A friend who is a teacher in France sent me some pictures last week of the school where she works, as it prepared to reopen. One particularly jarring image was of a small slide and climbing frame in the playground, now off limits behind a cordon of metal railings.
Elsewhere, solid blue circles of fresh paint, each about the size of a Frisbee, stretched along a concreted outdoor play area, leading to a wall with a different type of painting that had been there far longer: a jaunty pirate ship. It was a stark illustration of social distancing having usurped imaginative play in the playground.
Orange masking tape had been applied to a picnic table and bench to form two large Xs. Coloured lines demarcated the school grounds and corridors, with green spray paint used outside and orange tape inside. In one room, large spaces between single desks and chairs - all facing the same direction - lent the impression of an exam hall superimposed onto a primary school classroom.
That all came after the viral images of another French school where a staff member in a mask surveyed a playground with nurseryage children, who were separated into individual boxes marked out on the ground, each smaller than a table tennis table.
The question of when schools should reopen to more than the relatively small number of children who have attended them recently is, naturally, at the forefront just now. But whatever decisions are made, the emphasis of the conversation will then shift to how and when they can open in any way resembling school life before Covid-19.
In the longer term, teachers and parents worry about the psychological impact of a version of school where children’s natural attraction to each other has to be discouraged, where free play is restricted, where staff may have to wear masks and, time and again, issue stern reminders about safety procedures. I have seen for myself the reaction when it dawns upon a six-year-old that the coronavirus is not going to be over anytime soon, that it could be some time before they see their friends and teachers again and that, even then, the circumstances may still be strange or even intimidating.
Last week, EIS union general secretary Larry Flanagan made the point that, while people were rightfully concerned about the impact of the current lockdown on pupils, the bigger, looming worry was the impact of a 2020-21 school year like no other: social distancing would likely be essential for the foreseeable future, school would be a part-time experience and home learning would continue to have to pick up much of the slack.
He said: “To be honest, if pupils were going back in August into normal classrooms then the impact of lockdown could be addressed reasonably quickly, but we are looking at a year of blended teaching and learning that’s potentially more significant than the 10 or 12 weeks of lockdown.”
The equity issues are plain to see - many students, for example, do not have reliable wi-fi at home - and if, as the unions have proposed, the 2021 exams were to be cancelled, there are many questions about how this could be done fairly.
We have also in recent weeks reported on the views of psychologists. While there have been studies of how adults cope in isolation, such as in space or in polar exploration, there has been little research into how children would cope in such circumstances. Again, the current lockdown was seen as less of a concern - most children would prove resilient as long as they still had a good level of social interaction - than the longer-term impact of measures to combat the coronavirus, if they stretched far into the future.
Understandably, the debate just now centres on the process of reopening schools to all pupils. But when finally that happens, it will open up many more questions.
@Henry_Hepburn
This article originally appeared in the 22 May 2020 issue under the headline “The question isn’t when to open schools, it’s what to do after that”
