Ken Robinson tried to tell us…he pleaded with us to get it right – to prioritise the things that will make a difference to our children’s lives – to focus on the things that will really have an impact – to stir up the creativity in us all.
We’ve got it all wrong.
Now, more than at an other point during our lifetimes, we have the chance to change it all – but what are we doing? We are standing still, doing the same old things, reverting back to type – not changing a thing.
If you talk to any teacher, they can always tell you something they think is wrong with the education system. We know there are massive flaws – it’s a system that hasn’t really had any major rehauls in almost 30 years. That’s three decades. There have been changes, I know – but not a complete rethink of the system. It’s always been the same. Looking across the world, the majority of classrooms look comparable, have similarities, follow the same type of learning sequence, formula and approach.
What is it going to take for a complete reform to take place?
The DFE, Ofsted and all the ‘External Powers That Be’, have the same refrain – ‘catch-up’ – ‘filling the gaps’….’making up for lost time’. Pressure continues to be placed on schools which filters down from the top and ends with teachers finally burning out and giving up. And yet, we continue down the same old road.
We now have the ‘Covid Catch-Up’ fund, the School Tutor Led Grant – a huge push on the academics – Maths and English. Baseline testing for 4 years olds in EYFS has gone ahead this year and the submission of school phonics results have still been expected to be submitted each year.
What message is this sending to schools?
And don’t get me started about SATS…..if SATS were to go ahead this year…it’s crazy to think that we could all be in a position to give a test, that hasn’t been changed don’t forget, to our children who have had two years of disruption to their lives – two years of disruption to their schooling and two years of disruption to their whole way of being. It’s lunacy to even think that that is ok. How is it ok to judge schools and their children by using a test to judge progress and attainment on a cohort that haven’t yet experienced a normal year of school?
So, as always, you have schools all across the country who do phonics in the morning, phonics in the afternoon, maths ‘catch-up’ at play times, etc, etc, and yet again we see an already ‘narrow’ curriculum become even more constrained.
Last year, one of our teachers was really struggling with their class. The children wouldn’t settle and we were having behaviour issues in a way we had never seen before. Every morning I saw this teacher come into school more and more disheartened. The class was at breaking point.
During this time, I was attending trauma training with Betsy D’Thierry (if you haven’t had training with her yet, you must ) and was having a conversation with her about what we see in children when they have experienced trauma, when it suddenly hit me. Play. The children need to play.
Immediately I called this teacher and they were filled with excitement – ‘Yes!’ they said. It was the end of a term, and during that half term they planned so that when they came back, the class was completely different. Using features you’d see in an EYFS environment, everything had been turned on its head. And yes, because I hear you asking…the behaviour was transformed. The staff were filled with enthusiasm for learning in a way I hadn’t seen in a long time – and in turn, the children were powerfully engaged. Highlighting again, as I always have said, happy and passionate staff = happy and passionate children.
Play. We just don’t do enough of it.
So this year, I kicked off Inset with a focus on rebranding ourselves – starting new – engaging each other through an exciting hand’s on curriculum – and play.
Two years is a very long time. In a child’s life, it feels like a lifetime. The world has changed. We stopped seeing our family members, no more visits to granny and grandpa’s house, no more sleepovers and play dates – we even stopped going to the playground. School stopped and children weren’t even allowed to go into the grocery store with their parents where they might have had conversations about how much things cost or how many apples there were in the cart. Life stopped. Children were put in front of screens to see their teachers and when mum or dad had to work, they were often put in front of screens again. Everyone’s anxieties were magnified – anxieties about germs, anxieties about work, anxieties about money. Life completely changed.
Every child has had a different experience. Every family has had to deal with different things – with life and death, worries they’ve never faced before.
And many children had to stop being children for a little while.
Hand washing has become the norm and children’s anxieties are beginning to show themselves through new habits, OCD tendencies, picking of the skin and other tell-tale signs that children are worried about the world around them. We have no idea what goes on behind closed doors but all I know is that every single child in our school has experienced trauma during these last two years in some shape or form – and don’t forget the adults have as well. In fact, I don’t believe the adults truly realise just how much of an impact COVID has had on them.
We have not yet seen the full impact that COVID has had on the wellbeing of our staff and children.
We see children who struggle to write for longer periods of time. When you start to unpick this, you realise these are children who haven’t had two normal years of their ‘foundation’ in school. The daily ‘disco dough’ and scissor cutting activities to build up fine motor skills – the hanging on the monkey bars and pulling themselves up on the outdoor gym to build up their shoulder muscles. It’s all been interrupted and it has had an impact on everything.
Children without siblings haven’t had to share or had the opportunity to have discussions about what to play with and how things should be done, with any of their peers. Social interactions have been disrupted on a massive scale and it is obvious in the way children play with each other in the playground and how they communicate in the classroom.
Children had play taken away from them. While parents had to juggle working from home and deal with the fear that COVID brought, children often were babysat by devices. Parents have shared that they did not interact with their children as much as they normally would have or that they didn’t even go outside as often – instead Zoom meetings took over in the evenings and work suddenly never ended. A ‘lockdown’ that should have granted many of us ‘time’, in fact actually stole our time. Things are slowly getting back to normal, but many families still struggle with this new work/life balance. Children have suffered. Adults have suffered. Children haven’t had the opportunities to play like children should.
And now, the focus is on catching up. Tutors for Maths and English – and don’t forget to submit your results for phonics before the end of the term. And schools just follow suit because we are all too tired to keep on fighting the system. But, the longer we do this, the further and further we all fall behind. We seriously have to challenge this ‘status quo’ – we have to do what we all know is right.
Everyone will agree that no child can learn until they feel settled – until their wellbeing is taken care of and until they feel absolutely safe.
Where is the urgency for this?
If we aren’t careful, the ‘gaps’ that we create are going to be caverns – our children will have no foundation to lay anything on at all.
It’s time to change. It’s time to get our priorities right.
Relationships, Communication and Play.
There is no better time for change, than now.
So, what are we going to do about it?
