Has the pandemic offered us the opportunity to build a new and stronger strategic partnership between the compulsory and post-compulsory phases?
It is proving a long road from lockdown, one full of twists, bumps and turns: the original shut down, the gradual softening of this, the autumnal shift from “Eat Out To Help Out” to “Drink Up and Get Out”, the delayed circuit breakers that came only after the nation had filled their fridges for Christmas, to the current lockdown, and, now, the prospect of its easing with the vaccine roll-out and the publication of the government’s roadmap. Still, it’s hard to not be cautious with our hope.
And, throughout this journey, schools and education have been hot topics, trending on social media and making the news daily.
During this time, we’ve seen schooling and education conflated in a way that irritates those working in post compulsory settings. In short, too little attention has been given to those involved in further and higher education (other than the quarantining in university halls of ‘freshers’ in mid-autumn). FE and Adult Education have hardly had a mention, leaving a host of educators and what they provide ignored or forgotten, and implying that lifelong learning is somehow separate to that learning undertaken during the school years.
My question is, can we use the pandemic to grow a stronger partnership between the compulsory stages of education and the post-compulsory phases? Can we bridge this divide? Can we build models of lifelong learning that are, well, lifelong, embracing schooling along the journey rather than following it?
People, Place and Purpose
My exploration of how the schooling system has coped during the crisis has led me to embark on the writing of what is now two books, Lessons From Lockdown: the educational legacy of COVID-19 (2021), published by Routledge last month, and Bubble Schools: the long road from lockdown (forthcoming). A final book, in what is set to become a lockdown trilogy, provisionally entitled Post-pandemic Learning: the case for re-schooling society, is intended to set out a broader all age, all phase analysis, will follow in due course.
The first book, Lessons from Lockdown, tracks the early experiences of lockdown through to the end of August 2020, and identifies three key lockdown-inspired (or, at least lockdown-enforced) changes that I want to explore further here:
The engagement of parents and other family members in supporting the learning of children and young people during lockdown
The sites in which learning takes place
The broader discussions about the purpose of learning and the future needs of learners.
Simplified, these might be referred to as ‘People’, ‘Place’ and ‘Purpose’.
The shifts in these areas have profound implications and could lead to new opportunities for compulsory and post-compulsory education professionals to work together.
Let’s begin with ’People’; after all, what’s the purpose of an education system, if it’s not to benefit the learners at the heart of it?
People
In my research for both Lessons From Lockdown and Bubble Schools, which picks up the story of lockdown from September 2020 and tracks this through to the end of this academic year, one of the key themes and reasons for optimism is the evidence of a new relationship between teachers and parents.
In our focus groups and one-to-one interviews with teachers, school leaders and other education professionals, they all spoke of a new warmth in their relationship with parents.
It was clear there was a deeper understanding of the diversity of circumstances in which children and young people lived, and the recognition of a further opportunity to work more closely together.
Parents, for their part – many speaking as reluctant, conscripted home tutors – often talked of their admiration for teachers, as they grappled with some of the challenges that are the ordinary stuff of the classroom.
Parents also spoke of their challenges with subject knowledge, especially in their efforts to support older children in either the foothills or closing stages of GCSE or A level.
For some, this was a struggle, for others a chance to engage with learning, perhaps for the first time since their own school days.
This reveals a number of opportunities for all involved in post-16 learning. For starters,
can post-16 providers use the knowledge gaps revealed in home schooling, and the renewed exposure to learning, to motivate those that might not have considered adult education to do so – and in effect encourage a stronger culture of lifelong learning that more buy into?
Place
Another oversimplification has been talk of school ‘closures’. School buildings might be closed, but teaching and learning has continued online. In Bubble Schools I refer to schools as being recast as virtual multi-site communities.
Anybody who has worked or studied in a multi-site school or college will be familiar with the challenges that comes with this – not least the spread and separation of staff.
