Daniel Hannan

Lessons in a Covid climate

As our ‘home schooled’ children re-enter the classroom, Daniel Hannan explores the lockdown educational divide where some schools rose to the challenge and others did not. He also looks at why successful teachers view their job as a vocation.

I was struck by how committed teachers are, how even those in their early twenties feel a palpable sense of responsibility.

The lockdowns revealed a gap between ambitious and unambitious schools so wide as to be a cause for national shame. Good state schools, and most private schools tried to maintain something close to a normal school timetable. There were morning assemblies, online sports sessions, music lessons – the works.

Sure, teachers had to adapt to remote learning. It soon became clear that few of us – children or adults – can maintain a high level of concentration while staring at a laptop. But, very quickly, teachers found workarounds, breaking up the screen time with offline tasks and many insisted that classes keep their cameras on, knowing that it would prevent attention from wandering. How many times were there variants of the following exchange? “Sir, my camera isn’t working.” “Right, so if I check with your housemaster, he’ll tell me that it doesn’t work at all?” “Oh, hang on, it’s working now!”

Not for the first time, I was struck by how committed teachers are, how even those in their early twenties feel a palpable sense of responsibility. Peering over my daughter’s shoulder from time to time, I would see her teachers employing every method and device, technical and rhetorical, to make their lessons stick in her memory. They were not recording from home in their slippers. They were, in most cases, sitting at their usual desks, smartly dressed, with their slides and aides carefully prepared.

Yet – and you have no doubt guessed where I’m going with this – the experience of some schools was very different. According to a survey by the Children’s Commissioner, half of all secondary school pupils and the majority in primary schools, got no remote teaching at all during the summer term 2020.

A primary school near me not only failed to attempt any online lessons; it refused to mark the worksheets it sent out. From the beginning, it elevated producers over consumers – that is, teachers over students. Key-workers’ children were admitted grudgingly, the school making clear that they would get no teaching on site and would have to catch up when their exhausted parents came off shift. One couple, both doing frontline healthcare work, were repeatedly asked why they needed a place when they already had childcare for their pre-school child.

How are we to explain this difference in attitude? Seriously, how? It’s clearly not down to a lack of resources: a Zoom or Teams lesson costs nothing once the programme has been installed. Nor is it purely a private/ state division. Plenty of state schools were wonderful while several private schools were not. No, this is a question of attitude, not money. Some schools saw the virus as a challenge to overcome, others as an excuse to do less.

Teachers determined to continue lessons whatever it takes.

To be fair, that division exists in plenty of other areas of life. One of the pubs in my village, for example, has been frantically promoting its new takeaway service, offering to deliver to people who are self-isolating and, at weekends, running a market stall. The other has shut up shop completely.

But teaching is – or ought to be – a vocation. No one goes into it for the money. People embark on the career because they derive satisfaction from it. From my own occasional lecturing at university level, I sense how rewarding it can be. When you see students picking up new ideas, infected with enthusiasm for your subject, you feel a very special satisfaction. However it is almost impossible to get that sense through a screen. be a bit more risk-averse than the rest of us, since part of their job involves telling kids to step away from that window, to leave the socket alone, to come down from up there.

Risk-aversion, though, is not the chief explanation. I’m afraid what we’re seeing is something that happens in lots of large bureaucracies: the virtues of the individuals are lost in the collective. In academies, as in most private schools, teachers cheerfully found ways to work through the closures but in many government-run schools, the commitment of individual teachers was somehow filtered out.

We need to ask, bluntly, why not every school was able to respond to the lockdowns in the way that most private and some state schools did. The answer has to do with accountability, not resources. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another crisis to force us to fix the problem.

Some schools saw the virus as a challenge to overcome, others as an excuse to do less.

Cheam School: the type of teaching we’ve come to miss, face-to-face and engaging.

Why, then, have more teachers not been clamouring to return to the classroom? Have they been chastened by their unions, which mounted a campaign from the start to prevent any in-person tuition? Are they unusually risk-averse? Perhaps so and maybe that is no bad thing. We want teachers to

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is an author and columnist. He serves on the UK Board of Trade and is a Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party responsible for its international relations. He teaches at the University of Buckingham and the University of Francisco Marroquín. He sat as a Conservative MEP for 21 years, and was a founder of Vote Leave. He writes regular columns for The Sunday Telegraph, The Washington Examiner and Conservative Home. www.hannan.co.uk