The effects of the pandemic have been far-reaching and have had an impact on the lives of each of us in myriad ways. The circumstances we’ve found ourselves in over the past 18 months are like nothing our generation has ever experienced.

We’ve adapted to think on a short-term basis rather than look ahead. It has become difficult to plan for the future: much-longed-for holidays, special occasions such as weddings and milestone birthdays, and even the final celebration of life - funerals - have all been affected.

Our schools closed for a long time to most learners and education staff worked hard to try to continue to meet the needs of our learners as best we could. We have learned many things from our experiences and still have much to learn with that hindsight.

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We were, and are, bombarded with information and figures on a daily basis. This is a traumatic event that we all have a shared experience of. Some have had more trauma in their lives on top of this.

We know from research, and from experience, that living through trauma has a physiological impact on our bodies and our brains. We operate in a heightened state of alert, and we can only process the here and now. Some 18 months on, some of us are still living at this heightened state - but some of us are starting to accept the “new normal”.

Impact of Covid on school pupils

Last week, I had a discussion with a colleague about her own children and the time they have missed in their schooling. Her daughter is in Primary 3 and many teachers believe that this is the stage that the pandemic has affected the most. These children were just getting used to being in school and were ready to begin the final term of their first year in primary school - when everything begins to come together - then the unbelievable happened and schools closed.

The day after that chat, I came across a post on Twitter revealing the last “normal” school year that each class had had in the English school system:

I decided to create a version illustrating this for our system in Scotland (see below). A P7, for example, last had a Covid-free year in P4, and an S6 in S3.

Sharing this on my Twitter account and on the Scottish Primary Teachers’ Facebook page has shown me that I am not the only person who needed to see this written down - there was a huge reaction.

Wow! This made me stop and think ✋ explains a lot .. helps me understand some of the distress we are seeing in CYP at the moment. Please consider this - there is still a need to recover and repair #nurture #GIRFEC ??????? https://t.co/wa6SL3W7Vi

- Dr. Lynne Binnie (@BinnieL) September 30, 2021

But what does it mean in practice? As reflective practitioners, we are always using what we have learned to improve and adjust. Some of these reflections lead to easy tweaks, such as adjusting a working wall to support learners with numeracy or literacy tasks, while others take time to process before we can figure out what the impact will be.

This is the stage we now find ourselves in: the processing stage. We will continue to share professional dialogue and have conversations around how we can move forward and, for me, this has to have an emphasis on nurture, health and wellbeing and kindness.

Some of us are still at the heightened state of living and will need longer; some of us have been lucky that the impact on our lives hasn’t been as life-changing as it has for others. But all of us need to reconnect as humans - with each other and with our pupils.

I remember being told, when I had my first daughter, that it had taken my body nine months to get to this stage, and it would take at least that to return. Similarly, in schools, it has taken us 18 months to get to this stage and it will take us at least that amount of time to get back to whatever sense of “normality” awaits education in the future.

What I already know for sure is that things will never be exactly as they once were - but it’s OK to accept that we are now in a new normal.

Jenny Harvey is a principal teacher working in additional support needs. She tweets at @relativism