However, some parts of the education sector are used to this and some of the richest experience of this kind of distributed, multi-site, blended provision rests in areas like adult and community learning, and in organisations like the Open University.
A strong message from the research carried out for Lessons From Lockdown is that many schools are determined to retain and build on some of the key strategies and methodologies developed, and sometimes forced upon them, during the disruption wrought by the virus.
Again, this opens up various questions, particularly as to whether there can be more collaboration across the education phases – especially where community and further education providers are further along the line in providing blended provision. Might they be well placed to support and combine their resources with those in the school and pre-school phases to create an education system that truly supports lifelong learning?
Purpose
This leads nicely to my third and final point: the purpose of education. COVID-19 has caused us to reflect on the purpose of schooling and, specifically, of schools.
My research for both Lessons From Lockdown and Bubble Schools suggests a new recognition of the multiple purposes of schooling – teaching and educating, yes, but far more than this: school’s a vital space for children and young people to develop their social skills and self-confidence, it supports the day-to-day employment of parents, and acts as a community hub for parents, thereby enabling the development of the kind of personal resilience and support networks that are vital for parental, family and community wellbeing.
But lockdown poses much broader questions about the purpose of education itself, questions that in some sense those involved in the development and delivery of non-vocational and non-accredited courses, have spent a professional lifetime addressing.
One such question concerns the lack of genuine breadth in the school curriculum, which many believe is increasingly focused only on academic subjects, over assessed and based, typically, on a single mode of examination, the GCSE.
This, in turn, produces a curriculum that is insufficiently focused on, or supportive of, the vocational (or professional) domain; the work-related curriculum remains one onto which far too many young people fall, rather than one they positively opt into with the right knowledge and support.
Further, the school curriculum, and the National Curriculum, around which it is constructed, is insufficiently concerned with the personal and social development of young people, as individuals, as social beings and as citizens, at least in the stated curriculum, where PSHE and Citizenship Education usually have no more than a marginal place, at best.
Some of these issues talk directly to the expertise of those in post-compulsory settings; moreover, they demand that the long overdue discussion about educational purpose is an all-sector one, not one reserved for those in schools, or those in any other setting.
Skills for Jobs: a chink of light or a lack of ambition?
Given the recent publication of a new Skills for Jobs White Paper focused on post compulsory provision that the government claims will “revolutionise post-16 education, reshape the training landscape and help the nation build back better” (DFE, 2021), the hope ought to be that these and other reforms will be even more ambitious.
Skills for jobs? Yes. But, with employment likely to be less stable, work playing a lesser role in the lives of many (if not all) and careers increasingly fluid and multiple, education – compulsory and post-compulsory – needs to be for much, much more than just the workplace.
Children entering Reception Class this autumn will need to be prepared for a world that is ever-changing; they will need a new agility and adaptability, they will find their careers in industries that don’t yet exist, and they will need to engage in learning as a lifelong, life-wide project.
This promises a transformation in the purpose and form of statutory schooling; those in the post-compulsory phase may be best placed to offer the guidance and support that their school-based colleagues will surely both need and welcome.
Headline writers, media pundits, parents and politicians may not agree on many things but on one aspect of lockdown they are united: the closure of schools is the lockdown strategy of last resort. Notwithstanding the growth in home schooling, evidence of a new relationship between the home and the school, and a new embrace for online pedagogies, few in education would disagree. However, the assumptions that underpin this unity need to be unpicked, and the experience of learners explored, if we are to learn some of the most important lessons of lockdown.
Based on conversations with over one hundred pupils, parents and professionals in special, primary and secondary schools, my new book, Lessons from Lockdown: the Educational Legacy of COVID-19, is an attempt to capture these experiences, and the emergent reality is much more nuanced than the headlines suggest. In respect of supporting able students, I identify here three themes that I believe are especially pertinent and elaborate on these below.
