What will be our windmills? Creating a post pandemic ‘normal’.

Kevin Wyre, a graduate of the Universities of Wales and Cambridge, has over 40 years experience working in the field of education. With experience of leadership in two Ofsted rated Outstanding schools, he is now an educational consultant and has worked closely with many schools in the UK, Bangladesh and China with a particular focus on school improvement and cultural change. Here, he gives us his thoughts about how education will change in response to the recent pandemic.

“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.”   -  Chinese proverb

The Covid 19 global pandemic has had a major impact on life as we know it in an enormous number of ways.  Although we frequently hear people say ‘when we go back to normal…’, the reality might very well be that there could be no going back to some of the things that just 6 months ago or so we regarded as ‘normal’.  

Virtually all businesses have had to look at how they function in order to put measures in place to help them survive in the short to medium term, and schools are no different.  A number of those measures will just be for the duration of the pandemic but what might be adopted in the long-term to bring about genuine improvements for all and to create a new post pandemic normal?

Throughout the history of state education, the sector - particularly at the level of central government - has been conservative and resistant to change, often with a one-size-fits-all approach.  Reception through to Year 13 classrooms are run by teachers who deliver lessons that start and end with a bell. They deliver work, (hopefully differentiated), set homework, assessments, prepare their students for examinations and attain grades that might delight, disappoint or even surprise their recipients.

Although there was an impetus for change before Covid 19, the need for a response to the pandemic demonstrated the way in which technology can transform teaching and learning.

Because things had to change when the pandemic hit - there was no longer the option to carry on ‘just doing the same thing’ - education changed profoundly.  With the support and leadership of their teachers, (and / or parents), students were now just a finger-click away from the vast resources of the internet - Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams and Zoom etc.  Technology turns a laptop screen into a classroom, where students and teachers can see and question each other in truly collaborative online learning.  Just after the UK’s lockdown began, the Department for Education launched a new online school, where two million lessons were accessed by learners across the country in its first week.

During the UK lockdown, with the technology available to them most educational establishments have provided teaching programmes from 9am to 5pm and beyond into weekends and holidays. It has to be said that pupil attendance has been enormously variable, and easy access to a computer and/or the internet for all is a clear area for instant attention.  The UK government sees the advantage of online teaching and is beginning to make laptops available to those students. 

Anecdotally, students like virtual lessons. They eliminate long journeys to school. 

Some of the more stressful aspects of the school day have ‘disappeared’.  They allow an outstanding teacher, in for example Physics, to not only reach their own students, but also those in other classes or even schools that do not have a Physics teacher at all. 

What must not be overlooked however, is the role that schools play in the socialization of students and how they turn them into real people with coping strategies and other non-academic skills.  In future, virtual classes could allow students to attend school in person for, say, four days, with online lessons on the fifth. 

In this Covid 19 summer, school external exams at 16 and 18 have been replaced by stringent teacher assessments. Why can’t this continue?  Exams burden each summer term with so much student, parent and teacher anxiety that all too often little is learnt, and all the exams do is test the student’s memory. One major change will be that the UK government will need to demonstrate a much greater willingness to trust their teachers’ judgements than has been usual up to this point, and now that education stretches from the age of four to 18, there is actually little purpose in an exam at 16. Back in 1950, the tests made sense because 93 per cent of students left for a job. Today, 93 per cent of students stay in education and training. 

Universities will also have to change, preferably beyond the end of the pandemic. Students frequently complain about the lack of time with tutors paid for by their tuition fees. Today, tutors using Zoom can meet 10 or 12 students for a discussion much more frequently. Normal degree exams will also not happen in the UK this year.  At the University of Cambridge, students reading human, social and political science will not sit in a large hall for three-hour exams on three separate occasions. Instead, they will be assessed for a third of their degree on their work over the previous three years, and for two-thirds on essays written at home in two, three-hour ‘open book’ examinations. This is welcome because writing on a computer is quicker and more readable, and allowing students to refer to reference materials and books recognizes that immediate recall is less important than the deeper understanding they have accumulated from wider reading.