We won’t know for certain until Boris Johnston unveils the details later this month, but by all accounts his widely-publicised “Four Year COVID Education Recovery Plan” looks likely to set some sparks flying in the education community.
From longer school days to shorter holidays, the leaked policy suggestions have already agitated plenty. How do you feel about it?
With many still reeling from the decision to pause teachers’ pay increases - meaning they will now be taking a pay decrease in real terms! - that can hardly be a surprise.
Nobody is disputing that a radical recovery plan is needed:
Hundreds of thousands of students are behind on their reading, and the pandemic’s impact on social, emotional and intellectual development won’t be understood for a long time.
The issue is not whether we need a recovery - it’s how we go about it, and on whose shoulders the responsibility ultimately falls.
All education staff work tirelessly, but can’t do it all
My main concern - and I know I’m not alone - is that education professionals will be expected to take the brunt of it.
Anyone with an appreciation for teachers’ workload has got to bristle at the idea of extending the school day, when teachers already work routinely into the night.
And while teachers’ long summer holidays are the envy of many, we know that the majority of teachers always end up working a fair bit of that holiday.
It’s not even clear that students would benefit from longer days, as research suggests stress reduces our recall and ability to integrate new information - and what could be more stressful than a pandemic, followed by an extra couple of hours at school every day?
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has talked about how important it is to encourage teachers to stay in the profession.
But I suspect there is a real danger that policies like these could achieve quite the opposite.
The road forward
I’ve talked at length about the ways the pandemic might reshape education, and I still believe there are positive effects from the last year we should be looking to carry forward.
But much of that positivity is about a shift of perspective - and that’s what I think we need here.
I don’t have any big suggestions:
These are complex policy questions, and I think the only way to find genuinely effective solutions is to pool our collective intelligence.
So rather than offering a solution, I want to ask some questions - in the hope that they’ll start a more productive conversation:
Is this recovery a short-term fix, or a long-term rethink of how we structure education?
Is ‘recovery’ even the right framing? Could we be looking at something better than a mere recovery?
Could we restructure the curriculum and exams to reflect the events of the last year?
How can teachers’ remuneration be made to fairly reflect the extra work they put into the recovery?
And are there more creative ways we can take the load of teachers, to enable them to focus on the vital job at hand?
Over to you guys. I’m very keen to hear your thoughts at the sharp end of this discussion.
Thanks, Monil.
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