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Tag: Blended Learning

School Return and Balancing Acts

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

 

Today a phased return to school begins for some children.   While most weary parents, passionate teachers and isolated pupils agree that a full return is needed for all pupils, there are concerns about timing and the practicalities that schools and parents will now face.

Much of the media discussion has surrounded whether or not children are ‘super-spreaders’. A PHA presentation to education officials suggested that Schools are not a ‘major source’ of transmission. It is vital, however, that this discussion is counterbalanced by consideration of the negative impact of long-term school closures and the subsequent isolation of our children and young people. The negative impact of lockdown on their mental health and wellbeing is becoming clear in research from previous school closures, in practice, in our own experiences and in our conversations with family and friends. This impact is exacerbated by the closure of their other face-to-face social networks outside of school- such as sports clubs, youth clubs and societies.

As a trustee of Links Counselling Service I (John) am acutely of the mental health impact of lockdown throughout society. With many community resources unavailable, we are overwhelmed with self-referrals, GP referrals and signposting from other services. Our waiting list, including children aged 4-18, has more than doubled from a year ago despite a larger workforce that ever before. COVID-19 has not only exacerbated pre-existing mental ill health among individuals, families and communities, it has greatly challenged the systems in place to care for them.

Another balancing act

Balance is also needed is within the public (and media) discourse about children’s mental health. While there is clearly cause for concern, we need to avoid fatalism when it comes to our children. This is not the ‘COVID generation’ forever damaged by a ‘tsumani’ of mental health problems, as some of the more dramatic headlines would have you believe. Recent research from the University of Oxford, reported an increase in emotional, attentional and behavioural issues during the first lockdown period. Reassuringly, these issues decreased when lockdown was lifted, but with increased restrictions these issues have re-emerged. This places an emphasis on decision makers to ensure that lockdown restrictions that impact on children and young people are kept as short-term as possible.

However, a deterministic and fatalistic discourse can be counter-productive, cultivating a self-fulfilling prophecy that paralyses systems and prevents them from fully committing to the support that is needed to recover. Our children are so much more than the pandemic they have lived through. They have demonstrated creativity, kindness and resilience. It’s important to remain hopeful and to help our young people to find hope when they are worried about the future. It is the balancing act of our time to hold both of these realities together; that many people are struggling, and that things can get better.

Resilience Resides in Relationships

We often hear it said that ‘children are resilient’, but the truth is a little more nuanced. Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity or significant sources of stress. Resilience means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences, but it also means being empowered to grow and even improve your life along the way. Research has moved away from seeing resilience as a trait that people do or don’t have. There are various individual psychosocial factors that impact resilience levels, but there is also emerging evidence of a bidirectional relationship between healthy communities and more resilient individuals. This is important. It means resilience can be promoted and developed, and schools can play a role in this.

The majority of kids won’t need counselling post-lockdown. They will benefit from getting back to the structured, stable and secure environment of school. The predictable routine, clear expectations and consistent rules help children to feel safe. Then, most importantly, they will need space to play and to reconnect with others. Research also emphasises the important link between children engaging in sport and physical activity and their wellbeing. We need to see a return to these activities too.

Psychiatrist Bruce Perry states that, because humans are inescapably social beings, the worst catastrophes that we can experience are those that involve relational loss. Therefore, recovery must involve re-establishing human connections.Perry states that the most important healing experiences often occur outside therapy and inside homes, schools and communities. Before ‘catching up’ on missed learning we need to let the kids catch up with each other, and with staff. Resilience resides in relationships.

Through relationships we can reassure children that they are experiencing normal reactions to abnormal events. We can help them, as the Dr Marie Hill has outlined, to emotionally regulate before we educate. Prof Barry Carpenter and colleagues have developed practical resources for a Recovery Curriculum that encourages a systematic, relationships-based approach to teaching and learning post-lockdown. This is an example of the creative and systemic approach required to support our children and young people.

That said, every child and young person will come through this differently and there will be a range of responses needed. While all might need something extra, some will need more ‘extra’ than others. Lockdown has exacerbated disadvantage and pre-existing vulnerability. Some young people will need additional systemic and therapeutic support to prevent more severe mental ill health down the line. It’s vital that long-term planning includes improving availability and accessibility of this support.

Ultimately, we need to trust our teachers and school leaders to know how to best support our children post-lockdown. We need to embrace their professional capacity, support the system where we can, and lobby to ensure that they are properly resourced. It is essential that we prioritise children and young people as we emerge from this pandemic. They have been asked to make huge sacrifices and it is now time that we uphold their rights for equitable access to education, play and social development.

Dr John McMullen is an Educational and Child Psychologist, and a Senior Lecturer at Stranmillis University College and Queen’s University Belfast.

Dr Victoria Simms is the Director of Research in the School of Psychology, Ulster University, and is an expert in child development.

