45a. THERE IS NO ARGUMENT FOR RE-OPENING UK SCHOOLS YET - To Warrant Change, Something Significant Needs To Have Changed
As a teacher with asthma I spent much of the last week terrified. Suddenly the media was full of speculation that schools would be reopening as part of the anticipated easing of lockdown to be announced on Sunday. Although the Prime Minister has since backtracked on these rumours and attempted to minimise public expectations that lockdown would be ending any time soon, and I write this now, the Friday before whatever announcement Sunday will bring, with no knowledge yet of what the actual roadmap out of lockdown will look like, it is worth pointing out, I feel, whatever Johnson announces on Sunday, a few key details in terms of returning students and staff to schools.
1) As of now, May 2020, nothing has fundamentally changed from the circumstances which required a lockdown and to close the schools in March. While social distancing has helped “flatten the curve” of infection, here in the UK we still have:
The worst death rate from the virus in Europe.
A significant number of infections, not yet under control, putting the NHS under great pressure.
Furthermore:
There is no vaccine.
The virus remains potentially fatal to many.
Scientists do not have sufficient evidence yet that getting ill from the virus and surviving it leads to immunity, or any firm knowledge yet of how long such immunity, if it occurs, would last.
It is also well known that:
Schools are significant incubators for illness and their transmission, as seen every flu season and with every contagious bug that passes through them each term.
Given (1), it is clear that any lifting of social distancing threatens to lead to a rise in infections, a return to overloading the NHS, and more deaths, not just for students, staff and their families, but for all of us impacted by that domino effect of contagion and decreased healthcare capacity. Therefore if schools are to return at any point before a vaccine is found, it is clear that they will have to return very differently than they were before, operated with strict social distancing in place and with at least all staff wearing effective PPE. However…
2) We are now nearly two months into the crisis and our frontline health-workers have not yet themselves had sufficient PPE to effectively protect them from the virus while working. Why would, or should, teachers be better protected than those knowingly working with infected patients on a daily basis? If teachers could procure sufficient PPE, then some of it would surely be more useful sent to the medical frontlines where it remains starkly absent. If, as is more likely, teachers will not be able to procure it to the requisite levels for all staff, then it would be unsafe for them to return to work. No one should be returning to work until it is safe to do so, therefore schools cannot re-open.
3) For social distancing to work, people have to rigidly follow the guidelines. In leaked reports this week - the same reports suggesting schools could reopen by June - Whitehall officials were quoted saying that coffee shops and beer gardens would not be re-opened if restrictions were lifted because grown adults couldn’t be trusted to maintain social distancing in such places. If we can’t trust adults, fully aware of the risks to them and others, to maintain social distance outside a coffee shop, how on earth can we trust classes of thirty, or whole schools of hundreds, of young children - many shielded from the grim realities of Covid-19 plastered across the daily news by concerned parents over the last few weeks; many of those who have paid attention being told repeatedly the virus is not a threat to them or their age group - to strictly adhere to rules such as standing two metres apart, so unnatural to their previous lives at school? As a teacher, before school closures, I have routinely watched my students:
Be unable to follow instructions about where to sit or stand when told.
Actively rebel against such instructions.
Invade my personal space in the classroom.
Invade each other’s personal space.
Be inconsiderate about their personal hygiene (hand-washing, spitting, coughing, sneezing, etc.)
Act without thinking and endanger themselves and others.
I have also seen students, and their parents, lie about illnesses. Theoretically there were already illnesses, such as stomach bugs, which if a student had symptoms of they were not supposed to come to school for at least twenty-four hours. Many students still did. Are these same students now to be trusted when they claim not to have any of the symptoms of Covid-19? The week before school closures, when the symptoms to be aware of were well known, I still had multiple students sitting in my classroom with those symptoms (persistent dry cough and temperature). Their justification for being there despite the edict to stay home: “don’t worry sir, I don’t think it’s the coronavirus”.
