No-one would argue that 2020 wasn’t our usual year, with many challenges faced by all of us. In schools, we dealt with many additional responsibilities which normally lie alongside, but not within, our remit. With the dawn of a new year, will our focus be the same?
During everything that we faced in 2020, our overriding focus was as always, the education of our young people. This is our core purpose and enabling our students to achieve their best in their studies remains our priority. Alongside this, we were involved to a much larger degree than usual, in providing assistance in mental health and general wellbeing. This included providing access to food, managing larger volumes of safeguarding concerns and offering a wide range of additional support.
In 2020, we were faced with an unprecedented situation; one which we have now ‘lived with’ for the past nine months. We have all had total disruption to service, created online learning, used the expertise of our teachers to centre assess our students, discovered new ways to communicate and stay in touch, managed even more additional costs within budget restraints and learnt that plans can, and must, change at the touch of a button.
In 2021, as Covid continues to be an ever-present disruption to our day-to-day lives, our previous ways of operating are likely to be some way off. Clearly, many of the same adaptations will continue to be needed in for the foreseeable future. Indeed, as I write this we discover that schools will not come back in the usual way and that even more adjustment will be required.
So, can we change our focus?
The benefit of a year of adjustment is that the situation is no longer new. We have already put into place all of the systems and tools to enable social distancing, washing and sanitising as well as the support mechanisms to enable us to assist our school communities. Whilst this will require constant revision, these systems are now a fully functioning part of our everyday lives that we are used to operating under. That’s just locally; central government has improved its own response to the needs arising out of its Covid policies and support is now available for tasks previously undertaken solely by ourselves at the start of the pandemic.
The news that secondary schools will now be facilitating testing for students and staff is an additional operational burden, although some may consider the proposal to be reassuring, as it aims to make schools a safer space. Primaries are not afforded this and may well continue to suffer with the difficulties that staff absence can cause.
Despite this, for those of us who work in schools, we now want - and need - some normality back in our lives. Our students need to come back in 2021 doing in their schools what they are there for, learning, socialising, developing and achieving. It is our role to make sure that we enable them to do this.
So, whilst we will continue to carry out the operational demands of the continuing pandemic, all of us, I hope, will come back with renewed vigour ready to meet the challenges head-on.