Back to School: Learning Together after Lockdown

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

The sentiment of the popular inspirational acronym ‘Together Everyone Achieves More’ seems so simple that it could easily be dismissed as a platitude. Yet our current circumstances have brought the value of human togetherness into sharp focus. Our language reflects this too:  the English word ‘teams’ has taken on a new dimension, now often referring to images of solitary figures in rooms contained in little boxes on a screen. Until the onset of Covid-19, sharing actual physical spaces with people outside our own homes was an accepted part of daily life. Our places of learning – nurseries, schools, colleges and universities – were particularly social in this respect. Almost without thinking about it, we shared classrooms and lecture theatres, assembly halls and staffrooms. The arrival of the pandemic disrupted this, and possibilities to spend time in common social spaces with family, friends, colleagues and students remain very limited. It has been said that it is not until we lose something that we realise how good it was. So what exactly have we been missing?

Body matters

Rowan Williams in his book Being Human: Bodies, minds, persons, argues that ‘Persons are more than ‘individuals’; they are both spiritual and material, and their uniqueness is fulfilled in community not in isolation and total independence’ (p. viii). Our bodies matter, as well as our minds: we are sensory. In a recent interview for the Irish Times, Irish philosopher Richard Kearney described the Covid-19 pandemic as an ‘attack on the senses’. This is of course true in a very real way for those who have experienced the loss of taste and smell as a symptom of the Covid-19 virus. But it is also true that the pandemic has accelerated the shift from being together physically with other people to communicating virtually. This change had already been ushered in by the digital revolution. There are multiple examples of technology enhancing many aspects of our lives in recent years, not least in education. Schools in Northern Ireland have harnessed the benefits of digital innovation in a particularly admirable way. Interestingly though, Kearney argues that over the past year the speed of the shift has prioritised, and perhaps overloaded, our sense of sight, while at the same time inhibiting our sense of touch. This imbalance is a matter of concern. As Kearney puts it ‘It is no accident that skin is our largest organ … We need computers but we also need carnality.’

Hands on learning

In Kearney’s view, tangibility, or being close enough physically to touch another person or thing renders us vulnerable as human beings, but it also makes us more receptive to other people and our wider environment. This is particularly important in the learning of young children in play as Glenda Walsh and John McMullen have highlighted. We know all too well that touch can cause injury and harm, but over centuries, touch has also been a source of healing. It is by reaching out and engaging with other people and our surroundings at close quarters that we learn, that we learn to communicate, and that we develop empathy. By being close to people we can begin to read them, rather like a book. This is an important aspect of our being, and it is needed for us to flourish.

Mind matters too

Human beings, according to Rowan Williams, are both spiritual and material. Similarly, health is not simply either mental or physical, but embraces the whole person. There are real and valid concerns around physical contamination by a potentially dangerous virus, and these require a concerted response. But they need to be balanced by concerns for health more broadly, and particularly by an awareness of mental health. In a recent blog Noel Purdy highlighted the need to promote emotional health and wellbeing among young people especially. As lockdowns continue across the globe, concern for mental health generally is growing. For example, according to a recent study reported in the Lancet, ‘the increase in probable mental health problems reported in adults also affected 5–16 year olds in England, with the incidence rising from 10·8% in 2017 to 16·0% in July 2020 across age, gender, and ethnic groups’.

The focus of governments has turned in recent weeks to children and young people going back to school. There has been talk of lost months and years of education, identifying learning gaps, catch-up plans and reducing school holidays. In the middle of all this we shouldn’t lose sight of what it is to be human. For according to Rowan Williams, ‘Unless we have a coherent model of what sort of humanity we want to nurture in our society, we shall continue to be at sea over how we teach’ (p. x).

 

On being human … together

Absence might make the heart grow fonder, but spending time with each other in a shared physical space is a vital part of healthy human development and relationships. Not being together has made lockdown periods very difficult for many people,  and young people in particular have found that being apart makes friendships very difficult. Research has also shown that face to face social interaction results in better learning. For example, in language acquisition, Patricia Kuhl’s 2003 early childhood study found that ‘infants show phonetic learning from live, but not pre-recorded, exposure to a foreign language’. Teachers need to spend time face to face with their students. To create learning opportunities that are really valuable we need to get to know peoples’ needs and preferences. And we need to spend time together, talking and listening.

From Zoom to room

There is something of a sense of déjà vu (see last year’s blog) as yet again, we face the prospect of going back to school. The challenges involved in moving from Zoom to room are real. But so are the potential rewards: physical, mental and spiritual. People of all ages are trying to make sense of our world’s complexities and of strangeness of the days and nights that we have known. For this reason, many believe that as far as education is concerned, a playful, nurturing approach will be vital for children and young people, with language and communication, one of its 6 core principles, at its heart. In Northern Ireland it is encouraging to see signs of a commitment by government to this, with funding allocated to a new Nurture Programme.