I am not trying to be disparaging of either students or schools in mentioning the above, I am simply describing the reality of young people and the haphazard ability of poorly funded public institutions to strictly monitor and enforce rules, be they for staff or for students. Such erratic behaviour is not a child’s “fault”; it is just part of growing up - not understanding the good reasons for certain rules (usually because so many bad ones have numbed them to noticing the few which make sense), rebelling against things they don’t like (a good instinct in many cases), being a bit disgusting as you learn to care more about your body and recognise what it does… But this stuff can be dangerous in the current context, not merely amusing or infuriating as pupils fumble their way to maturity. Consider, for example, my philosophical advice in most instances to question everything. In general it’s a good rule of thumb for a philosopher. But that same good rule of thumb could become a death sentence were I to use it as a solider in a war zone. “Duck!” yells my commanding officer. “Why?” I ask, instead of obeying, as the bullet ends my life.
Children are hard to control. It’s a good thing. It’s why so many parents are discovering during lockdown how hard a teacher’s job is, and why so many teachers pull their hair out each academic year trying to get their students to do as they are told. As an anarchist I love this instinct our students have to say no. But being realistic about who our students are and what they are like means recognising that social distancing in such a fraught environment will be a nearly impossible task to maintain. Again, this Friday saw even some grown adults incapable of following social distancing measures and holding shared VE Day celebrations in their streets against all government advice and the full enforcement of the law. Even if followed rigidly for the first day, the first week, how long before kids slip into old habits? Which brings me to point (4)…
4) What are schools to do with those students who simply refuse to follow the new rules? Do we put them into detentions? How do detentions work under social distancing? Once the limit of a room is reached - what happens next? We fill every available space until we end up unable to follow social distancing ourselves to punish students for breaking social distancing? Do we send students home? If we can do that, we ought probably to have just let them work from home in the first place where it is safer. There are lots of superior behaviour management techniques in education to detentions and exclusions, but the life or death nature of Covid-19 without a vaccine or immunity means we don’t have time to slowly develop better choices in our students through positive reinforcement. We need to know, as staff, that we, and our families, will be safe from day one. Certainly in my own case I did not feel safe at work the week before lockdown, where students were actively coughing uncovered and laughing with each other that they had “given you corona”. Hilarious. And potentially fatal. To my knowledge nothing was done to stop those students, as they had done the same thing in previous classes that morning. What will make it easier to prevent such behaviour with fewer sanctions to apply?
5) Social distancing in detention rooms is one thing, but actually socially distancing at all in some schools, such as my own (and many others’), an old Victorian building, is deeply difficult. Some of our corridors, or adjacent classroom doorways, aren’t one metre wide, let along two. With two metres of distance between students, perhaps seven or eight can fit in a classroom safely - not much use for a class of thirty. Of course this can be overcome - sharing lessons across teachers, splitting that class of thirty into four or more individual groups - but that radically transforms teaching capacity and timetabling. Teaching one GCSE group of thirty now becomes four times the job it should be. Each extra period of repeat-teaching (GCSE class A group 2, GCSE class A group 3, etc.) means time in which another class can’t be taught, or a teacher cannot mark or plan. And each other class of thirty needs four times as much time to be taught themselves! We could halve, or quarter, the lesson time of everyone, but then they’re all still losing some teaching time.
An alternative is whole classes in larger rooms, such as sports halls. An amplified teacher (sharing mics? Who is ensuring they are cleaned between sessions?) ensuring all can hear them, but not all schools have enough large rooms for all their students. And in such an environment it would not be practicing social distance for a teacher, even in PPE, to go from student to student to offer individual advice and teaching. While there has been talk of phased returns of some year groups and not all, or rotas between year groups going to school effectively part-time - this all means a loss of teaching time for everyone, and for what? At this point we need to break down the actual argument for why students need to be in school at all. (I am not talking about the economic argument yet, as, despite the government and media’s repeated insistence that schools need to open to get the economy back up and running, schools and teachers are not needed to look after children so that the economy can function, merely childcare facilities of some sort, as i will discuss later).
I believe the argument from school leaders about school return (the genuine arguments, not merely the professional ones designed to promote the idea of our professional importance for fear we might be all replaced by computers) might go as follows:
a) Education is important and every day our students aren’t in school is a day their education is being impacted.