1. The need for curriculum catch-up varies enormously within and between schools, and between individual students
Behind the widespread panic about school closures – whether that be close to total, as was experienced in the spring and summer or ‘bubble by bubble’ as it has been since September – lies the assumption that children have been ‘missing out’ and missing out, in particular, on curriculum content. This fear of missing out – and the consequent need to ‘catch-up’ – sits at the heart of many media headlines and politicians’ pronouncements. There can be no doubt that some children have missed out enormously, and that the socio-economically disadvantaged and those living in challenging domestic circumstances have suffered most. Nor can it be denied that those in examination cohorts have had to navigate their courses through a choppy and much varied landscape, and here the variability of experience is the critical issue. Since the stuttering re-openings of first June and then September, no two schools in the same locality have had the same route from lockdown. But claims of a universal educational Armageddon are wide of the mark. In this mix, and in almost every setting, some young people have prospered: the children who have blossomed as a result of the previously scarce family time afforded to them, those who have valued the freedom of home-learning, those who have enjoyed pushing on through an examination specification at their own speed and have consequently gained ground. In this regard the re-introduction to school of these ‘lockdown-thrivers’, as I identify them in Lessons From Lockdown, is not without its challenges, especially when the ‘disaffected-able’ form a part of this cohort.
Against this background, the smartest ‘catch-up’ strategies have started with diagnosis of need, not its presumption, and proceeded to offer highly personalised support that is particular to the learner, the group and the bubble. This, of course, is strongest when it is informed by exactly the methodologies modelled by those working either with the most able or those facing particular learning challenges.
2. The social purpose of schooling has been underlined as never before
Whatever the challenges of curriculum ‘catch-up’, what might be termed social catch-up is far more complex. But, if this challenge is not addressed, it will feed through into reduced wellbeing and lower educational attainment. The reason for this is straightforward: inclusion is not the poor relation of attainment; rather, and especially for those young people at either end of ability and motivational ranges, it is the pre-requisite for educational success, howsoever measured. Provided that we have the resources (a pretty big ‘provided’), we have the skills and the knowledge, especially within networks such as that provided by the NACE community, to advise on and deliver curriculum catch-up: booster classes, revision modules, targeted interventions, personal study plans and so on. Not so, social catch-up: how do you address the gaps left by virtually a year without play dates for the seven-year-old, or by several months of those evenings and weekends usually spent with friends, often not really doing anything, as a teenager?
In short, whatever the educational purpose of schools, their social (not to mention the socio-economic) purpose has been underlined by the pandemic, and with it the vital contribution that this makes to the development of the young. It may be time to give far more status to the social purpose of schools and to appraise their success against a much broader scorecard. At risk of repetition, wellbeing is not a nicety to be considered after good grades have been assured; it is the foundation block on which achievement rests.
3. The challenge lies not in getting back to where we were, but to deciding where we want (and need) to go
Towards the close of our focus group and interview-based discussions, I posed one key question: what can’t you wait to get back to, and what can’t you wait to leave behind? Highly structured systems (or ‘total institutions’ as Erving Goffman termed them over fifty years ago) tend to reproduce themselves over time and are remarkably resilient of change. The military, hospitals, prisons, our public service bureaucracies and, of course, schools, are such institutions. Their tendency is to maximise the feeling of change while minimising its impact. How else might we explain why generations of educational reform have delivered a curriculum that still mirrors that offered in the post-war schools of three-quarters of a century ago? Why else might we have overseen the building of a swathe of new schools at the turn of this century constructed on the exact template of their predecessors? Highly structured organisations such as schools (and there is no doubting the need for such structure) usually change only as the result of a profound system shock. The pandemic has provided just such a shock; so, the question is straightforward, even if the answer is far from simple: where do we want and need to go from here, and how are we going to get there?
Schooling will be different after all of this. As a profession, and as a community of interest – one particularly committed to identifying, supporting and unlocking potential in able children – we need to ensure that we work with colleagues, and their specific communities of interest, to shape the schooling of the future. If we don’t, it will surely be done for us, and to us (again).