Experiences of pandemic lockdown have gifted us with a greater awareness of the benefits of technology to keep us connected digitally. But we have also come to understand, perhaps more fully than at any point in history, that isolation from each other physically is unhealthy. Perhaps what we need most is getting back to exactly what we have been missing: being together.

Dr Sharon Jones is a Stranmillis University College Lecturer and member of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement

 

Left to their own devices…again! The enduring inequality of lockdown home-schooling

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

Less than a month into the first national lockdown, I wrote a CREU blog highlighting the dangers of the digital divide. The blog concluded that “unless action is taken in the days to come, the current lockdown and the differentiated experiences of home-schooling have the potential to further disempower and disenfranchise, thus exacerbating the social injustice of an already deeply divided education system.” A subsequent research report based on a large parental survey carried out by our CREU team at Stranmillis confirmed my fears that pupils’ experiences of lockdown home-schooling in Northern Ireland were mediated by their parents’ backgrounds, especially their level of education. We found that better educated parents were more likely to be able to work from home, spent longer on home-schooling, were more directly involved in teaching their children and felt more confident throughout the process, despite the challenges. In contrast parents without university degrees were more likely to be essential/key workers, and often felt under enormous pressure to juggle their work and family commitments, to access online resources, and to motivate their children to engage with learning.

As I write this in January 2021 at the start of the second lengthy period of national lockdown and a return to enforced home-schooling for the vast majority of children, much has changed. Unlike the sun-kissed spring days of last April and May the weather is now cold, dark and (let’s be honest) dreary. The novelty of home-schooling has well and truly worn off to be replaced by lockdown fatigue and a sense of ‘here we go again’, while stretched family budgets must deal with the additional challenge of heating their homes during frosty weather when their children are off school.

However, I think some lessons have definitely been learned.

Teachers are better prepared for online teaching

We must all commend the dedication and commitment of our teachers who have worked incredibly hard to develop a range of digital learning skills since last March, often through the generous sharing of expertise and resources within their own communities of practice (such as @BlendEd_NI). As a home-schooling parent as well as a teacher educator, I can already see how during this second lockdown the confidence and competence of teachers is much greater than before as they embrace a wider range of interactive pedagogies including, this time, more of the recorded/live video sessions which were largely missing from the first lockdown. This time around it is clear that, for teachers, technology is much less of a barrier to be surmounted or even circumvented, and much more of a pedagogical springboard to engagement – that is definitely progress, and is something to celebrate.

Some households are no better prepared for online learning

We must also commend the work of the voluntary and community sector as well as the Education Authority over the past few months in providing digital hardware to those most in need. However, I fear that significant challenges remain in terms of access to laptops, tablets, and printers for home learning in too many households. Broadband access also remains patchy in many rural areas and will take years to improve. How can children be expected to learn remotely when they still don’t have a suitable device to access their resources, when they don’t have a printer to print their work, or when there is no broadband availability in their rural community? There is a world of difference between, on the one hand, waiting for your exhausted key worker parent to return from work in the evening to access your schoolwork on their mobile phone, and, on the other hand, sitting at your own desk with your own laptop and printer and degree-educated parent all available to support the learning process.

And in our preoccupation with tests, examinations and curricular content, let us not forget our commitments expressed following the first lockdown to promote the emotional health and wellbeing of our children, including our youngest learners. As fully expressed in another CREU blog by colleagues Glenda Walsh and Stephanie Gillespie, the September ‘restart’ was to focus on understanding, reassurance, connection and opportunities to play, relax and have fun, not least as a protection against social isolation and an uncertain future. Those principles remain centrally important in the return to remote learning.

SEN pupils spared lockdown home-schooling

Finally, we should be encouraged that in this second extended period of lockdown (unlike in March 2020), it has been decided that special schools should remain open to all pupils. This is not to underestimate the challenges facing special school principals in maintaining their high staffing ratios at a time when so many teachers and classroom assistants are off work, but it does represent a welcome acknowledgement that every effort must be made to provide access to education and on-site health therapies for some of our most vulnerable children and young people.

However, although we have learned much and our spirits have been buoyed by the roll-out of vaccines, my fear remains that this second lockdown is likely to reproduce and exacerbate many of the inequalities of the first. It could lead to a perpetuation of the ‘Matthew effect’ of accumulated advantage we saw then, as the rich get even further ahead and the poor get left even further behind. As we enter this second extended period of home-schooling, we need to work together to learn the lessons of the first lockdown, to honour the commitments we made then, and to ensure that all our children, whether rich or poor, urban or rural, are given equal opportunities not just to learn but to thrive.

