It may be a surprise, but there was nothing in my postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) training to prepare me for how to teach during a global pandemic.

And yet, my experience of remote teaching during this period has highlighted the importance of two aspects of teaching that were overlooked or understated during my PGCE training: Communication with parents and working with pupils through grief.   

1. Parental communication

In my training, I can only recall having about a half-hour session on communicating with parents, in which I was given the advice that if you need to communicate with a parent, phone them.

And yet, from my limited vantage point as a trainee, it seems that, in most secondary schools, teachers tend to only communicate with parents if their child has: a) shoved someone’s head down a toilet; b) won the Nobel prize for physics; c) parents evening - and then you only get a five-minute slot. 

However, remote learning has shown that communication with parents is vital, even more so during a pandemic, but almost certainly afterwards, too.

After all, you can try all the computer trickery in the world and follow all the research, but it is the parent who often knows best how their child is coping with life.

This means keeping parents up to speed with what and how their child is doing in their subject, and what is expected from the child. 

I am not suggesting that communication with parents is easy or that teachers should tell parents how to parent, or that we should ignore factors that might make communication with parents a challenge.

Certainly, teachers should be aware that parents might not work in jobs that enable them to check up on their child’s work, or that parents themselves might have had very negative experiences of school and therefore might be unlikely or unable to engage with your flurry of email or telephone correspondence. 

But with better communication, such issues could be overcome and a more harmonious relationship created.

2. Pastoral care challenges

The other fundamental that I now see as lacking from my PGCE was around the wider responsibilities of teachers.

On initial teacher training placements, you are frequently told that being a teacher is more than merely teaching your subject.

Indeed, you are often attached to a form group, but the extent to which you engage with the pastoral aspects of being a teacher seems, from my experience, limited.  

Instead, when training to teach, the main focus is naturally on teaching good lessons and, although this does entail accounting for the special educational needs and disability (SEND) requirements of your pupils, I wonder how much it involves considering the pastoral needs of the child.

The reality is that when pupils come back to school in June, August, September or whenever and in whatever capacity that might be, they will return to school having lived through or living through a global pandemic.

A pandemic in which they have been distanced from friends and family, the routines, structures and norms that typically inform their lives.  

More pressing, in this situation, many children will be prematurely made aware of one of life’s hardest-to-bear truths. As Heidegger wrote: “As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.” Children will return to schools at some point, and they will know death.

They might have had family members die without being able to properly see them at the end of their life and to have closure.

And even if they do not experience death directly, pupils will know that they have had months off school not because of a dream, but because of a nightmare.

No child can escape the dystopian daily death count and, as teachers, we must be there for them more so than ever, even if it feels as if we are not the best-qualified professionals to support some of the pastoral needs of our pupils.

Therefore, for the teachers of the future, the PGCE needs to place a greater focus on caring for pupils through grief.

Thomas Breakwell is a PGCE secondary religious studies student at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. From September 2020, he will be a religious studies teacher at King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys, Birmingham. He tweets @breakwell_tom