On long-COVID in education
(Not all) dire predictions about the health of our schools, teachers and students
This newsletter isn’t going to be all negative. I’m determined. But it has been spurred by a recent tweet: School leader Anne Gripton has captured the educational zeitgeist and my own feed confirms it. Things are fairly dire and they’re going to get worse.
It feels for many like three years of reactivity building up to fever pitch for many of the world’s teachers. But it is worth stating what’s been different this year so far, so that we can consider whether to take a business-as-usual approach or set a direction in a proactive way.
I remember the first year of COVID academic reporting as being unusually fraught, considering how nebulous the NESA outcomes felt, with no marks or ranks. If this method of reporting was frustrating for me, imagine how it felt for parents. Oh wait, I did receive a year worth of generic-comment reports. In hindsight (notoriously 20/20) I think for just two weeks of lockdown, this response was extreme. But are we heading for an overcorrection by reporting as though the worst is over? Will mitigating the ‘soft’ness of reports feel like a cop-out to parents? Jan Ruscoe has shared her concerns about papering over educational long-COVID. We don’t have daily Premier’s updates, lockdowns or in many cases even masking to back moves that might obviate the inevitable queries we get where progress has not been made, despite COVID being ostensibly over.
Being in a small environment, I have been protected from rolling staffing issues that other schools have faced. But winter is coming. The free RAHT supply is over, doors will be closed, heaters will be on. Anecdotally, some teachers are falling ill a second time after only four weeks. Some basic calculations suggest to me that some subjects in the HSC were scaled generously last year, due to the disruption. This year has been far more disruptive for many Stage 6 students, but will NESA adopt the ‘let it rip’ strategy and expect that after three years of interrupted learning, teachers will magically fill those learning gaps? I realise that this also raises the question of whether those standards will ever be regained, and that’s another question mark over long-COVID.
The really unexpected aspect of long-COVID in schools, for me, has been the rise in discipline issues. It seems that students are struggling to maintain self-control. Is this a lack of socialisation after successive lockdowns, cancelled sport seasons, and a start-stop social life? When I was a kid my friends and I used to prank call people in the phone book and hang up in fits of giggles. At my child’s school, students are creating fake profiles online and petitioning for the principal to be sacked, and creating fabricated evidence of cyberbullying. With adolescence extending into young people’s 20s and crime at an all time low, our students are finding new avenues to be sociopaths in the only ways they know how.
In relation to long-COVID in education, I have some unsolicited advice for teachers and leaders. First, I think that pretending nothing is happening is stupid. I think we can mitigate a lot of what’s happening in schools (possibly not to schools but certainly a lot within) if we name what’s going on, head on. It serves nobody to pretend we are not mid-pandemic. Set realistic expectations with parents and staff. Accept that there will be learning gaps and intervene where possible - but don’t be afraid to ask for support. In terms of leadership, be swift, decisive and targeted. Stability is a luxury right now but accepting and acknowledging that we can’t be all things to all people will make teachers feel safe.
The silver lining, though, is that the Great Resignation has barely hit teaching yet. Schools can only delay long service leave requests for so long. Since the unions have done little to change working conditions, consider how your next appointment could be negotiated. A side effect of long-COVID is that schools need teachers more than teachers need schools. Can you negotiate a lighter teaching load for the same pay? Can you give extracurricular commitments a miss? Can you negotiate a day off?
A colleague mentioned to me last year that a job-share applicant had taken the conditions of their employment back to the negotiating table. I was shocked. I had quite literally never heard anyone question conditions like both workers having to complete professional development on their day off, or full time equivalent extracurricular loads. I hope this becomes more common, especially in the case of working women. It might be the only good thing to come out of COVID, but only if we know our worth.
I suppose my purpose in writing this is to put long-COVID on the radar. It’s year three and there are two ways of looking at the ‘new normal,’ a phrase I really, really despise. We can ‘let it rip’ and pretend it’s over, or we can continue to take a more proactive and measured approach, just like we did in ‘19 and ‘20: agile, realistic, supportive. The new normal is not normal.