Dr Noel Purdy is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement

“There is no education like adversity”: learning from the positive experiences of lockdown

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

As Disraeli once wrote “there is no education like adversity”, a maxim that seems just as relevant during the current pandemic crisis as when it was first penned a century and a half ago. In this blog we consider what can be learnt from the positive experiences of home learning for some children and families during lockdown.

Dr Noel Purdy is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement at Stranmillis University College, Belfast.

Alistair Hamill is Senior Leader in Lurgan College, responsible for Teaching & Learning, and Learning Lead in Craigavon Area Learning Community.

There is now a wealth of evidence from studies here in Northern Ireland (Walsh et al., 2020, O’Connor et al., 2020) across the rest of the UK (Sutton Trust, 2020; IFS, 2020), in the Republic of Ireland (Mohan et al., 2020) and further afield (Goldstein, 2020), that lockdown has been very challenging for many children and for their parents/carers, often leading to an exacerbation of existing social inequalities (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2020; ONS, 2020) and widely divergent educational experiences.

Among those most likely to be negatively impacted have been those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, those with special educational needs and those in rural areas with poor internet connectivity (Walsh et al., 2020; O’Connor et al., 2020). Most of our attention has now justifiably turned towards planning for what has been referred to as a flexible ‘recovery curriculum’ to prioritise emotional wellbeing needs, to redress the imbalance of educational access and to bridge the learning gap which will inevitably have widened during lockdown.

However, it is important to acknowledge that there have also been some children who have had overwhelmingly positive experiences of learning at home since March, and we argue here that there is also an onus on schools to meet their needs during the Restart and, where possible and appropriate, to seek to learn from and use their positive experiences to promote better learning dispositions among the wider peer group.

Many families have enjoyed home learning

First, and most broadly, the findings of the CREU online parental survey carried out in April/May  highlight that for a sizeable minority of families, the experience of home learning has been enjoyable, offering them an opportunity to spend more time together, enjoying a calmer pace of life, giving parents time to engage confidently and more directly than ever before in their children’s learning, supported by appropriate online resources from the school, while also giving children more time to play, relax and enjoy the outdoors.  Indeed this resonates with a recent UK-wide study where 26% of parents reported that their relationship with their children had improved during lockdown (especially where the youngest child was under 4 years old) and only 4% said the relationship had worsened.  In open-ended comments from the Stranmillis CREU study, several parents also commented specifically on how their children were really enjoying the home-schooling experience (though often missing their friends and classmates), feeling less stressed by the pressure of external exams, benefitting from a ‘slower pace of life’, and enjoying opportunities to re-connect as a family:

The difference in our kids is amazing they are so much happier and more relaxed the whole house is much less stressed, adults included.

I think my children have coped very well – they are settled, contented and enjoy the cocoon of home.

It has given my children more time to play freely which is positive.

My son suffers with anxiety at school and with being at home with the lockdown I find it really has helped my son focus more on school work and not the class clown or feeling anxious or worried so he definitely seems more relaxed and has the head space to study better with less stress

Some children with ASD and ADHD are benefitting

Second, and more specifically, while it has been noted by NICCY and others that many children with special educational needs have undoubtedly struggled with the lack of additional learning support, therapeutic intervention, familiar structure, leisure and respite opportunities, conversely a smaller number of other children with special educational needs have actually thrived.  Some parents in the CREU survey spoke of children with ASD and ADHD in particular whose anxiety levels have fallen, free from the social pressures of a busy school environment, away from the threat of bullying, and able to learn in a less regimented, more flexible and secure home environment:

Our son has Aspergers. He is v bright but lacks concentration. When he is in the mood to do work, we do it. He needs a lot of attention to keep him in tasks.  Generally speaking he is much less anxious than when at school, he struggles with the social side of school which results in massive anxieties and OCD behaviours. These have significantly reduced since he has been at home.

My child is currently being assessed for ADHD which does at time impact her focus and motivation and I feel she has enjoyed the flexibility/autonomy of our lessons.

I think my dyslexic son benefits as he doesn’t have the same pressures as the classroom and I can work with him 1-1 and produce much better work than when he is in a class of nearly 30 pupils. I can also work one on one to improve his attention issues.

Remote learning has benefits for pupil self-regulation

Third, lockdown has highlighted the importance of self-regulation among learners.  Schools provide a highly structured, regulated environment, with a high degree of timely accountability for the pupils as they do their work. For pupils who struggle with self-regulation, this environment can, at the very least, produce compliant learners: pupils who will turn up to class, generally do the work set by the teacher and mostly hand work in on time. In the lockdown environment, the loss of the direct experience of this structure, regulation and accountability has left pupils with much more freedom – and responsibility – to self-regulate. A recent ETI report found that many post-primary pupils struggled even with basic levels of compliance in this context, but there is evidence that other pupils managed this freedom very well, supported by learning resources from, and interactions with, their teachers.  More significantly, there is evidence from studies such as a recent school-based study in the Netherlands that learners who can self-regulate go on to achieve more highly.

