headteacher-secondary

teachwire.net to be a fantastic source of support and helpful advice. Its BSA COVID Charter provided us with a clear set of guidelines to aim for when reopening our boarding house, while giving both ourselves and our families a sense of safety and quality assurance in what we were doing. When our 150 boarders rejoined us at the end of August 2020, they’d come from some 30 different countries around the world, so we had a number of students quarantining for a time. We considered bringing them back earlier, but after contemplating the prospect of keeping them in their rooms with nothing to do for a fortnight, we felt that would be significantly more damaging for their wellbeing than simply giving them schoolwork to be getting on with at the start of term via video conferencing and our VLE. That speaks to how the entire profession has been through the most dramatic staff development experience any of us have ever experienced. The pivot we’ve seen to online has been phenomenal – last year we were accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, which told us that we’d completed two years’ worth of professional development within just two months. Human contact The main thing I've learned over the past year is the place of artificial intelligence and digital learning within schools – how important and essential they both now are, but also that such systems aren’t replacements for, but rather supplements to existing, high-quality human connections. The schools that have utilised these technologies successfully are those that have paid attention to the wellbeing and interpersonal relationships of their community, because when you do that, children will flourish and thrive, and develop healthier relationships with each other and their teachers. I remember having conversations around the ‘fourth educational revolution’, back when teaching staff were all apparently going to be replaced with robots. The processes we’ve worked with over the past year and a half have clearly shown all of us that that’s simply not going to happen. If kids are to make progress, there has to be that human contact. My message to national education leaders would be to step back, take stock and consider what can be got rid of from the education system as it currently stands – what doesn't need to be there? I know that I’m grateful to What would YOU do? Earlier in the year we carried out a series of scenario planning role-play exercises with our teaching staff and parents via Zoom. We had different individuals fill various senior roles – mine, the deputy head, the principals of different sections – and familiarised them with the information and protocols their role entailed. We then presented the initial situation to them, under which they had to manage the running of the school – and proceeded to feed them new information every five minutes, such as text messages from worried parents and updated guidance from public health authorities. Through doing this, we were able to ensure that teachers and parents alike wouldn’t have simply glanced at the school’s assorted medical sheets, protocols and flowcharts, but would have actually absorbed them and thus know what needed to be done in the case of a genuine outbreak. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief when they completed that hour-long exercise, but it certainly gave them all a detailed understanding of our processes. challenges and are highly aware of how important it is to recognise them for what they are, so that people feel able to talk about them. It would be hugely inappropriate to not recognise the many new stresses teachers are now under, and I’m enormously proud of how they've stepped up to the challenge. Colleagues have been able to express their feelings in a full and frank way via staff forums that are moderated by our HR team, and we've continued to organise regular wellbeing surveys among staff and students to identify any issues and what we can do to address them. The students have been remarkably resilient on the whole, but there will always be those kids you need to look after, and we've worked with partners at the Family Wellness Practice to ensure that safety net is in place. Phenomenal pivoting We have boarders at the school, and found The Boarding Schools Association “WE’VE HADTO CONTENDWITH ANUMBER OF TOUGHWELLBEING CHALLENGES ANDARE HIGHLYAWARE OF HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO RECOGNISE THEM FOR WHATTHEYARE, AND THAT PEOPLE HERE FEELABLE TOTALK ABOUTTHEM.” BARNY SANDOW, HEAD OF SCHOOL 47 C L A S S R O OM L I F E work in a school system where we don't do SATs or exams at 16, but instead allow children to be children and grow. I once accredited a school where no external exams were held until the students were 18. I asked them how they could know where the children were, and was in turn asked if I knew how much time the school consequently got back. If your Y11s don’t lose a whole term just sitting the exams themselves, and if the huge amounts of preparation time within the preceding two years were to simply go, how much more time would you have that you could then spend on wellbeing and developing the actual skills students will need to survive in the real world?