For nine years, between 2001 and 2010, I had the privilege to lead the Citizenship Foundation, one of the pre-eminent voices in the movement to establish Citizenship Education in the National Curriculum in English schools. The Foundation was one of several founding partners who together established the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT), the membership body for those who continue to deliver this key, but too often ignored, curriculum entitlement. In an article in the issue 52 of the ACT journal, Teaching Citizenship, published in November 2020, I explore the key role that Citizenship educators, and others across the wider social curriculum, need to play if we are to effectively renew our schooling system in light of the pandemic. An extended version of the article, Classrooms, Boardrooms and Staffrooms: post pandemic landscapes for citizenship education and citizenship educators, is reproduced below.
Background
Fifteen or so years ago, with Citizenship then a relatively new Foundation Subject of the National Curriculum in secondary schools, Barry Dufour and I, with the support of colleagues at what was then the Citizenship Foundation (and is now Young Citizens) developed the concept of the Citizenship-rich school, giving expression to this in our edited collection, Developing Citizens: a comprehensive introduction to citizenship education in the secondary school (2006) and in a range of practitioner focused journals, including Teaching Citizenship. In this article I set out why I believe that there is merit in revisiting the concept in light of the remaining challenges facing those of us in Citizenship Education, developments in what I would contend are the related fields of localism and governance, and through the opportunities (and need) for post pandemic educational reform.
The remaining challenge for Citizenship educators
With a chasm remaining in our society where political literacy should be, it seems to me that Citizenship Education is more needed than ever, but perhaps less visible in our schools than at any time since the subject’s addition to the National Curriculum in 2002. This had followed the publication of the first of three reports from independent advisory committees Chaired by Professor (later Sir) Bernard Crick. The first report, Education for citizenship and the teaching of democracy in schools (QCA, 1998), outlined the need for Citizenship Education during the years of statutory education, the second argued for such provision for those in Further Education and training, Citizenship for 16-19 Year Olds in Education and Training (FEFC, 2000), while the third, The New and the Old (Home Office, 2003) focused on the educational needs of newcomers to Britain, and those long-settled migrants seeking the formal status of British Citizenship.
At the heart of Crick’s model of Citizenship, especially in the inaugural schools-focused report, was a three-dimensional model that conceptualised Citizenship as being composed of a set of interrelated strands: social and moral responsibility, political literacy and community involvement. Amongst these, the focus on a model of citizenship that placed political literacy at its core was distinctive. It heralded a model not just of ‘active’ citizenship but of effective citizenship – a citizenship not simply marked out by kindness and care but one that sought to empower, give agency and transform. This wasn’t about earnest young people helping elders to cross a road (whether or not the latter wished to do so) or about digging their gardens (irrespective of whether they had requested such “random acts of kindness”); it was about individuals working together to shape society and it was about responding to a democratic deficit that remains as strong today as when Crick reported. Addressing such a deficit had been a lifetime’s work for Crick, whose earlier efforts had included the establishment of the Politics Association and authoring the seminal text, In Defence of Politics (1962). He was later, of course, to establish the Association for Citizenship Teaching itself.
Crick’s Legacy
Crick’s endeavours helped to spawn a series of further reports, and a number of related policy innovations, including the introduction of a Statutory Duty on schools to promote Community Cohesion, a foray into a prolonged debate about what has been termed a “Statement of British Values” (but which might better be thought of as a “British Statement of Values”) and, controversially, the launch of the PREVENT initiative. Five post-Crick reports are particularly notable: Sir Keith Ajegbo’s report, Diversity and Citizenship, which led to the addition of a fourth strand concerned with Diversity and Inclusion to Crick’s framework for Citizenship in the National Curriculum, Peter (Lord) Goldsmith’s Report, Citizenship: Our Common Bond (2007) and the report of the Commission on Integration and Commission, led by Darra Singh, Our Shared Future (2007), both of which focused on the notion of shared values as the connecting glue of any ‘lived’ model of Citizenship, and Learning through Life: Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning, supported by NIACE and written by Tom Schuller and David Watson (NIACE, 2009), which focused on the need to enable adults (who had rarely benefited from any form of political education during their school years) to access Citizenship Education through Adult and Community Learning programmes. Finally, one of Crick’s shrewdest moves was to convince the Department for Education to commission the National Foundation for Educational Research to launch the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study, led by Professor David Kerr, into the impact of the introduction of Citizenship Education in schools, and related initiatives. The CELS study as it has become known, produced a whole series of important reports and research summaries.