So, what are the qualities exhibited by such pupils and what can we learn from them? An Education Endowment Foundation report summarises the evidence on self-regulation and metacognition, and cites a range of strategies that help pupils learn independently, including: ‘setting specific short-term goals, adopting powerful strategies for attaining the goals, monitoring performance for signs of progress, restructuring one’s physical and social context to make it compatible with one’s goals; managing time-use efficiently; self-evaluating one’s methods; attributing causation to results and adapting future methods’.

Based on the additional experience of online teaching of 14-18 year olds in one local grammar school during lockdown, it has become clear that some pupils, especially those in KS4/5, have developed sufficient self-regulation skills not only to comply with the work set, but to become fully engaged in their learning. More than that, it has given some pupils a high degree of agency in their own learning, as they have shown significant self-awareness to adapt their learning schedules and strategies based on self-reflection to align with how they learn best. These include pupils who have designed their own learning timetable for the week, using the learning support from the school as a foundation, but adapting it, based on a high degree of self-awareness, to best facilitate their own learning.

Looking ahead we would recommend that schools seek to do more to develop self-regulation skills among pupils, a view echoed by the EEF, whose report on remote learning published at the start of lockdown, made the following recommendation:

Supporting pupils to work independently can improve learning outcomes. Pupils learning at home will often need to work independently. Multiple reviews identify the value of strategies that help pupils work independently with success … Wider evidence related to metacognition and self-regulation suggests that disadvantaged pupils are likely to particularly benefit from explicit support to help them work independently, for example, by providing checklists or daily plans.

With the possibility of further school disruptions in the 2020/21 school year, the need to train pupils in self-regulation skills early upon their return to school is imperative.

Learning from lockdown

As schools transition back to a blended model of face to face and remote learning, how do we respond to what has been learnt from this time? The following questions might facilitate some self-reflection for teachers, school leaders and policy-makers:

1. How do we ensure that our approach to education after lockdown is more balanced?

In what ways can we make school less pressured, more pastoral, less assessment-driven and more focused on the well-being of individual children, while recognising the potential to build on positive experiences of family and parental engagement since March?  How do we prioritise relationships – within schools, within families and between schools and families?

2. How do we best prepare some of most vulnerable learners with special educational needs for the return to school in August/September?

It must be acknowledged that this will not be a return to school as they knew it before, and that during the last few months, new routines will have become established in settled home environments where face-to-face social interaction and communication could be kept to a minimum.  How do we ensure that these pupils’ anxiety at the prospect of the Restart is minimised, and that school itself is a safer, happier place for all learners, irrespective of their needs?

3. How do we best support the full range of pupils’ self-regulation habits as schools open more widely?

How do we find ways of fostering and encouraging the continued growth of effective self-regulation shown by some pupils? In what ways do we ensure that the re-introduction of the highly structured environment of school does not cause them to lose the agency they have developed during remote learning? How can we find ways of sharing this effective practice with those pupils who have struggled more with this, encouraging them to learn from the example of their peers? And, how do we explicitly teach and upskill all pupils in the learnable techniques of self-regulation and metacognition?

We not have not sought here to deny or minimise the reality of the challenges faced by many children and their parents during lockdown (and these have already been well documented).  Instead we set out to look for learning opportunities as a result of positive experiences where they did occur, despite adversity.  In reporting these here, we hope to have provided some encouragement, though also many further questions to consider together over the coming days.  In so doing, we have every confidence in the educational workforce of Northern Ireland to rise to the challenges that lie ahead.

Bridging the Lockdown Learning Gap (Part Two)

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

In the first instalment of this blog, I considered two initial questions around the lockdown learning gap: (1) Is there a lockdown learning gap? and (2) What does the lockdown learning gap look like?

In this second instalment, we turn to the third key question: what steps can we take to bridge the lockdown learning gap?

Dr Noel Purdy is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement at Stranmillis University College, Belfast.

Bridging the lockdown learning gap

Over half a century ago, in Education and the Working Class Jackson and Marsden (1966) highlighted a system of educational apartheid in England which benefitted the elite and disadvantaged working class children. More recently Diane Reay has argued that, despite a common curriculum and many other changes to the educational landscape, ‘educational success is still restricted to a few’ (2017, p.177) and that the winners are predominantly those from families with wealth, influential social networks and a history of educational success. Reay argues that the upper classes and most of the middle classes have been ‘insulated’ from the last decade of austerity and its consequences, while the working classes have struggled. Reading the emerging research studies of lockdown learning experiences across the UK (Sutton Trust, 2020; IFS, 2020; Walsh et al., 2020) leaves little doubt that once again children from working class backgrounds with less educated parents are struggling most, with less access to online resources, less time spent learning at home, and less support from their parents. Once again, it seems, there is no ‘insulation’ for those already disadvantaged in our education system and society at large. Instead, the social injustice of the lockdown learning gap is striking, and as we consider practical blended strategies to adopt over the coming months of (at best) part-time schooling supported by further home-schooling, we must be mindful that the gap will not be bridged easily or quickly.

