch too. My daughter’s class was put into isolation last week. That meant no access to after-care, no participation in sports clubs, choir or school show auditions (because they all involve the mixing of classes and year groups), having to have playtimes at a different time of day from the rest of the year (and therefore not being able to hang out with her closest mates), and having to eat lunch in a separate space. These things alone have taken a toll on her mood and mental health. And, having to stick to demarcated areas of the playing field has led to some pretty horrid comments from other non-isolated pupils, encouraging everyone to keep their distance from the “infected class”. It’s a lot for a 10 year old to deal with.
And then this week, the inevitable two red lines finally appeared on our Thursday morning LFTs. So now her school-based isolation has transitioned to being confined to the house for the next 10 days (unless she magically tests negative again some time around Wednesday…) and a return to online learning and homeschooling. Motivation levels are understandably low, and my availability to support and encourage her (while also trying not to catch said Covid) is pretty limited, given my workload. It’s tough on her.
And then there are examples from my work.
I’ve spent much of the week interviewing teachers for different research projects. One of the projects is looking at the entry requirements set by schools and colleges for post-16 qualifications. I didn’t anticipate that Covid would come up in our discussions, but it has. The first setting I spoke to explained that, because there have been two years without formal exams at the end of year 11, students have had to apply for a place on their sixth form/post-16 courses having to rely on teacher-assessed grades. This particular teacher was responsible for admissions onto science A level courses and she told me that she is seeing a number of students who - on paper, using their teacher-assessed grades - met the entry criteria with no problems. However, when they got further into their courses, they were beginning to struggle - perhaps because, she hypothesised, the lack of formal GCSE exams (due to Covid) meant that they had scored higher than they otherwise might have. So these students found themselves unsettled about whether to continue their studies or to change direction.
The next person I spoke to told me about a variation of the same issue. His setting commonly provides support for students who might need to re-sit their core maths and English qualifications so that they can progress to other post-16 opportunities at his college. But his admissions numbers have plummeted over the last 2 years, as fewer students were failing their GCSE English and maths - again, he thinks, because there were more passes within the two years of teacher-assessed grades, again thanks to Covid, than usual - so he has found it harder to recruit students into his college which has implications for its future sustainability.
And finally I came across something more positive…interviewing a series of primary teachers about how and why they’re working on improving the quality and quantity of computing education that their pupils receive. Primary school children have spent so much of the last couple of years dealing with remote learning that they have become experts in using so many different apps, adept at using shortcuts on their keyboards to cut-and-paste their answers into online worksheets, and fully used to uploading their artwork onto Seesaw. The teachers I talked to were passionate about taking inspiration from their pupils and were buzzing with energy about the specialist training that they’d been accessing that was helping them to transform their children’s computing lessons, now that the children were in the classroom more, as they wanted to be able to keep up with their pupils’ energy and expertise!
These few snippets aren’t even a drop in the immense ocean of effects that Covid has had on young people, but they got me thinking. I wonder where you’ve seen Covid’s impact on children and their education this week?