The point of this historical tour is to give a sense the sheer scale of activity in the Citizenship Education sphere that characterised the years between 1997 and 2010 and to draw on this work and subsequent activity – led by, amongst others, ACT, Young Citizens and the alliance formed by both organisations in 2009, Democratic Life – in revisiting the potential of the Citizenship-rich school as a concept for re-energising the Citizenship Education agenda and the broader social curriculum within which it sits. Moreover, my own work, over the past five years in the school governance arena and in exploring the links between educational provision and localism, has caused me to reflect on whether recent innovations in school governance, in part following my own reports, Who Governs Our Schools? Trends, Tensions and Opportunities (RSA, 2017) and A Place for Learning: putting learning at the heart of citizenship, civic identity and community life (RSA, 2016) may open up new conduits for developing new forms of Citizenship-rich schooling in the sort of post-pandemic landscape that I discuss in my latest book, Lessons from Lockdown: the educational legacy of COVID-19 (Routledge, 2021, forthcoming).
Revisiting the Citizenship-rich school
The concept of the Citizenship-rich school emerged to some degree because of the debate about the nature of Citizenship as a subject, an issue thrown into sharp focus by its inclusion, as just that, in the National Curriculum, a theme that I had explored in a pair of articles published in early editions of Teaching Citizenship, A Citizenship Manifesto for Every School (Vo.2, No.1; Breslin, 2002) and New Subject: New Type of Subject (Vol.4, No.2; Breslin, 2004). The first article explored the Manifesto idea which, as I recall, had emerged from a teacher workshop that I had led in Autumn 2001 in which we considered the diversity of citizenship learning experiences that young people might be exposed to as they worked their way through secondary education and through the newly statutory Citizenship curriculum in particular: opportunities to engage in charitable, community and enterprise projects, opportunities to seek election and represent their peers through various student voice conduits, visiting schemes, mock Parliament and mock trial projects and competitions, the study of different social movements in subjects such as History and Sociology, school-based volunteering initiatives, and so on. The problem with many of these opportunities, especially those with a participative dimension, was that they were (and are) sometimes dominated by a small group of students. Perhaps through a manifesto-based approach, schools could commit to delivering an entitlement – curricular and extra-curricular, within Citizenship classrooms and across the curriculum – for all secondary age students across years seven to eleven, delivering a genuinely experiential model of Citizenship Education to all young people.
The second article explored Citizenship as a subject, and a new kind of subject. In particular, its aim was to get away from the false “do you teach it as a distinct subject or do you ‘go’ cross-curricular” dichotomy that was prevalent at the time. At a teachers’ CPD seminar staged at the London office of the National Union of Teachers in early 2002, I recall one nationally profiled Head responding to my presentation with the comment “Tony, you can’t teach citizenship in forty-five minute lessons – you’ll bore the kids to death”. My response was quick and a little sharper than I intended: “Well, that’s never stopped us with Maths, English, History, Geography…” As Barry Dufour and I were later to argue in Developing Citizens, the choice is not between ‘subject’ or ‘cross-curricular’ approaches but how they are combined. As too many schools have found (but too few have acknowledged), cross-curricular approaches, as I remarked at a Select Committee hearing into the teaching of Citizenship Education (TSO, 2007), can quickly dissolve into no coverage at all: doing Citizenship everywhere can amount to doing it nowhere, but if Citizenship has a proper curricular home, evidenced by a place on the timetable (and usually that means more than adding the letter ‘C’ in the non-specialist delivery of PSHEE), it can flourish because of this anchorage point elsewhere in the curriculum, be this through the study of the Suffragettes in History, the consideration of Community in Geography or the use of voting data in Maths.