In the figure below, based on a reading of the most recent research, supplemented by my own convictions, and adapted for a new, untested educational landscape, I set out what I see as the seven key ways to bridge the lockdown learning gap, followed by seven underpinning foundations:

Pastoral Support for Pupils

The first practical consideration has to be effective pastoral support for pupils all of whom, at the very least, have lived through the crisis of a global pandemic that none of us (as adults) have ever experienced in our lifetimes. Many will have experienced the uncertainty of their parents being furloughed or losing their jobs, some will have felt the hunger of reduced family incomes and lived off food banks, others will have seen at first hand the devastating effects of COVID-19 and lost loved ones, especially grandparents, and will be experiencing the pain of bereavement. It must be recognised that many pupils will need emotional reassurance and support, and will feel anxious about leaving home to enter a strangely different, socially distanced school environment. Schools already have highly-skilled pastoral teams, but they should be prepared to encounter many more emotional health and wellbeing needs in the months to follow, and should adopt a child-centred approach of whole-school understanding and trauma-sensitive ‘flexible consistency’ to ensure that all children feel physically, socially, emotionally and academically safe. Pastoral care is a feature of every classroom, and all teachers must be encouraged and empowered to show compassion, understanding and sensitivity to children whose experience of lockdown may have been completely at odds with their own.

Quality Blended Teaching and Learning

The second priority has to be quality blended teaching and learning. In September it is likely that pupils will be in school at most 50% of the time, so there will still be a need for effective provision of remote learning. Some teachers naturally feel out of their comfort zones, but I would reassure them that the key elements of effective pedagogy remain the same as before, irrespective of the teaching medium: clear learning intentions, engaging content, differentiated tasks, opportunities for a range of meaningful pupil activities, and timely formative feedback on work submitted. Our recent report of parents’ experiences of home-schooling in Northern Ireland also revealed that almost a quarter of homes did not have access to a printer.  Others were struggling to afford the cost of printer paper and ink. As a result, some schools have already signalled their intention to offer printed hand-outs which is welcome. Creating online quizzes rather than asking pupils to print pdfs to complete, scan and submit is also something that can reduce inequalities as well as helping to reduce a teacher’s marking load.

Curricular Innovation

As my colleagues Dr Sharon Jones and Dr Glenda Walsh have suggested in their recent CREU blogs, there are, thirdly, opportunities for curricular innovation in the post-lockdown learning environment. While formal changes to the curriculum will take time, teachers can immediately explore the flexibility of the existing curriculum to integrate more outdoor learning play opportunities, to focus on the positive elements of character education within Personal Development and Mutual Understanding (Primary) and Learning for Life and Work (Post-Primary) and, I would argue, to make opportunities to discuss and process children’s experiences of the past six months. Moreover, there have been some wonderful examples in the past of how school communities have come together in the wake of natural disasters (e.g. Carol Mutch’s work following the 2010-11 New Zealand earthquakes) through creative projects to recount, illustrate or commemorate their own experiences and stories.

Professional Learning Opportunities for Teachers

Fourth, teachers have worked hard in challenging circumstances to upskill themselves, but ground-up initiatives like @BlendED_NI illustrate that there remains a skills gap across the profession and an urgent need for Professional Learning Opportunities for Teachers. The key considerations here are the availability and affordability of such learning opportunities. Stranmillis has recently provided free CPD to over 300 teachers on its Remote Teaching and Learning course (see website for details of all Stranmillis professional development courses). The other obvious concerns here are teachers’ own access to the internet, availability of appropriate hardware and software, and teachers’ own need to maintain a work-life balance. While there is much to learn from online courses, recent experiences have also illustrated the potential from emerging online ‘communities of practice’ where materials are increasingly shared openly, and much-needed guidance offered by peers.

Focused Learning Support

Fifth, there will be a need for focused learning support for pupils in September. Although pupils are likely to be in school only part-time, it will be important to use some of that time to quickly assess what exactly are the learning needs of the different children in each class, and to consider approaches to support. For those children on the SEN register, the additional learning and therapeutic support which was often partially or completely absent during lockdown, can be restored but it is important to note that budgets are already incredibly tight in schools and as the 2019 Northern Ireland Affairs Committee inquiry on educational funding highlighted, SEN spending and classroom assistant support are often among the first cuts to be made as school leaders struggle to balance their budgets. Providing additional focused learning support without additional funding will simply not be possible.

