We are approaching the end of half term and again discussing the potential return to school for all children. We all know the talk will inevitably come back to that worst of all phrases in my opinion ‘catch-up curriculum’. I find it so frustrating on many levels and actually feel it simply adds pressure where no one needs it, least of all our children. We have educators who have been having to plan, teach and engage children, children attempting to access education and learn and parents supporting their children’s learning, all in a way they have never done before. 

I appreciate that there are concerns for the most vulnerable children, and they are obviously my ‘cup of tea’, and I don’t deny that for many children they may not have had the best, if any meaningful educational input over recent weeks despite people’s best efforts. However, at the other extreme we will have children who have completed excessive education over recent weeks, as they will come from households that have really responded to all the anxiety around how far children are falling behind. 

My concern is that our education system is built on the presumption that outcomes and impact are measured in data. My belief is that this should not be the case. Data is a contributory factor that gives us one quantitative indication of how we are supporting a child in their education is working or not. I have always felt that a child being happy to go to school, excited about their learning and proud of their achievements is the greatest indication of whether a school is meeting their needs and helping them progress. This was easy to say from the side-line, the potential tension arose when as a Virtual School Head I still felt that this was the greatest indication, yet this was not how the value or success of a Virtual School, nor any school is ‘measured’ by most people.  

Do not get me wrong I am not saying that I do not believe that a child’s attainment and progress are not important, and I am as anxious as the next parent to see my children’s school reports to see how they are doing as compared to expected levels. I more importantly however want to see that they are making progress and that they are still keen to learn. My measure of a good teacher at parent’s evening is not how well they explain the levels, it is always how well they can demonstrate that they know my child. I want to know that they ‘get them’ and are therefore keen to help my child reach their potential. As a Virtual School Head or any Headteacher, the data concerning the children on your school roll is the thing that you get asked the most about. However, for me and for so many excellent Senior Leaders in education that I have worked with over the years, they would much rather tell you about the actual children themselves and their stories of the important things that they have accomplished. Sometimes this may be about attainment and progress, however sometimes the incredibly journey that they have made cannot be seen in the levels, the numbers or the percentages. 

Just think for a moment think about the child whose parents have never really supported school attendance, and for who school was not a pleasant memory and so their feelings towards education are either ambivalent or negative. This child has a lack of routine and boundaries at home and has never learnt to emotionally regulate. This child finds school overwhelming, frightening and confusing. The teacher who has this child in their class finds this child challenging and distracting and so, to meet everyone’s needs initially, the child spends majority of any school day outside their class, with a Teaching Assistant one-to-one. In the first term, the majority of the Teaching Assistant’s day feels like they are just trying to stop the child climbing the walls (literally), running off or hurting someone. The Teaching Assistant is constantly looking for danger, because that is where the child is. Its stressful and emotional for both and little learning is achieved. Ad-hoc and rudimentary attempts to ‘assess’ the child and determine how good they are at Maths and English seem to indicate that surprise, surprise this child is significantly below expected levels. 

This is a skilled Teaching Assistant however, who works well with the Teacher and between them they spend a lot of time considering and planning how to best meet this child’s needs. They have understood the priority in the first term was building a relationship and helping the child to feel less hypervigilant in school. They know that this the only way that this child will ever be able to access their learning brain. So, by the next term the child is beginning to access some learning with the Teaching Assistant. She is able to encourage some small bursts of learning in creative and imaginative ways, and the child is able to demonstrate that actually he is much more able than people realised. She is a tad frustrated that some of his best learning is difficult to evidence, as it is him calling out number bonds as he bounces a ball around the sports hall in an effort to regulate, or doing some phonics whilst commando crawling across the floor. However, she persists, and there are those small periods of engagement and concentration where the child is accessing some work at the level of his peers. Whilst he is still regarded as below expected, it is felt that this is less so than before. According to the data this child is closer to expected in terms of attainment and has made progress. 

By the third term, the adults have continued to work as a team to support the child. They now have built really supportive and trusting relationships with him, and he knows that they have his back. He still finds school quite overwhelming, but he is less frightened and there are lots of strategies in place to help him find it all less confusing. The aim is for the child is to spend increasing amounts of time in his class with his peers. He is managing this most days for some period of time. He is managing to not always need his Teaching Assistant sat with him and he is making friends. He does need lots of sensory breaks, and by the afternoon he is often really tired and so can find this time in school more challenging. When his work is now assessed, because he is working more independently it varies quite significantly in terms of the quality and whilst sometimes it is sitting at just below expected levels, other times there is a lack of evidence, therefore it is regarded that the child is working below expected. 

The data therefore tells us that the child continues to not be doing overly well in terms of attainment, and sadly there has been no progress this term. The reality, as I hope you can see, is an entirely different story. This is a child where progress from the first to the third term is phenomenal. This is a child who has a school that understands and is responding to his complex needs, and the result is that the child is beginning to see school as a huge positive in his life. This child has made friends and for some of the time is managing to cope with these relationships and function within his class. In terms of getting this child prepared for surviving in the real world, the progress that has been made is incredible. This is a child who now has some understanding of strategies he can use to help him access his learning brain. This is a child where the actual impact of all this amazing work may not be seen in data for years to come. This is a child who now has a chance of surviving mainstream education and achieving some qualifications. Without these interventions however, the only data that this child may have ended up on is exclusion figures. These are the stories that people working in education actually want to tell, rather than publishing or discussing data, that merely tells a part of the story (and rarely the most interesting part!). 

