Homerton’s Pandemic Year

The news pages of this magazine are usually filled with guest lectures, concerts, choir tours and sporting achievements. This year, in their place have been endless hours of Zoom calls. Reminders still flash up on online calendars alerting us that today should have been Graduation, the Kate Pretty Lecture, the Boat Race, while we continue to interact via a screen from whichever corner of the house we have managed to commandeer. But while we may not have had the usual array of events, and the College has been empty of staff and students, it has not been short of news.

Homerton, along with the wider world, was thrown in March into a completely different version of 2020 than the year we had anticipated. It happened, like Hemingway’s bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. We went from drawnout discussions over whether the MA Graduation, scheduled for 28 March, would be able to go ahead, to confronting the unthinkable prospect of sending home hundreds of students in the middle of term.

The IT team worked frantically to provide access to remote working for whole departments which suddenly had to reconfigure their activities in order to work from home. The relative merits of Teams, Zoom and Google Hangouts were tried out, and everyone’s devices began pinging with notifications on multiple platforms. We rapidly became experts on the interior design and bookshelf contents of our colleagues’ homes.

The Senior Tutor, Dr Penny Barton, and her team had to develop methods of providing a Cambridge-quality education to students scattered to their parents’ homes, connecting students to tutors for remote supervisions, and providing remote access to lectures and the library.

“Students and supervisors alike quickly adapted to working from their kitchens and bedrooms in that Zoom dance we are all now all too familiar with,” says Dr Barton. “The superimposed background quickly took over from the more homely. I really take my hat off to our fantastic supervisors who juggled time zones and disparate groups with different internet connections whilst still looking after babies and home-schooling their children – providing an academic lifeline and sense of normaility for our students to look forward to.”

While the College was closed with immediate effect to the majority of staff and students from late March, roughly 60 students who were unable to go home hunkered down to spend their lockdown in Homerton. Grouped into “households” Professor Mary Dixon-Woods to ensure that no one was too isolated and enable them to support each other,

they spent the spring and summer in a depleted College.

“Those not already in graduate accommodation were moved into Morley House and Harrison House where they had full kitchen facilities and could look after themselves,” says the Bursar, Deborah Griffin. “Towards the end of June we started to welcome back some postgraduates whose laboratories were opening, firstly either into quarantine or separate households, then into established households.”

Maintaining a sense of community

This cohort of students sacrificed much of their Cambridge experience, from the significant rites of passage such as Graduation and the May Ball, to the dayto-day pleasures of sharing each other’s company, attending lectures, taking part in sport, music and drama, and enjoying what the city has to offer. In order to maintain a collegiate sense of community, from a distance, we launched two new blogs early in lockdown.

The Homersphere (homersphere. squarespace.com), made up of contributions from academic staff, aimed to recreate the capacity of College life to foster spontaneous exposure to ideas beyond the reading list. By luring the reader in with one story, but hoping to distract them with another, it replicates the chance stumbling upon new areas of interest which, in normal times, students might experience through a conversation in the bar or spotting a lecture poster on the railings. Fellow in Education Philip Stephenson has provided regular commentary on specific artworks from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection, in conjunction with the latest development in these pandemic times. Emeritus Fellow John Hopkins has offered musical playlists in a similar vein. But the blog has also included recent research, reflections and writing on topics both connected and unrelated to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

In parallel with the Homersphere, LifeSpace (homertonlifespace.wordpress. com), launched by Catherine Snelson, the College Counsellor, offered a lighter opportunity for students and staff to remain connected, through book reviews, pictures of pets, poetry and lifestyle articles. Both blogs tapped into the need, as the weeks without contact with the outside world ticked on, to remind ourselves that we are still part of a vibrant, varied and exciting academic community, and to share ideas within it.

On site

Even emptied of students and staff, aspects of College life continued to tick over. The gardening team, led by Helen Andre Cripps, worked throughout the tantalisingly beautiful spring to look after the grounds. The buttery continued to serve a limited menu to those staff and students who remained on site. The library team had the challenge of establishing, in a very short space of time, how to look after the needs of students revising and studying from home.

