Covid and the Recovery Curriculum

There has been a lot of stimulating talk about the kind of curriculum needed for children returning to school after Covid, whether this term that is coming to a rapid end today, or in September. I don’t know anyone more qualified than Barry Carpenter to talk about this, particularly with his well-known balance of wide understanding of SEND and a compassion that stretches into every school he deals with. The Chartered College of Teaching caught up with him at a webinar I was privileged to listen to earlier this week, and it is worth sharing the link and getting people to listen to. Barry’s presentation takes just 30 minutes, though there is a Q&A session hosted by Dame Alison Peacock afterwards.

As well as a guide to some of the really critical resources that schools will need, Barry expounded the sense of loss that children and young people will feel – routine, friendship, structure, opportunity (especially to succeed in planned-for exams) and freedom. The sense of bereavement, attachment, anxiety and trauma he has seen and could foresee was very moving, thinking for instance of the fact that children, who need to be smiled at, will not know that smile if we are all masked up, relying on reading a teacher’s eyes. He believed that many of these features, along with the hyper-vigilance we have all got used to, the lack of trust and its accompanying fear and anxiety, and the mourning of teachers and friends and schools because so many are leaving one school or year group and moving to another without a proper goodbye, and a closure of those relationships. He warned us as teachers that children will have these varying levels of anxiety even if they feel confident and secure.

Recovery, as outlined in his recovery curriculum, will need to be holistic (for all, because all have been anxious, even adults), focused (for most, who need a highly personalised response because of the variety of experiences during lockdown), and deep (for those who will need nurture and who have been very damaged as a result). Thinking about the need for each child to have a register of significant events documenting what happened to them during lockdown (parent ill, grandparent died, loss of job, loss of income, furlough), Barry said that learning from the experience of educators in Christchurch after the earthquake of 2011 proved helpful in this. This register would be shared appropriately within the school so that each teacher had an idea of what children had gone through during the earthquake. A pandemic register for each child would help both keep a history, take children seriously, and allow a teacher’s compassion to be properly focused, and rooted in a child’s experience.

Five levers were necessary, Barry believed, to help us take action:

• relationships: we need to reach out to greet people deliberately, to restore, joyfully, the sense of welcome and belonging, in order to cushion the discomfort of enforced social distancing.
• community: we need to broaden the community we are part of in schools – engage with them, listen to them, understand their concerns, grow together with them, enabling teachers, parents and children to be part of one community together. There is such a moment here: it could completely realign our partnership with parents.
• meta-cognition: we need to scaffold learning explicitly, in order to restore confidence to those who have forgotten the skills of being a learner.
• transparency in curriculum: young people will want to know what they have just experienced, the big picture of Covid, its origins and prognosis, and what people think will happen in the future and how to prepare for it. This will have to be a curriculum we co-construct.
• space and time: we will all need time and space to be, to rediscover our self-image, our self-concept, self-esteem, self-confidence, and this will not happen quickly, and might look quite different at the end.

We are going to need, Barry concluded, “creativity, care and compassion on a scale we have never embraced before.”