Implied in (a) is:
b) Current online learning is not doing the same job as classroom learning. There is a deficiency of some sort through this medium which can only be rectified in the classroom.
c) Once back at school teachers can teach again, and students can learn. The sooner we can return to normal, therefore, the better for our children’s education.
The problem with all of this are the number of faulty assumptions smuggled within. Firstly the assumption that the “education” important to students is only the education one can get from school. While, as a teacher, I believe what we offer our students has value, I do not believe it is the only form of education which has value, and that students during this time away from the classroom can’t be having just as rich an education as they can at school, albeit one of a different sort. Much of school education is overly focused on arbitrary examination and tests. A richer education has been offered by many during this time away from that system, especially with the absence of formal exams. Furthermore, the assumption in the above that students cannot learn the normal school curriculum effectively online is unproven. In many cases students are enjoying the experience and teachers are being very innovative. While there will be numerous technical difficulties and teething problems, plus the gross social inequality of the country means many simply can’t access the learning - there is more of an argument for improving access to IT and training in online pedagogy for all than there is for returning to school if the level of online learning is lacking something found only in the classroom. Certainly for some of my classes, I have managed to make the internet feel like the classroom. It is possible - we just aren’t good at it yet as we’ve only been doing it for six weeks. Give us more time to get better and we will, teachers and students alike.
Which brings us back to the biggest assumption of all - that the return to “the classroom” means the return to the old classroom.
Certainly in my old classroom students could do things they can’t do so easily online as they share devices with siblings and parents and access their work at different times: they can interact. Work in groups. Share resources. Except…how much of this can they do two metres apart in a room of seven? Probably just as much interaction as seven of them could have at any one time online in a Google “Classroom”, Microsoft “Team”, or a Zoom meeting. I certainly won’t be wanting them using filthy shared textbooks or other germ-ridden resources. I won’t want them writing by hand, on paper, and giving me piles of their potentially infected work in that way when we return. It is highly likely that “the classroom” they return to will still ultimately mean working online, only doing so with a teacher now being put needlessly at risk in the room and potentially bringing home an infection from one of the handful of peers they share the room with unnecessarily.
Of course, being there “in person” means students can get help from you. But students can do this online already. Emails, chat functions, even online phone calls. I have given individual and group feedback successfully throughout this initial period of lockdown learning. Again, it hasn’t all been brilliant, but I’m learning on the job, and, and this is important, not all feedback was effective in the classroom before school closure either. As teachers we constantly tweak and evolve what we do - what worked with one group last year may not work with another today. What worked with one class on Tuesday may not work with a different class on Wednesday. We, and our students are learning this new way of doing things together and we have about as much success and failure at it as we did in the classroom. Importantly, being good teachers, when we fail, we rectify. Just as we always have. When the stakes are this high (life and death) we need to be able to separate nostalgia and sentiment for what is sensible and what is necessary. Much as it would be nice to sit in front of thirty students again, laughing, sharing jokes, helping them all and letting them work together, that won’t be the reality of a socially distanced classroom, kitted out in PPE and students spaced two metres apart. And when you look at what you will be able to safely do in person it really offers little more than the online experience other than physically being able to see each other in the same room. Is that really worth putting so many people and their families at risk simply for that?
So to conclude point (5): the majority of schools were built to cram as many students as possible into a small space, not for social distancing. Online learning has a lot of potential and, compared with a socially distanced classroom, offers about as much opportunity for interaction between students and teacher. The socially distanced classroom is not the classroom we are used to working in and, realistically, students returning will be returned (if done safely) on some sort of rota basis, meaning half the school will likely be needing to continue having online work set anyway, doubling the workload for teachers. Besides seeing my students there is very little I can imagine achieving in a physical space together today that I cannot achieve online, with time, once both I and my students have adjusted. While being able to safely return to a full school life is one thing, until there is a vaccine, that is not what ought to be offered, and what can be offered safely has little obvious educational benefit to working from home.
