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Coping with COVID-19 – “Allowances aren’t being made”

Nick Hurn, CEO of the Bishop Wilkinson Catholic Education Trust, shares his experience of responding to 2020’s series of tough and constantly evolving challenges

Nick Hurn OBE
by Nick Hurn OBE
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Our initial response to lockdown was somewhat mixed and uncoordinated. Each school had its own particular approach and differed in terms of their capability. Some were able to offer very good ICT and remote learning provision to their students; others, not so much.

And yet every school, even those that were initially under-resourced or less prepared, has got to the point where their students can access remote learning and lesson materials with a reasonable level of support.

From that early mixed approach we’ve since made massive strides, learnt from our best examples and sought to raise standards across the trust to the same high level.

Frequent disruptions

Being based in the north east, we’ve experienced frequent disruptions and had to cope with numerous student bubbles being sent home. As such, we’ve needed to be very cautious and carefully maintain our own track and trace systems.

All of our students work in bubbles, and will either stay in a particular location with staff coming to them, or move around the school one at a time. If someone should test positive, we’ll immediately identify which groups the individual was with, phone round parents, check registers to see who they’ve been in contact with and review their movements on the days prior and immediately after them being tested.

Discussions will then be had with the relevant LA’s public health team, after which a decision will be made as to which groups have to isolate.

We’ve tried to ensure our remote teaching resembles the classroom experience as closely as possible – for example, by issuing teachers with Wacom tablets so that they can easily present formulas and equations in maths, physics and chemistry lessons.

We also use some materials produced by the Oak National Academy programme and BBC Bitesize, and make a point of teaching students how to use the online facilities and resources available to them. It’s one thing to say that something is online, but quite another as to whether the students are using it effectively or not.

A key issue that concerns me right now is that allowances aren’t being made for the effects the pandemic is having in certain local populations compared to others, and the impact of that on next year’s exams.

Some of our students have spent four weeks in isolation, returned to school for a fortnight and then needed to isolate again, missing massive chunks of their learning in their process. And yet these students are going to be examined in exactly the same way as students in those parts of the country that have been barely affected at all, by comparison.

We need a slimmed-down curriculum that everybody can work towards, complete clarity as to what schools need to cover, and the time and opportunity to do that, whatever restrictions might be in effect across any given locality.

Above and beyond

A proportion of our students’ parents are highly engaged in their children’s learning, but we’ve often heard from others who would like to be more engaged and able to assist their children, but don’t know how.

We’ve found the parental communications platform Free Flow Info to be a really good vehicle for providing them with information and sharing various resources.

It’s more well-established in the trust’s primary schools, but it’s helped us find effective ways of supporting parents at secondary too. In English, for example, students might be studying a text like An Inspector Calls and be assigned a summarising activity for homework. A member of staff can use Free Flow Info to present parents with the key points their children should know about, and send parents their subsequent comments on the student’s completed work.

Needless to say, the past few months have been an incredibly stressful time for our staff. I get quite cross when I hear people suggest that teachers haven’t been in school or performing their roles, because it’s simply not true. What I’ve seen across our schools has been amazing, including staff organising deliveries of food parcels and many other things that go above and beyond the job.

I do worry about the prospect of burnout and our staff’s overall levels of mental health, which is why we’re very careful to support all our staff – particularly single parents who may be needing to self-isolate with their children at home, because there’s nobody else available to take care of them. In those situations we’d look to grant a paid leave of absence whenever we can.

Our staff are ultimately our biggest and most important resource – if we don’t provide them with sufficient care and support, what can we hope to achieve?

Future planning

One of the biggest challenges of this whole affair has been the constant churn, change and updates to the rules, like the introduction of the tiers system and its implications. We’ve managed all of that so far, but it’s been hard.

Blended learning is now a critical part of our future planning. If, God forbid, we’re facing another year of pandemic-related lockdowns, then we’re at least now prepared for it. We’ve implemented a strategy across the trust that allows every school to deliver a very high standard of tuition via Sharepoint, Google Classroom and Teams.

Longer term, we expect a number of our post-lockdown changes to remain in place. For instance, it’s unlikely that we’re going to assemble 50 people together in one space again for a meeting any time soon – but considering how many such meetings largely consist of information sharing, why would we need to? We still hold meetings, albeit not as frequently as before, among staff who are generally much more comfortable using Teams and Google than previously.

Out of this awful pandemic has come a great deal of innovation. We’ve implemented approaches we’ve wanted to pursue for a number of years, particularly the online resources we’re now able to offer students, supported by excellent video explanations from our best teachers (see ‘The view from the school’).

This type of distance provision will never replace classroom teaching, but it’s enabled us to provide interactive lessons for students on long-term absence due to COVID-19, or any other reason. Some good things have come out of this, and I’ve been really encouraged and impressed with what I’ve seen happening across our schools.

Trust statistics

Number of schools: 13 (eight primary, five secondary) Areas: Northumberland, Sunderland, Durham and Gateshead Total student population: approximately 8,000 Future expansion: 48 schools to be added by 2022

The view from the school

Jonathan Parkinson is the headteacher of St Thomas More Catholic School

What we’re currently asking staff to do is record every lesson they teach. At the base level, you can just use Google Hangout’s built in record button, but a few of us geeks in the school are now starting to use OBS Studio (obsproject.com) – open source broadcast software that enables livestreaming to YouTube.

As I’m teaching, I’ll identify certain sections of the lesson, be it a Q&A or a five-minute explanation, and note down the time when I reach them. When I later come to edit the recorded lesson, I can scroll through, quickly find my explanation point and cut it out to form a separate clip very easily.

That way, I can convert a lengthy lesson into a concise series of clips that can be used in a Google Assignment, and essentially go from teaching live, to editing the lesson down into something more accessible children for unable to be there, to sending it out, all within 15 minutes.

Nick Hurn OBE is CEO of the Bishop Wilkinson Catholic Education Trust; for more information, visit trinitycatholicmat.com

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