Citizenship Education in the classroom (and beyond)
This combination of subject-specific and cross-curricular delivery flourishes best in an environment that itself nurtures and models Citizenship in its day-to-day practice, while doing so alongside a clear and identifiable curriculum programme for the delivery of Citizenship.
Such an environment is provided by the Citizenship-rich school. In this kind of setting, there are multiple opportunities for student engagement and the expression of student voice, a variety of programmes that enable charitable endeavour and volunteering, an open environment that welcomes parental and community involvement, strong ties with this community and a well-resourced, visible, high status Citizenship curriculum, typically delivered by a specialist team.
Thus, the cliched binary between Citizenship Education being “caught or taught” is dissolved. In the Citizenship-rich school, Citizenship is both taught and caught, and the school is both transformed as a community and in the community. In shifting from a ‘cross-curricular theme’, a status that effectively cast Citizenship as less than a subject, pre-Crick (one of six appended, retrospectively, to the original National Curriculum), it promised to become more than a subject after Crick. In truth, in too many secondary schools, it remains a promise largely undelivered.
Citizenship in process in the Boardroom
The practice of local governance is a practice in engaged citizenship. Indeed, the relative loss of power amongst local governing boards in some Multi-Academy Trust and Federation settings and, in a minority of cases, their removal, is an issue that should concern all committed to localism and local democracy.
Nonetheless, across the UK, over 250,000 volunteer citizens continue to be engaged as school governors or academy trustees, with the majority embarking on the route to governance when their children are pupils at schools in their local communities. The engagement of governors in the appointment, support and appraisal of school leaders, the setting and approval of school budgets, the oversight of of arrangements for safeguarding and wellbeing, the sign-off of school improvement strategies and the framing of the values, ethos and strategic direction to which schools commit represent one of our society’s key conduits for citizen engagement and agency. Moreover, the opportunity to build bridges between school governance and other forms of student, staff and parent engagement has the potential to be both educative and empowering. Indeed, such bridge-building is vital if a school is to genuinely consider itself “Citizenship-rich”.
Why? Because to fail to do this is to exchange an ever-richer participation pathway along which individuals can progress, should they have the commitment to do so, with relative ease for a hierarchy of disconnected participation layers according different levels of agency and implied importance to those participating through different channels. In short, the risk is that governors make decisions, the Parent Teacher Association makes cakes, and the school council plays games. In healthy, Citizenship-rich communities, participation opportunities sit along multiple, interconnected participation continuums – less a ladder of participation (to use the phrase popular in the participation literature), more a scaffolding of engagement with multiple access points, and a Boardroom door that is open to inputs and presentations from actors across the school community, not least the children and young people for whom it exists.
Citizenship Educators in the staffroom
The original National Curriculum had effectively removed the social sciences from the curriculum at Key Stage 4. Although subjects such as Sociology, Government and Politics and Psychology survived (and often thrived) in the sixth form, a significant proportion involved in the delivery of the social sciences moved into Further Education. This both weakened the capacity of schools to deliver high quality and specialist PSHE – a decade before Crick’s report was commissioned – and changed the dynamics of many school staffrooms, because these social curriculum specialists had often played a key role in school staff communities, for instance as professional association representatives and staff governors.
That cohort of Citizenship Education specialists who have subsequently emerged to support the delivery of National Curriculum Citizenship – many of whom are ACT members and readers of this journal – are the natural successors to these earlier staffroom activists, and, certainly, the post pandemic school-scape needs an injection of the kind of political literacy that those leading on the social curriculum are especially likely to possess if the expertise of the staffroom is to have its proper place in a re-purposing of schooling that, as I outline in Lessons From Lockdown, is already underway.
