I take my exercise ration earlier these days to catch the sun rising over the sea. It gives me the beach to myself to reflect on what has changed so radically since the day most schools closed to most students. 

When I shut the classroom door on that fateful March day, I stood on the threshold of the virtual learning space - and I had yet to appreciate just how quickly and radically my professional life was about to change. 

I have always prided myself on managing any number of setbacks in what were often politically propelled changes. But this time, there has been no build-up. At first, there were considerable challenges just catching up with the technology in order to keep functioning as a teacher. IT has been a great leveller in this pandemic.   

Managing workload

As a head of department, you get used to trying to ward off unnecessary additional tasks. While the IT learning curve for younger teachers may have been rather less steep than for more experienced staff, on the downside, they are more likely to have a timetable that could pin them online for many hours at a time. 

So, workload has to be uppermost in all our minds.

Changes to the ways in which lessons are “delivered” have necessitated much more planning and putting materials online ahead of the day’s timetable. There’s less flexibility to find something on the web and share it on the whiteboard within seconds as I used to do in the classroom.

Searching out materials and generating content involves more time on search engines. Expectations are very high from students and parents in spite of the great tolerance they have shown so far. Many students rely heavily on schools to keep them occupied fruitfully. So sharing resources is the most important plank in our survival strategy.

In-school exams are coming up. Downloading and printing each paper would place a massive strain on our home stationery, so traditional paper marking is out. Marking as lightly as some exam boards do - ie, no annotations, only a numerical mark - is also not possible: how could we show students where they went wrong and how to improve? Marking and editing online is also too difficult because the results need to be moderated. We will probably set up an individual marksheet grid for each student to show them how their performance has been assessed. Then it will need a massive Teams session to give detailed feedback.

Is this a worse service than usual? Well, not necessarily.  Research by the Education Endowment Foundation, published in 2016 as A marked improvement?, shows that spoken feedback is most significant in enabling progress to be made, and that students don’t take away so much when their technical errors are corrected by teachers.

Ensuring meaningful learning for Years 11 and 13

For at least the past 10 years, teachers have been pressured into giving up holiday time to provide extra revision sessions.  Since this year there are no exams for Years 11 and 13, all those resources will have to be mothballed. A much more creative venture lies ahead, but it eats up the holiday. It’s time to throw out the literary canon and even reintroduce media texts sidelined by the dead hand of government.

This is the chance to break away from the limitations of assessment objectives and to make the study of English pleasurable, independent and inventive. Ofsted has to take a back seat for the moment.

This small window of time is one in which we are in a kind of free fall. Assessment can now come at the end of the course; it doesn’t define it. If we don’t have to squeeze ourselves along the narrow corridors of exam board mark schemes, then we have the chance to teach students how to put together an analysis that is not skewed by assessment objectives.

Best of all, we can point towards the academic freedom and variety that students will enjoy at university. 

Leading teacher assessment

I leave this one until last. On the one hand, at last the government trusts teachers to provide grades for their students.  A cynic could claim they had no choice - who else is in any position to make the academic judgement?  

The bad news is that:

a) The exam regulator’s statistical straitjacket provides norm referencing to make sure the results tally with previous years’.  This will be based on historic performance - not good news if you have a stronger cohort or a cohort with a different spread of expected grades. There is a limit as to the freedom to predict.

b) There is a consequent lack of distance between teachers, and parents and their children. There will be disappointment and potentially some email trails to pick up in the first part of the autumn term. Exam boards have the luxury of procedure to protect them in their distant citadels. Unlike middle leaders, they have greater authority and can deflect much of the criticism that each year brings.

So for my colleagues in middle management, this particular mixed blessing may bring with it a greater say, but one that is balanced - or even overbalanced - by much greater workload in carrying out the consultation and mediation necessary to rank students without clustering them on the same position. (What madness is this - teachers making finer distinctions than exam boards ever have to make?) 

Will new responsibilities equal a new democracy in this unprecedented crisis?

We live in interesting times where some of the constraints on subject leaders have been thrown off and new powers over final grades have been conferred upon us - as well as the potential for greater blame. The cancellation of traditional exams has created an opportunity for enterprising, far-sighted professionals to step into the void and reshape the curriculum into learning-led assessment. 

This, then, is the true value of subject leaders: not just in filling the vacuum left when the accountability system loses its defining structures, but in setting a precedent for a new relationship between teaching and learning, and education and the state.

Yvonne Williams is head of English and drama in a secondary school in the South of England. She has contributed chapters on workload and wellbeing to Mentoring English Teachers in the Secondary School, edited by Debbie Hickman (Routledge)