At the start, the pandemic was personal. We saw the faces of those who died and the faces of those who had loved them. We saw the deep, red marks that personal protective equipment (PPE) had left under the eyes of our critical workers and we recognised the sacrifices they had made. We felt fear and we felt other people’s fear. We were all in it together.

However, as the number of cases and deaths climbed, as the scientific explanations grew more complex and as the pandemic response became more political, the faces began to blur, the PPE marks became more familiar and the fear began to subside. Slowly, the human narrative of the pandemic began to disappear.

That had consequences for schools. Those within and outside of education began to experience the pandemic very differently. Unlike much of the population, school staff did not have an opportunity to withdraw from the human impact of Covid-19: the fear of being infected or infectious never faded because the threat remained so real; the stories of tragedy could not be ignored because teachers were dealing with the fallout in their communities; and the personal stories of the pandemic never disappeared because human interaction remained the foundation of teaching, be it virtual or physical.

Covid and schools: The risks faced by teachers

You could see the results of the disconnected experiences clearly whenever schools were discussed in relation to Covid-19. In the comments sections, on social media, in the angle of political statements - even in the science - many people, it seemed, stopped caring about teachers or, at least, repeatedly underplayed the risks they were facing and the seriousness of the pandemic.

Faced with this, it would have been easy for teaching staff to give up, to just do “enough” and “make do”. But that’s not what happened. Reading our special issue this week, it is clear how the profession has risen to the challenges of the past 12 months with ingenuity and skill but, most of all, with a complete dedication to their communities.

Co-principal Vic Goddard writes in this issue about never having an opportunity to hit the “off switch” over the past year. “I’ve felt obliged - from the moment I wake up to the moment I close my eyes - to stay on top of stuff, to read things, to check emails, to respond, because I’m worried and I’m anxious,” he says.

Those in schools can only work in this way for so long. And yet things are going to get worse, with the insistence on rapid catch-up and a catalogue of fixes for pandemic repercussions landing at the doors of classrooms. Rather than celebrating what schools have achieved, they have just been handed a longer to-do list.

As Goddard says: “I’ve never had more conversations with people of my age - headteachers in their fifties - saying that they wanted to start working their way out of this …That’s not because any of us are falling out of love with the job, it’s just that you look around and realise that the pressure isn’t going away.”

We seem to have forgotten that behind the statistics, behind the catch-up narrative, behind the long list of additions to the curriculum - behind all the expectation - there is a group of human beings who get tired, who hurt and who need positive encouragement in the same way we all do.

We need to do better. Yes, we all want to mitigate the impacts of the past 12 months, but we won’t achieve that if we forget that at the heart of every school is a group of people who excel at what it is to be human. We owe them that recognition and we owe them a huge thank you, too.

@jon_severs

This article originally appeared in the 19 March 2021 issue