Moreover, with the resurgence of agendas around safeguarding, wellbeing and inclusion, their underscoring in the inspection framework launched in September 2019 (Ofsted, 2019), and the rebalancing of the standards-inclusion nexus that this implies, those with an expertise in Citizenship Education and the social curriculum are well placed to make an informed and expert contribution to these debates, in leadership teams, staffrooms and school communities more broadly.
Citizenship Educators and post Pandemic Landscapes
COVID-19 has provided a system shock that has rocked a range of our key institutions, especially those that have a habit of reproducing themselves across generations, and schooling is just such an institution. As such, post pandemic schooling is likely to differ significantly from that on offer before the virus: modes of in-class delivery, parental engagement and digital enablement are changing in a range of ways, a number of which will endure in the long term. Blended learning is likely to become the norm, rather than a quirky outlet for the technologically-confident. Home schooling is revealing itself as an option to far more than previously, and the myth that schooling works for all has finally been exposed – amongst all the headlines of educational Armageddon and the ‘disaster’ of closing schools, the tale has sometimes been lost, that, for some students, the forced closure of schools may have revealed an alternative to mass schooling that they may not previously have consciously sought.
These developments, and many, many others, provide rich terrains for both the Citizenship classroom and the Citizenship educator, and for the boardroom and staffroom. Throughout lockdown and the painful, partial, stuttering exit from it, politicians have stressed the need to “follow the science”; they might have been wise to follow the social science too. In our classrooms, staffrooms and boardrooms, citizenship educators might be amongst those best placed to do so.
Most Heads that I’ve spoken with in recent weeks have described the past month or so as one of their most challenging in headship, especially because most schools remain open to support the children of keyworkers and those who are vulnerable.
Since lockdown, there has been much discussion about SATs, GCSEs and A levels but these debates barely scratch the surface of what Heads are currently managing, and the nuanced nature of the day-to-day judgement calls that they are having to make, a task that they are passionate about getting right but one which is far from easy: Who counts as a keyworker? Who counts as a vulnerable child? What level of support should and can schools realistically provide for home study? How well is a particular school equipped to deal with the provision of such support? What does school look like for those still in attendance? How are we going to say good-bye to those moving on to junior or secondary school, or to college, university or employment, or to much-loved staff who are leaving us? Oh, and what am I going to do about the governors?
As governors, one of the things we have to do is to find a way to take that last question off the table, to go governance-light, without going governance-free; we cannot do the latter because our legal and moral responsibilities as members of Governing Boards (as recent advice from the Department for Education and the National Governance Association makes clear) do not disappear. However, we must do the former, and go governance-light, because, frankly, much of the really important stuff that we do in ordinary times will, like the economy, just have to wait. By comparison with those challenges facing Heads on a daily basis, our predicament is much less pressing. Nonetheless, it remains important.
So, what might. ’governance-light’ look like? No trite answers here, but three questions that we might wish to ponder:
The principle behind all of this is simple: we need to ensure that the tone of meetings, messages, phone calls or other communications is entirely at the support end of the ‘support-challenge’ continuum, so that, as the DFE put it, school leaders can “get on with operational matters”; if this were our usual practice, it would not amount to good governance. But these, as we are all too aware, are not ordinary times.
Of course, this will mean some catch-up activity further down the line, but it may also cause us to focus, as never before, on what really matters, and on the quality of our collaboration and partnership. Long term, this may lead to better, more effective governance, and a range of practices that weren’t even on the horizon a month or two ago.
And maybe, just maybe, as we approach another day, week or month in this socially-distanced landscape, let’s be sure to use any time that, as governors, we have to think creatively and pre-emptively in a way that the pace of an ordinary school year denies us.
Right now, we might yearn for that ordinariness but, in the interim, we need to consider the longer-term impact of the system-shock delivered to our schools, and the wider education system, by the virus; schools and school governance might never be the same again. As governors, let’s play our part in shaping the new, as yet unknown, post-COVID-19 reality.