Around the start of this year and during a particularly stressful period at school, I rediscovered baking. It brought back happy memories of, as a little girl, being in the kitchen with my gran, watching her turn flour and sugar and eggs into something scrumptious. I began with pancakes and scones, using my gran’s old handwritten recipe book to guide me, and very soon became a regular early-morning baker. It felt good to start the day doing something positive and the delighted faces of my family when met with freshly baked goodies for breakfast were a lovely bonus.

During lockdown, as with many people, my passion for baking grew and when I reflect on why, I am drawn to how it feels to make time to bake. To decide on a recipe, clear a space in your head and on your kitchen bunker and invest your time to make something. Not in a rush, doing four other things at the same time, but giving your focus and care to this one task; the outcome secondary to the process.

Even as a child, it was the experience of baking with my gran that I loved most, being allowed to stir and pour and measure, being amazed at how the mixture was altered with each new ingredient or technique. Now, as an adult, what I value is the calm focus, time spent solely on this one goal; if the end product turns out to be delicious then that is a happy bonus. I’ve made traybakes sweet enough to make a honey bee boke and a caramel flan you could bounce off your walls, but I’m not auditioning for Bake Off. I’m just enjoying myself, content in the journey, not fixated on the destination.

This has led to leaps in learning: my baking has improved because I am noticing things that work and things that don’t, tweaking for the next time. My skills are improving through experience and I’m motivated to keep trying because I feel good about what I am doing. That calm, motivated state allows other thoughts to come through, too. I often get ideas for writing while wrist-deep in flour and butter, or find the solution to a work problem while flipping pancakes. I am generally happier and more productive, readier to square my shoulders and face the challenges that lie ahead.

You could say that because I baked in childhood I should have been able to pick up where I left off; I should have been able to “catch up” the time. Of course, that is a nonsense because the skills and knowledge I collected have degraded over time, mainly through lack of practice of what I learned long ago in the kitchen with Gran.

Coronavirus: The impact of lockdown on learning

It is this notion of catching up that permeates the current rhetoric in Scottish education. Children and young people, we are insistently told by media and advisory bodies alike, need to “catch up” on study time lost due to the global pandemic.

In July, the Commission on School Reform, an independent group of education experts set up by the think tank Reform Scotland, proposed six extra hours per week of catch-up lessons for pupils over the next two years, in order to “repair the damage” caused by lost education during lockdown. Its paper, Catching Up: the educational losses of Covid-19, identifies an “urgent need to plan for the lessons lost” and calls for an extra £100 million of government funding to provide for additional teachers, support assistants and subsidies for the most disadvantaged pupils.

There is no doubt that lockdown has had a big impact on children and on young people’s education. Any teacher in the land will tell you that 20-plus weeks of no school - the rough equivalent of three school summer holidays - will be detrimental to academic progress. As always, children who are experiencing poverty or hardship are at increased risk. But it does not necessarily follow that the best course of action should be a blinkered focus on catching up. One estimate, by the Centre for Economic Performance, suggests that to replace all the learning and teaching hours that have been lost due to closure, the school day would need to be more than doubled in length for the next year. Assuming we still plan to eat and sleep, there are literally not enough hours in the day.

Creating the expectation that schools catch up on those hours, like for like, is ludicrous - because, without a time machine, it’s simply not possible. So let’s set aside the blueprints for a DeLorean 2.0 and take a closer look at what has actually happened during lockdown.

Many schools made the leap into digital, embracing technology as a means of staying connected with families. Children experienced hubs, home learning, topsy-turvy childcare arrangements and rainbow -themed artwork. They have endured the grief of bereavement and separation and the disappointment of lost graduations, proms, holidays and other rites of passage they so richly deserved. They have adapted to face coverings, daily walks, friendships from a distance, increased stress and uncertainty and a whole new, often hyperbolic, vocabulary. Not to mention the unpleasant and potentially alarming concept touted heavily in the press that children themselves are “super spreaders” and could unwittingly bring the virus to their own vulnerable loved ones. Simply put, this generation of young people has been faced with unavoidable evidence that the world is not constant, that things can and will change at a moment’s notice and that the unthinkable is only ever a government briefing away.

We can only begin to guess at the impact all of this has had on their wellbeing and mental health, much as we come to terms with the impact it has had on our own. To suggest, though, that learning somehow stopped happening during these unprecedented months is false. Traditional classroom learning may have paused, but learning, in its myriad messy forms, continued throughout lockdown - how could it not, given everything our children have experienced?

Consider your own thinking, your approach to work, family, friends, to what you prioritise and to what matters to you most. Can you honestly say those things have been unaffected by the past four months? We are not who we were in March. The world has changed and so have we.

Schools cannot simply pick up where they left off and hope to scurry through the curriculum at double time, ignoring the gaping trauma the world has experienced in the meantime. But nor can they afford to take their collective foot completely off the gas. Scottish education has always prided itself on its exacting, ambitious standards and high expectations and aspirations for all. Now, as we face the aftermath of the longest interruption to schooling in a generation, it may well be the time to prove it.

So where does the middle ground lie? How can schools acknowledge and support families’ wellbeing post-lockdown yet also ensure a swift resumption of high-quality teaching and learning?

Perhaps the answer lies not so much in catch-up but match-up. As my late return to baking has proven, a quiet determination to start from where you are is key. I could have panicked about what I didn’t remember, obsessed about what I used to be able to do and couldn’t now, but that would have made me stressed, unhappy and lacking the motivation to try. By accepting where I was and using the knowledge I had, by making the experience pleasurable and focusing on the journey, not only the end goal, I became relaxed and increasingly confident, keen to keep having a go. Good schools know how to set the conditions for teaching and learning, and when those conditions are right, learners flourish. Relaxed, happy children who feel safe and secure are ready to learn. There is no mountain that a motivated, confident child cannot scale.

Re-establishing the structures that support wellbeing is where we must start. In schools, this means routine: predictable, safe routine. Yes, some children will rail against it at first, particularly after months without it, but quickly, kindly and consistently setting the expectations that go along with school will help young people to settle for the long run. Instead of terrifying pupils and teachers with an impossible to-do list of things they must catch up on, we should seek to match up with where they are now, emotionally and academically.

By creating a familiar common ground through school routines and a consistent culture of calmness and kindness, we will spread a relentless message that instead of panicking about the time lost, we will make the very most of the time we have now and take joy in being back together in the process.

Investing the time to get that right and starting from where we are now, not where we were, will help families to feel ready to learn and staff to feel ready to teach. And then learning will happen and lost ground will be regained - no time machine necessary.

Susan Ward is depute headteacher at Kingsland Primary School in Peebles, in the Scottish Borders

This article originally appeared in the 28 August 2020 issue under the headline “Why catch-up is a half-baked idea”