Our education systems can learn a lot from the way the health service dealt with the pandemic.

As the pandemic subsides, we are learning to live with Covid, but we also have plenty to learn from the pandemic, and our response to it.

The primary factor of this is to reiterate the imperative need for our students to be seen, safe and supported by the schooling system.

With this major point in mind, in our work designed to create and sustain collaborative learning communities which are designed to have teaching schools at their centre with other schools clustered around them, we have drawn heavily on the work of the health service.

In particular we would like to draw upon the way the health service responded to the escalating death rates and hospitalisation caused by the rapid spread of COVID-19 as our reference point.  In doing so, several interesting issues for comparison with our education systems emerge.

These comments need to be set in the context of the unique situation which initially the health service found itself in.  One in which they and us, the population at large, were totally unprepared for. For, within days of the first recorded cases we were all required to modify our social behaviours to reduce the spread of the virus.

Diagnosing the range of variants that emerged and forensically track their spread

There have been several variants of the virus, and each has been shown to impact different groups of the population according to age, gender, ethnicity and health. To target interventions more effectively, their spread has been tracked forensically.

While we now track students’ progress more thoroughly than in the past, this does not mean that all of our students’ learning issues are identified. Some of this can be attributed to the use of extremely weak and wide-ranging diagnostics and the stigma felt by those in the profession who object to labelling students anything other than normal.

However, there is a wide consensus that as in the health service, the use of diagnostics which recognise the personal characteristics of the pupil can play a major role in determining what interventions are effective. There is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Collaboratively working to find solutions 

It quickly became apparent that solutions were being sought across national and organisational boundaries. This happened because there was already in place an ethical framework which respected the contribution of all parties – state, commercial organisations, health services and research institutes – which allowed for collaboration and competition to drive innovation.

In education, competition and collaboration are often seen as opposites and transference of international or even regional solutions to pressing educational issues flounder in the negative sea of context.

Mitigating the impact of the virus as well as the cure

The health service and governments adopted a three-pronged approach to deal with the spread of the virus. Introduce restrictions to reduce its spread, reduce the impact of the virus on those who caught it and who search for a cure.

In education we seem to focus on mitigating the impact rather than preventing the spread or finding the cure.  This is particularly true of what we often see as a common set of interventions to reduce underperformance. Here, the approach is to publicly acknowledge the failure, identify those involved, introduce a number of interventions designed to reduce the impact of the failure, and announce a range of sanctions to be imposed if the desired outcomes are not met.

What is missing are the other two components: stopping it happening in the first place and finding a cure. As we have reported, often stopping it happening in the first place is not in control of education alone but in the way society distributes its wealth and provides health care.  The cure lies in our view in creating schools within that challenging context that can provide an outstanding solution and then build within them the capacity to share their knowledge with others – the role we envisaged for teaching schools.

This article draws from the notes we prepared for the Horasis US panel which took place on March 4, to discuss the impact of the pandemic on US and Global education.  The primary thrust of this panel centred on placing importance on the primary need for all pupils to be seen, safe and supported. We know we are not the only voice in this. Reconnect London is one such example. This collaborative learning community has been formed by a group of head teachers in London. They have created a ‘post-lockdown, practitioner-led initiative focused on supporting disadvantaged and vulnerable learners in the capital’.

They have identified eight key areas for action:

  • Attendance and engagement
  • Literacy
  • Transition strategies
  • Mental health and emotional wellbeing
  • Crisis leadership
  • Behaviour and exclusions
  • Teacher recruitment and retention
  • Effective use of data

Many of the head teachers involved have drawn upon their experiences of working together over many years, including as part of the London Leadership Strategy, London Challenge. They are interested in making contact with any groups of practitioners who have formed similar collaborative communities in other global cities. They can be found at Reconnect London.

Take care and stay safe

George