And finally,
6) If instead of speculating about re-opening, we were given a clear line that schools should not re-open until we have a vaccine or some other fundamental change in scenario that would guarantee the safety of staff, students and their families, then we could actually be using this time to invest in the future of online learning. Planning ahead. Building our online curriculums that are well-designed and not cobbled together based on old lessons and the hope it will all return to normal by the summer. Living this massive transformation in our jobs on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis goes against everything teachers have been working towards in terms of well planned curricula and lesson sequencing. There is a massive job ahead, but massive jobs get less massive when there is time in which to do them. If I need to be figuring out the best way of inducting my new exam classes for September online, or of offering transition from key stage two to key stage three, I should probably be thinking about it now rather than crossing my fingers that my usual plans for September will be useable. We do need clarity. We do need a roadmap. But there should be no stop on that roadmap for reopening schools unless something significant has changed.
To untangle all of this we can summarise as follows:
Until there is a vaccine or meaningly confirmed knowledge of immunity from Covid-19 nothing has fundamentally changed to make schools safe for staff, students or their families.
Opening schools up again therefore exposes all students, staff and their families - plus anyone connected to those students, staff and their families in the effort to re-open the schools (such as bus drivers, petrol station workers, supermarket assistants, and anyone else these people come into contact with as a result of their commute to or from school) - to a greater risk of contracting Covid-19 than they would have if students and staff were staying home.
Therefore any effort to re-open schools must be done with at least all staff wearing PPE and all staff and students practicing social distancing at all times.
The possibility of this is unlikely, given the historical facts about PPE procurement for healthcare frontlines and evidence of normal student behaviour and psychology when it comes to following rules, combined with schools having many disciplinary sanctions made inoperable due to social distancing measures.
Even if PPE is sourced and social distancing strictly followed, teaching under such conditions is a radically different proposal than teaching full classes in a fully functioning school before Covid-19, making the supposed benefits of the physical classroom and being “at school” much diminished and not necessarily offering more than can already be offered at a distance, safely, working and learning from home.
As it is possible to teach effectively from home, and a significant risk for staff and students to return to schools with little obvious benefit, given the lack of vaccine or known immunity for Covid-19, it is a risk there is little good reason to take.
The risk does not merely affect the students, teachers and their families, but given the nature of the virus’ rate of infection, and the country’s limited medical capacity, it risks the health and wellbeing of all of us.
All of the above suggests any decision to put staff and students (and the rest of the country) at risk by returning to schools before a vaccine exists or our healthcare capacity improves is merely a decision to sacrifice our lives and wellbeing for the good of “the economy”. i.e. if schools re-open, parents can send their children to school and free themselves up to return to work.
However, besides the obvious point that the economy is an ideological fantasy and we could afford to simply fund the whole country to stay home and stay safe if we really wanted to and made different foundational decisions about wealth and expenditure, and bearing in mind that getting parents back to work also means putting further people at risk until there is a vaccine or known immunity from the virus, as I have already mentioned - the desire to free parents up so they can work does not require schools and teachers, it simply requires childcare. This could be within families (parents in two parent families sharing time at home and time at work), or within communities, relaxing social distancing in small areas for the necessary purpose of allowing families to send their children to trusted carers or more formally organised set-ups (turning schools into such provision, as some have done, but not as an educational facility in need of teachers for staffing them and only used for those essential key workers needed to keep us all safe as we stay at home, not so that McDonalds can re-open to turn a profit), but it is not an argument for sending teachers and students back into schools. Indeed, we need teachers working from home to set work for those students with underlying conditions who will continue to need to self-isolate, those students not able to attend school due to socially distanced rotas, etc. The online learning will need to continue in any scenario, so why not just acknowledge this instead of flooding the profession with uncertainty and the falsehood that we are needed on the frontlines?
As you read this, we will now all know what Boris Johnson’s roadmap looks like. As a philosopher though, there are some things we can figure out a priori, without experience. Things David Hume called “relations of ideas”, and to me, as long as the known facts remain as they are, this remains an analytic truism: until there is a vaccine or something drastically changes to make staff, students and their families safer, there is no credible basis for safely re-opening UK schools.
Author: D. McKee
(My new book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is out TODAY everywhere. Order it direct from the publisher here).