Making This Year Count!

By Emma Lennard

On the anniversary of the first lockdown, a year since I hushed my children to listen to the news, drawing them onto my lap, more for my own comfort than theirs, I am looking back at those 365 days since the world as we knew it ended, in awe of the triumphant spirit of our profession. When the unthinkable happened, the government told us to stay at home, teachers nationwide began a transformation of our schools. How could we still meet the needs of our pupils when we could not be together? We had to find answers, quickly.

Schools stepped up to the challenge of supporting children during a pandemic because that is what we do. We always, no matter what, put our children first. At the centre of communities, our schools made food parcels, stationary packs, organised supermarket vouchers, delivered work packs. Schools shifted their educational offer online, reaching those that they could in this new way. They established systems for accommodating children of key workers so their parents and carers could care for others and deliver essential services, going out to work knowing it would be safer to stay at home.

Our new vocabulary isn’t so new anymore; social distancing, R- rate, school bubbles, self-isolation. We cover our faces, sanitise our hands, separate our desks and keep our distance without needing to think about it. We continue to contemplate how we carry on whilst mourning loss, wondering how we ever explain those losses to our children. The past year has been a lot. But our reason for being, our core purpose remains the same, education. It may look different now, it may feel different but our mission as teachers is to educate the children who have lived through this year, who look to us as adults to explain things that perhaps we cannot. We can’t give them answers about when this will end, what our lives will look like in the next few months, in the next few years, but what we can do is teach. We can make sure that the education our children are receiving is of the highest possible quality. We can be clear about what children will learn. We can work to make our curriculum the best it can be.

What we know is that there are no quick fixes. The needs of the thirty or so children in front of us are not all the same, just as their experiences of the last year may not be alike either. At the Knowledge Schools Trust we have based our approach to the challenges of this year on the understanding that the most powerful tool we have is great teaching. As described in the 2021 Education Endowment Guide: Supporting School Planning, we must look closely at the components of high quality teaching including; explicit teaching, scaffolding, cognitive and metacognitive strategies. Taking a whole school approach, we can provide training and support for teachers in these areas, develop and secure their subject knowledge, and to empower them. This support needs to be sustained, not one-off sessions but a structured programme designed to help teachers, particularly early career teachers flourish. As senior leaders, we can look at our curriculum closely, thinking deeply about the choices we have made. Within our schools we need excellent teachers, teaching an excellent curriculum, because every minute counts.

Through the curriculum we can bring the world into our classrooms, when our children cannot go out into the world. We can read stories, sing songs, paint pictures. We can let our children lose themselves in the wonders our curriculum holds. They can learn about Ancient Egyptian pharaohs, Viking Kings, the deserts of Africa, ancient cities, battles fought and won, artists painting on ceilings, on walls, sculpting their visions with their hands, scientists learning from each other to make new discoveries and save lives. They can encounter performers, inventors, historians, explorers. They can learn about the world and the people who have lived in it, for there has never been a better time to do that. We can arm our children with powerful knowledge that will help them to determine their own lives, that will help them to fight the battles they may face. Today as teachers we can create in our classrooms, places of escape, of imagination, of investigation, of creativity. We can educate, because that is what we do best and maybe, right now, that is more important than ever before.