The experience of parents, carers and children of all ages within the current crisis has highlighted starkly the societal inequality that has grown under the Conservative policy and dogma of austerity.
Niamh Sweeney in her excellent article in the Guardian on 7th April [1] puts the case that the post-Covid 19 world of education must look different from what we have come to experience in the market driven Govian world that we are in.
Parents are trying to accommodate the demands placed on their children of schools who assume that each child has free and unfettered access to the Internet via their own laptop and dutiful parents who have nothing else to do than attend to the home learning demands placed on them by their schools.
Parents may be lucky enough to be employed on a permanent contract with an understanding boss who can help them to balance all the demands placed on them. For those on several zero-hours contracts, who may or may not have been furloughed, worrying more than normal about where the next meal is going to come from, is now also being expected to enforce a home learning regime that would make Andrew Adonis happy. [2]
System leaders must seize the initiative and say that the way that we educate our young people must be integrated into the social fabric of the communities. When children come to school hungry, without warm clothing and unsure whether they will eat that evening, the priorities of our society must change.
Now is the time to push for a basic universal income for every working age person in this country, set at a rate where families can feed and clothe themselves without worrying about whether the bills will be paid this month.
A programme of building high quality social housing with secure tenancies so that families know where they will be living for years and not days.
Our teachers and teaching assistants will be on the frontline once this crisis is over. They will be the ones that will be consoling those who have lost members of their families and calming the children having panic attacks about being with large groups of children after being told for months to self-isolate with just their families. The staff in our schools will need looking after not just in the weeks after we return to work after this “new-normal” but for years afterwards.
The pupils currently in year 10 and 12 will have lost the best part of 4 months of teaching if schools go back in some way in September. Those in year 10 will need reassuring that they will still be able to get into sixth form, college or an apprenticeship. For those in year 12, they are worrying now about whether they will be able to get into University or on to training programmes. It will be the teachers and support staff within our schools that will be helping our young people to navigate this uncertain future.
The Higher Education Sector are already worried about their financial viability going forward [3] and this will be reflected in the anxiety of those researching and planning for their next stage in their education. This in turn is spreading fear and uncertainty about the future in the staffing in our Universities, who have recently come through strike action with many of their demands unaddressed.
State support for the Higher Education Sector is going to be vital if we are not going to lose the expertise that train the future professionals that our economy desperately need now and into the future to rebuild our economy.
The collapse in graduate-level recruitment for the current students in the third year of their degree leaves them adrift with the large student-debt hanging over them and no longer the certainty of securing graduate level employment.
Debt-forgiveness for those graduates that choose to train to work in the public sector will be a key incentive to enable the economy to recover with strong recruitment into the public sector.
In conclusion, the education sector and the society that it serves will need to nurture and reassure the young people that they work with, that they do have a future and that we will all be there to support them.
[2] https://www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-adonis-inadequate-online-learning-claim-sparks-fury
How can we get through this “new normal?” Teaching in a post Covid-19 world: Derek Boyle.
Derek Boyle: FCCT. SCITT Director at Bromley Schools’ Collegiate.