Schools in Scotland: 'Covid Generation' will pay high price if they stay off school too long – Cameron Wyllie

In this time of coronavirus, we must be imaginative in finding ways to get children back into school as soon as possible, writes Cameron Wyllie.

Primary school pupils wear wings to help maintain social distancing in a classroom in Taiyuan in China's northern Shanxi province. (Picture: AFP via Getty Images)

For the last few months the nation’s health, and specifically the wellbeing of the NHS, has rightly been at the forefront of everyone’s mind. These times are unique – this is certainly the weirdest thing ever to happen to me – and we have all recalibrated our thinking. We have a new form of criminality, with the threat of a mugging from each passing jogger’s breath and, until recently, a new ritual of communal clapping which, at least down here in sunny (and busy) Portobello, had its quasi-religious nature reinforced by the church bells ringing.

The Scottish Government – and, let’s be honest, no one really knows if it is right or wrong – has decreed that a further semblance of “normal” life can return. But while we all embrace (metaphorically) our friends and loved ones again, we need to steel ourselves for the next big crisis, and that’s in the nation’s education.

I can’t believe that there have been earnest discussions going on about the possibility of cancelling the SQA exams in 2021. Surely, surely, it cannot be beyond the wit of Education Scotland and the SQA to work out the mechanisms necessary to ensure that exam candidates – certainly those in S5 and S6 – can, if necessary, sit socially distanced exams next year.

The cancellation of this year’s exams was, of course, both inevitable and correct. It has led to terrible uncertainty among the young people due to sit them, particularly those dependent on results to progress to the next stage of their life.

It has been ghastly for teachers who, as usual, responded with professionalism and fairness as they put together the evidence, the rank orders, the spreadsheets that will, in time, become these results for this cohort. For the sake of everyone involved, however, it is vital that the gold standard of the SQA exams returns in a year.

Otherwise another significant group of students will be landed with exam results put together from classwork and continuous assessments, when the courses are, of course, designed to be assessed by final exams, done at the same time all over the nation and marked with scrupulous accuracy and scrutiny.

Of course, as things stand, these courses will be the product – at least for a while – of John Swinney’s “blended education”, a mix of lessons in school, online teaching and homework. Even if the doctors deem this necessary, it must be done for as little time as possible and the objective should be to get all pupils and all teachers back into actual classrooms in actual schools as quickly as possible, apart from the very small minority of both pupils and staff who are particularly vulnerable.

If this does not happen, the inevitable consequence is that the poverty-related attainment gap, which we all want to see closing, will widen further than ever before and we will have lost the battle to try to improve the educational chances – and the lives – of our poorest and most vulnerable children.

I was a secondary school teacher so I’m most attuned to thinking about older children. The cliched reputation of teenagers has taken a massive shift in the past while. Of course, many of them are very conscientious about their schoolwork, and that hard-working and positive attitude is reinforced by many many parents. Adolescents, however, are not university students, who have chosen what they study, who can – in lots of instances – see where it’s going to lead, and who are that much older anyhow.

It stretches credibility to think that Jimmy, 14, is going to think of his S3 “broad general education”: “Well, I don’t like geography and I’m not very keen on that old hag Mrs Smith because she really makes me work, but now I can do it at home, unsupervised, I’ll do it a lot better.”

Teachers tell of the frustration of preparing online work and finding that lots of kids are simply not engaging with it. Let’s also remember – and I make no apology for repeating this – that teachers are not trained to provide online courses. If they were surgeons and it was suggested that, instead of doing an operation themselves they should, in the national interest, do it by programming a robot to do it for them, people would screw up their faces in disbelief.

Some teachers – let’s be honest, mainly young teachers – can produce lessons with flair and enthusiasm but they aren’t in the house to make sure that Jimmy does them. That’s left to mum or dad, who, at the same time, may be doing their own jobs or minding other children.

The new national priority should be to maximise the time young people are learning on school premises, and we need to do it imaginatively and we need to do it soon, while assessing the efficacy of the online offer in Scotland. The first useful studies of how well online education is working in the UK make very disturbing reading, particularly with regard to those children at the most deprived end of the educational spectrum.

This needs to be the first step in a national conversation about education, which needs to extend well beyond the timelines of this current crisis lest, years from now, several school year groups are known as the Covid Generation and are, educationally, left blighted by the disease.

Cameron Wyllie’s blog is called A House in Joppa

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