Catch-up Tutoring

Sixth, and returning to the opening discussion of the social injustice of lockdown learning, the widest learning gaps to be bridged will require more than skillfully differentiated classroom teaching. For those children who have been engaged in little or no home learning since 23 March, the challenges of re-entering the educational system cannot be overestimated. In response, there are several options for catch-up tutoring. One is the summer school model which has been adopted by schools across Harlem Children’s Zone and which endeavours to use vacation time to fast-track the recovery process. Another model is to enlist community volunteers or university students to offer free tutoring to disadvantaged pupils. The recent EEF report notes that a pre-COVID evaluation of low-cost tutoring provided by third-level students generated a positive impact on pupil learning of three additional months’ progress. As ever, there are significant challenges in meeting the learning needs of the most disadvantaged children, including demands on teacher time, affordability, safeguarding, and ongoing digital access inequity.

Enhanced Parental Engagement

Finally, enhanced parental engagement: the Stranmillis report on homeschooling during the COVID-19 crisis revealed harrowing experiences by some parents and high levels of stress and exhaustion among others, especially those on the front line employed as Essential or Key Workers. However, many parents also used the survey to comment on how much they had enjoyed spending time home-schooling with their children, and had felt closer than ever before to their learning. This report should make essential reading for schools as they seek to capitalize on some of the positives from the lockdown. While parents often requested more guidance on how to support their children’s learning and how to navigate the complex range of learning platforms available, this shouldn’t disguise the fact that they want to be involved and, coming out of lockdown, I would contend that this is an opportunity for schools to build on, improving communication with home, welcoming dialogue and embracing the notion of parents as learning partners.

A Further Seven Foundations to Bridge the Lockdown Learning Gap

While these are important practical steps to be taken, the figure illustrates a further seven foundations upon which the bridge must be built. Of foremost importance, of course, is the health and safety of the entire school community (pupils, all staff, parents, visitors) and it goes without saying that schools must follow the most recent government guidance on social distancing, PPE, hand sanitizing etc. as there are very real and justifiable concerns that a return to school as part of a broader easement of lockdown restrictions could lead to a rise in the R number, as was briefly the case in Denmark following the re-opening of schools there on 15 April. Throughout this crisis we have seen excellent examples of effective school leadership, with gifted principals taking difficult decisions with little guidance to help them, communicating regularly, informing and reassuring the school community. Given the unique circumstances of each school, school leaders will continue to need to adapt broad-stroke guidance to their individual school circumstances. The underlying principles of pupil voice and inclusion/equality of access remain prime considerations to ensure that pupils are involved meaningfully and have a valuable role to play in their schools, and that no one is left behind or excluded, willfully or by oversight. Regular, clear and consistent communication at and between all levels has also emerged as a much valued element of a school’s response to a crisis. I would argue that this will be particularly important in the approach to the new academic year, when staff and pupils will naturally be feeling anxious about the return to school, though not to school as they knew it. With technological support, it will be possible to communicate directly to pupils and parents, showing them (via photos and/or video) what schools and classrooms will look like, thus alleviating some of the understandable anxiety that is already growing. Adopting a research-informed approach is also more important now than ever for educators. If the current health crisis has shown anything, it is that the scientific community has united as never before, sharing expertise, making research open-access, adapting as new findings emerge and helping to inform those charged with making policy decisions. There is an onus on those of us who are researchers to work hard to disseminate our findings to policy-makers and to those on the front line in schools. All of this requires generous government funding if it is to become a reality rather than an aspiration, at the very time when budgets look to be tighter than ever before. However, this pandemic has demonstrated that there is the potential for additional spending where the need is deemed to be great enough. So why not now?

Is this not the moment to invest in educational recovery, to facilitate the purchase of the latest technology (hardware, software, internet access, printers) to enable effective blended learning, to support the efforts of schools to upskill staff through high-quality professional development, and to provide learning support to those in danger of being educationally as well as socially ‘left behind’? There is no quick fix, no silver bullet. Bridging the lockdown learning gap will require vision, courage, tenacity, skill and investment. It is time to get started.

Bridging the Lockdown Learning Gap (Part One)

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

Dr Noel Purdy is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement at Stranmillis University College, Belfast.

Last Friday afternoon (5th June 2020) 369 educators from across Northern Ireland took part in a ground-breaking webinar on the theme of ‘Charting the Way: Conversations on education in NI ahead of September 2020’. It was by far the largest and most relevant-to-practice webinar on which I have ever had the privilege of being a panellist, and is a remarkable testament to the innovation of the @Blended_NI team who organised it in less than a week. In its sheer scale, it was also a clear sign of the thirst among dedicated classroom teachers for practical guidance, support and reassurance as they face the challenge of an educational earthquake (revolutions are planned after all) that no one could have predicted even six months ago. The webinar discussion was wide-ranging but one of the key issues to emerge was the likelihood of a ‘lockdown learning gap’ arising from the current pandemic crisis during which the vast majority of children are not being educated at school.

