Being in school just now can feel a little strange, observed one teacher in a piece on tes.com last weekend. Pupils have come back - but they seem changed. We’re not just talking growth spurts and facial hair; it’s something about their demeanour.

The piece was by primary headteacher Susan Ward, who reflected on why previously quiet children could be found “swinging from the light fittings”, why some who walked with a swagger pre-Covid have become shrinking violets, and why some once-stoic pupils succumb to tears when they can’t find the right colour of crayon.

It is in these observations that the fallacy of overly simplistic “catch-up” rhetoric becomes clear. There is a danger of seeing school and learning purely in terms of linear progress, as a ladder of learning that you’re either ascending or descending with never the slightest shimmy to the side. This picture of school, shorn of nuance and context, lends itself to calls for longer school hours or intensive summer learning sessions: simplistic solutions that gloss over the complexity of what schools are faced with just now.

Teachers are encountering pupils who, as Ward puts it, “have become accustomed to doing their own thing”, or for whom “rules hold little value now because [during Covid] they have witnessed at shockingly close quarters that rules break” - and why bother to follow rules “if everything goes wrong anyway”?

Now, when the impact of everything that has happened during the pandemic is spilling into schools in often unpredictable ways, Ward echoes many school leaders around the country when she says that “we need to be as predictable as possible”, in a way that acknowledges all the trauma Covid has caused. By re-establishing consistent routines in school, by reasserting it as a secure place, school staff are, as Ward puts it, helping pupils to feel “safe and ready to learn”.

Learning and wellbeing are not mutually exclusive - quite the opposite. Yet, this false dichotomy became, if anything, even more sharply defined during the pandemic. Outside of schools, the debate on media - social or otherwise - was often reduced to the apparent split between demands for extra catching-up sessions and those who wanted no mention of anything that sounded remotely like “catch-up”.

In truth, teachers have been equally concerned with the learning and the wellbeing of their pupils, knowing that these are closely intertwined concerns, not divergent paths that you must choose between; that by making school a place of routine and consistency - where acting in a certain way as a pupil elicits a predictable response from staff - you boost learning and wellbeing. This is true kindness.

There is a mocking caricature of kindness in education that you sometimes see - that softie teachers are placing too much emphasis on saying “there, there” to melancholy pupils rather than harrying them to get up to speed with whatever it is they are supposed to be learning. In fact, the kindness that fuels schools - and teaching, one of the most altruistic of all professions - is about so much more than offering comforting words to a struggling pupil. Kindness is drawing up workable timetables, whatever the shifting demands of national policy; it is helping pupils to see how they might navigate an apparent morass of assessment requirements; it is about reconnecting children with the joy of discovery and achievement that a classroom offers; it is about building routines that provide a daily anchor amid whatever Covid turmoil there is beyond the school gates.

The school buildings that so many returned to in recent weeks may feel different, with pupils not acting quite as they did before. But, as the entire span of the pandemic has shown time and again, those who work in schools are a constant: a team of thousands that eschews simplistic debates to strive for whatever is in the best interests of their pupils.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 30 April 2021 issue under the headline “Pupils have been to a hard place, now schools must be their rock”