Nicola Hacking: What's Next?

What happens next?

I was delighted to be part of a zoom conference on Sunday entitled ‘Which Way Now? Creating a Better Education System after Lockdown’. The panel consisted of speakers including EYFS, Primary, Secondary and Union Leaders; although they apologised for the lack of diversity within the panel and promised to be back with representatives from SEND and Post 16 amongst others. I listened with great interest to Elaine Bennett’s truly impassioned speech about the value and importance of the Early Years in education, and how we can use this horrendous experience to prompt big changes to our current system.

Elaine spoke at length about how the Early Years is at the forefront of education, but why? What is it we do so well? Well I think the Lockdown has highlighted a few key factors:

• We already value parents as playing a key role in children’s learning and have effective working partnerships with them. We understand that parents are experts in their child and are their first and enduring educator. Alongside this, practitioners are experts in Children’s Learning and Development. Together, parents and teachers make for diverse but complementary educational role models. We put immense importance on valuing and working with them to support their children, and ensuring they feel valued, part of the team. This means those parents felt empowered when the schools closed and were ready and enthusiastic to take on some of our role as educators.
• Our learning environments are amazing. The trend towards approaches such as Reggio Emilia is growing more common with over coloured, laminated and chaotic classrooms banished in favour of calm, engaging learning spaces filled with plants and inspiring resources. Is the lockdown showing us that we need to think about the chaos and cluttered curriculum we live in and what actually matters? When push came to shove, what skills have our children needed right now?
• We recognise the importance of the Child’s voice and their contribution towards their learning, particularly through play. We create an environment where children are responsible for deciding what to learn and how to go about it, with practitioners scaffolding this in order to extend it further. Giving children a voice and showing them that they are important and valued also promotes their self-esteem and self-worth. Does this give us children who are able to manage their own home schooling? Who are confident in exploring their own resources, being creative, using what they’ve got and keeping themselves busy? Children who are able to emotionally manage the situation they’ve found themselves in?

Another thing that they talked about was the negative impact of testing throughout education and the call to immediately cancel the plans to introduce the Reception Baseline Assessment. An immediate effect of Covid-19 and the lockdown is that numerous tests will be missed or cancelled this year. Will that prove to be a glimmer of sunshine through the clouds? Jess Edwards, the representative for Primary education brought tears to my eyes when she discussed missing the year 6 SATs this year, saying that “For the first time we will have a generation of children who will leave Primary School having not been told that they are failures… That they are not ready for their next step.”

So what happens next? Well I suppose the thing is, we don’t really know. But I do know what I’d like to see…

• Let’s make it child lead and reclaim our classrooms! I’d love to see education build on the success of our truly outstanding Early Year’s provision by pushing our values and methods further up the system. Why do we start off by encouraging children to lead their own learning, to become enthusiastic and curious, imaginative and diverse learners, using incredible and diverse learning environments and then as soon as they hit Key Stage 1 we tell them to sit in silence on the carpet reciting times tables by rote followed by an identical worksheet?
• Mental Health and wellbeing for the children – How have we got to the stage where 1 in 10 children have mental health problems such as depression or anxiety? How have we allowed childhood obesity to become a global epidemic, with the most common factors being lack of physical activity and unhealthy eating patterns? Let’s hope we learn from our current situation and see that we need to change this, and we need to do it fast.
• Mental Health and wellbeing for the staff! – Many of us work in a constant state of sheer exhaustion, lying awake at night panicking about the next day and how to get through the never-ending to-do list. How to make our Senior Leadership Teams happy (if you don’t know what the term ‘non-negotiables is, now’s the time to google it). How to get the children through numerous tests with amazing results. How to be successful in everyone else’s eyes… Well it’s time that stopped, and we started thinking about what we, and the children need. It takes a special kind of person to become a teaching assistant, practitioner or teacher. You are driven by an innate desire to make a difference, to support and encourage children to grow and succeed. But the special is often frazzled out of us by systems that are outdated, unrealistic and at times, cruel. Use this opportunity to gain some perspective and take a step back. What is important to you? How can we get our love of teaching back? How can we ultimately be the teachers that children deserve?

But above all, kindness. Let’s learn from this, and fill our homes, our Educational Systems, our communities, and our society with kindness. Without it, what’s left?