“It was a rapid and difficult few days to close the library when lockdown began, and arrange how staff might work from home,”

Senior Tutor Dr Penny Barton and Principal Professor Geoff Ward toast graduating students at a socially distanced celebration

says the Fellow Librarian, Liz Osman. “In two days we created the ‘Little College Library’ for those students remaining on site. It contained our wellbeing collection, including books on subjects as diverse as cookery, mindfulness and study skills. We also shelfpicked from both the adult and children’s literature sections in the hope there would be something to appeal to everyone.

Some members of library staff have been working from home through lockdown, supporting students remotely via email whilst they were completing dissertations and assessments. We’ve also been keeping in touch via social media. We’ve been planning how and when to re-open and are really looking forward to being able to start offering a physical library service again. We’re also giving thought to creating virtual inductions and other such adjustments to ensure new students can get all the information they need and also stay safe.”

Supporting our staff

But there were many roles, crucial in normal times, which simply weren’t needed. As the furlough scheme came into being, the Bursar and HR Manager found themselves needing to establish which staff would be taking up government support. Fortunately, the College was able to top up the furlough pay, ensuring that all permanent staff continued to receive their full salaries. Casual catering staff on short-term contracts received 80%, through government funding.

“We have furloughed quite a number of staff particularly those in catering and housekeeping who cannot work from home,” explains the Bursar. “Some teams such as Finance, Tutorial and IT have worked on the basis of having half the team on at any one time. Nearly everyone has worked from home and the IT team provided superb support to getting us all up and running on Zoom, Citrix, Teams etc . Managers have been keeping in touch with their teams and we are now bringing back people to prepare for the new term. Most people will be back by September and we are putting in measures to keep everyone as safe as possible. Our new HR Manager, Andra Hoole,

Socially distant staff operations meeting

who joined on 2 January and Jim Morris, College Accountant, have got to grips with the Job Retention Scheme and ensured that our staff have been well communicated with and looked after during this difficult time.”

Supporting our students

It was clear from early on that some students were likely to suffer financial hardship as a direct result of the pandemic. Some would not have the technology required to enable them to engage with remote lectures and supervisions. Others would not be able to take up planned work placements, missing out on necessary income. International students found themselves needing to buy flights home at the last minute. For some, their parents’ financial situation had changed, with a knock-on effect on what they were able to afford.

The Development Office was proactive in addressing this, launching a Covid-19 Emergency Hardship Fund in late March. Thanks to the huge generosity of our alumni, we raised over £40,000 in two months, which enabled us to respond to students’ needs as they arose. We are enormously grateful to all who donated for helping us to ensure that students were not economically disadvantaged by circumstances beyond their control. As one Masters in Education student said:

“The Hardship Grant has been hugely helpful during these difficult times. As a result of the pandemic, I lost a lot of additional work I had been relying on in order to pay my university fees. Furthermore, my mum has been furloughed for the past few months, so it became more difficult for her to help me financially. The Hardship Grant has eased the burden of paying the fees, therefore making it a much less stressful process.”

“These extra funds have been invaluable for helping our students with unexpected additional expenses in the current crisis,” agreed Dr Penny Barton, the Senior Tutor.

Subject to the advancement or retreat of the virus we hope to be able to welcome all students back on site in October, although social distancing guidance may mean that large-scale lectures and eating together are limited. But, with luck and planning, we should be able to move towards some degree of normality in the next academic year. We are enormously proud of how all our staff and students have responded to these extraordinary times, demonstrated most notably by the fact that this year’s academic results were the best we have ever had.

On 18 July, we hosted a virtual celebration for undergraduates and PGCE students who had completed their studies (an equivalent ceremony for postgraduate students is planned for September). Coming together via slightly unpredictable technology for speeches from the Principal and Senior Tutor and a shared toast was surprisingly moving, and it was good to have the opportunity to acknowledge the achievements of this ambitious and resilient cohort, our pandemic generation. As the Principal said in his speech:

“I’ve come to realise over the last few months in particular that Homerton is not just a place, it’s a sphere of interactions, a community, and that community endures whether or not we are physically in the same space.”