In response I would suggest that there are three key questions to consider: (1) Is there a lockdown learning gap? (2) What does the lockdown learning gap look like? and (3) What steps can we take to bridge the lockdown learning gap?  In the first instalment of this blog I will address questions 1 and 2.  In the second instalment I will consider question 3.

Is there a lockdown learning gap?

The short answer to this is that we can’t know yet for sure, as we don’t have reliable evidence from large-scale assessment tests to tell us the long-term impact. That will doubtless come over the coming months. In the meantime, we can however look at likely indicators from a number of recent studies: for instance, the pre-lockdown Ofcom survey revealed that online access is mediated by family background and that children in working class homes are less likely than those in middle class homes to access the internet via either a tablet (59% vs. 72%) or a mobile phone (49% vs. 62%); the early-lockdown Sutton Trust Report in April confirmed what I had predicted in an earlier blog that the lockdown has exacerbated existing inequalities in our education system with children from poorer backgrounds having less access to online resources and parental support, spending less time learning, and submitting less work than their less disadvantaged peers and those attending private schools. A month later, a report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies found that children from better-off families are spending 30% more time on home learning each week (amounting to more than two additional school weeks in total, assuming schools re-open here in late August/September) and have more access to individualised online resources than those from poorer families.

On 20 May our own Stranmillis report on Home-Schooling in Northern Ireland during the COVID-19 Crisis reported on a survey of over 2000 parents and found wide disparities in parental experiences of home-schooling, often mediated by their level of education and employment status. Experiences ranged from, on the one hand, confident, highly educated parents relishing the opportunity to spend more time learning alongside their children, safely cocooned from the pandemic threat, to, on the other hand, highly stressed working parents struggling to access resources, lacking confidence in their own abilities and battling to motivate their children to engage in learning during the ‘nightmare’ of lockdown. Based on these robust research reports, it is clear that there will undoubtedly be a lockdown learning gap. I would further suggest that the gap is likely to be wider than the traditional loss of learning experienced during the summer months, because unlike the normal two-month summer vacation, there will not have been such widely divergent experiences between children who have effectively been home-tutored by degree-educated parents and children who, through no fault of their own, have engaged in little or no learning at all.

What does the lockdown learning gap look like?

A report published earlier this month by the Education Endowment Foundation has attempted to predict the impact of school closures on the attainment gap, based on a rapid evidence assessment of a total of 11 previous studies of learning loss carried out since 1995. The EEF predictions suggest that the current closures will widen the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers by a median estimate of 36% (with a range between 11% and 75%). The authors acknowledge the limitations of their review which (inevitably) is based on studies of summer learning gaps rather than the experiences of previous current pandemic crises. The report notes that sustained effort will be required over the coming months to help disadvantaged pupils catch up.

There has been much general discussion of learning needs but little specific about the particular learning needs of pupils on their return to school. Consequently, I have developed a typology of learning needs (see below), beginning with the need for teachers to address pre-lockdown learning which may be lost (and needs reteaching) or rusty (and needs refreshing) as might be expected after a lengthy break from traditional schooling of 5 months. This experience is similar to what might normally be expected following the summer vacation, and teachers are already skilled at recapping and refreshing knowledge and skills in September before moving on to new learning material.

A typology of lockdown learning needs

While this might represent relatively familiar ground for teachers, the particular features of lockdown learning loss are different: based on the studies cited above, we can also expect many children to have missed lockdown learning where there was little or no engagement at all with learning activities since March (through no fault of their own) and where catch-up teaching is required; shaky lockdown learning (requiring consolidation) where lockdown learning has been partial, incomplete or insecure, the result of a range of possible factors including poor or miscomprehension, lack of pupil motivation, inadequate parental support, and limited opportunities for individualised teaching and/or feedback; and minimal lockdown learning (needing extension) where learning has been rudimentary, covering minimum content but falling short of the wealth of differentiated extension activities that would normally have been provided in school.

Typology of Lockdown Learning Needs

The fundamental consequence of this is that additional time and investment will undoubtedly be required to identify and address the various learning needs of individual pupils over the coming months. So let’s not imagine for a moment that this is going to be ‘business as usual’ in August/September.  With the prospect of widely divergent attainment levels following more than three months of widely divergent home learning experiences, teachers will need to draw on all of their professional expertise to meet the challenges ahead.

So, I would argue that there will undoubtedly be a lockdown learning gap come August/September, and that it will be wider than what might be experienced after the customary two-month summer vacation. Furthermore, I would contend that the nature of the learning deficit will be more varied and differentiated than ever before, including lost, rusty, missed, shaky and minimal learning, all of which need to be addressed by professional, dedicated and compassionate teachers. In the second instalment of this blog, I will consider the third and most significant key question: what steps can we take to bridge the lockdown learning gap?