So, when I think about ‘catch-up’ it also makes me sad that we are not acknowledging some of the vital skills that some children will have developed over lockdown. Their learning being different, creative and away from school, has brought new opportunities that may just hold them in good stead for the real world. We have got primary children who without the formality of the classroom, and with parents often working at home too, are having to work independently. They are beginning to realise that sometimes they have to motivate themselves or things will not get completed. We have got primary children who can now log on to a computer, check their emails, look up their schedule for the day on their calendar and then access a learning platform to see what their work is for the day. I don’t know about your experience, but my 10-year-old certainly couldn’t do that prior to lockdown. Children have learnt that they have to set alarms to remind them about their class reading, or double check emails to make sure they are clicking and pasting the links correctly. Fantastic life skills that are genuinely useful in the real world.

My eldest child who is in secondary school has particularly amazed me. Not simply because of the quality of her academic work, but at her attitude. She has always been conscientious and a hard worker, however I had never appreciated how good she was at problem solving and her determination is reassuring to observe. When faced the other day with a dilemma, instead of giving up because the sheet would not print in the format it had been sent, she had worked out that she could screen shot it and print it and thus complete the task. I know adults that I have worked with in the past who would not have got to that conclusion, and who would have chosen instead to wait for someone else to fix the issue. We hear time and time again, that because we cannot possibly know the types of jobs many of our children will do in the future, because technology is moving so fast, we need to equip our children with transferrable skills that will make them successful in roles that don’t even exist yet. I feel reassured that my daughter with her problem-solving skills is on the right path, and I don’t think either of us would have felt quite the same about that had lockdown not occurred. The unique situation presented problems that needed fixing and often no-one knew how to fix them. In school, children trust that the teachers can fix anything!

There is also learning I have undertaken. Despite my knowledge about sensory systems, and the fantastic work of people like Sarah Lloyd (google BUSS model to find out more). I have been forced to adjust some of my thinking about how children learn. I know from the work I have done with Sarah that some children will struggle to sit still as we expect them to do in school, and I understand why. Despite all this, as we first contemplated home learning as a family, we all found ways to create the chair and desk scenarios that ‘looked’ appropriate and made it feel like we were doing this working from home lark seriously. As time has gone on however it all looks a little different. I would find myself looking anxiously at my son, slouched on the sofa with his pad on his knees, thinking about how he was possibly going to write neatly in that position. I would find my daughter huddled over on her bed, wrapped in a blanket hoodie, and my instinctive thought would be, how on earth is she concentrating like that. And then I would see the incredible piece of writing my son had produced or see the considered answers my daughter had given to her science assessment. It turns out that our children being comfortable was sometimes way more important than whether they looked traditionally ready to learn. My son was marching round the room the other day working out his personification and they are some of the best sentences he has ever written. 

It made me really consider some of the things we do in school and why we do them. As the corporate world moves further away from people being tied to their desks, with hot desking, breakout rooms and café spaces. With the introduction of standing desks, desks with bikes and even desks with sleep pods, why on earth are our places entirely designed for learning and creativity not changing too. We watched the film ‘The Internship’ the other day and it really made me think. If Google gets that its employees will be more solution-focused and creative with an environment that includes sensory stimulation and also places to be calm and retreat, it’s not surprising that these same things work in schools. Thinking about my role as Virtual School Head, it was amazing in the first lockdown to see children thriving when learning at home. Without the pressure of going to school and all that meant for them, they were calm and felt safe and could therefore access their learning brain. And the most surprising part – they really wanted to! 

My fear then is that instead of learning some of these valuable lessons, and instead of thinking about the good stuff that may just have come out of this, we will instead just focus on catch-up. We will return as quickly as possible to our traditional approaches and things that actually some of the people in schools know don’t work. We will do all this because I believe we are more driven by data than children. Surely the role of schools should not be producing data, surely the focus and the measure of success should be whether it is producing children that will be successful as the adults of the future? I worry that we will scrutinise that data, focus entirely on what is not there, and miss the point. A quote which genuinely makes me smile:

 Aaron Levenstein

Let’s ensure that the focus when our children return to school is ensuring that they are happy and safe. That they have chance to enjoy the social aspects that they have missed out on, and that time is dedicated to building up those trusted relationships that actually make all the difference. The data will only tell us a small part of the story and focuses on our need to teach children the answers, when for me we should be teaching our children how to solve the problems. Let’s not talk about catch-up, please let’s reassess where we actually are and start from there, because in some respects we are in an entirely different place, and the learning journey took a huge diversion. If we talk about catch-up we ignore all this and go back to the point on the journey we were at over a year ago and that would be such a waste. What our children need on their return to school is curiosity about their learning and kindness to help them settle again. 

#justbekind #statisticsarelikebikinis