Lessons From Lockdown. The Experiences of Students, Teachers, and Administrators: U.K. Perspectives

• In Event: An International Study of the Cultural and Spatial Politics of Education During the COVID Pandemic

Abstract

This paper draws on evidence collated over an eighteen month period which has spawned two texts (Author, 2021; Author, 2022, forthcoming) and a series of articles and blogs. These have drawn on a shared database constructed through:

• A series of over 20 focus groups with pupils, parents and professionals, including school leaders and system influencers
• A number of one-to-one interviews with individuals in these cohorts
• An analysis of media coverage from March 2020 to September 2021
• An initial review of the emergent literature during this period.

While the focus has been on the UK experience, the work has spawned a series of three collaborative sessions with US-based educators and a focus group drawing on the experience of educators, educational leaders and educational researchers from a range of settings internationally.

The focus has revealed a series of headline findings, five of which form the core of this paper, namely that:

1. The pandemic has rendered visible challenges with which educators were already familiar but which COVID-19 has rendered undeniable, notably those around equality, equity and the impact of socio-economic disadvantage
2. The reality is that no two children and no two schools have had the same lockdown, and nor have they had a singular and consistent experience throughout the lockdown
3. The wider social and economic role of schooling, acutely visible during the pandemic, is arguably at least as important as the specific educational purpose with which schools are (rightly) charged
4. So called ’catch-up’ and ‘recovery’ strategies are overly focused on matters of ‘learning loss’ rather than on the impact of COVID on the wider development of children, such that deficits in say Mathematics or English are prefaced ahead of, for instance, addressing the impact on a seven year old of a year’s missed playdates or the impact on a fourteen year old of not been able to mix freely with peers in the less restricted areas of the school campus, and beyond its gates
5. There is an emergent disjuncture between the narratives of system leaders, focused on “getting back to normal”, and educators intent on utilising the disruptive potential of the past 18 months to initiate a wider debate about how schooling might be different after lockdown

The last disjuncture has generated a set of questions explored in each of the focus groups and interviews, and crystalised in the suite of questions that guide the wider project within which this paper sits; these call on educators to reflect on the nature of schooling immediately prior to lockdown, and ask:

a. What can’t I wait to get back to?
b. What can’t I wait to leave behind?
c. What are my “COVID-keeps”, those practices established during lockdown that I hope to retain in its aftermath?

Responding to these questions will ultimately allow practitioners and policymakers to unpick the lessons from lockdown and to apply these in the schooling landscapes that follow.

Author

• Tony Breslin, University of York