Teachers are at breaking point because of COVID

Ed Dorrell, The Independent

“People are saying COVID is over. From where I’m sitting, it doesn’t feel like COVID is over. Not one bit. If anything, it’s as bad as it has ever been.”

These words were said to me last week by one very senior school leader — one who is normally known for his robust attitude and bullish demeanour.

To put it bluntly; the Easter holidays really couldn’t have come soon enough. The government might want us to believe that we can “learn to live with COVID,” but by the end of the spring term (last Friday for most), that idea was being tested nearly to destruction in schools.

The reason my educationist friend was so fraught was the impact that this latest surge in coronavirus cases has had on the staffing levels in the family of secondaries he runs. He painted a bleak picture in which some staffrooms had a third of teachers at home in isolation, and he is most certainly not prone to exaggeration.

He is not alone. Evidence compiled by the Association of School and College Leaders is quite shocking. In the run-up to the end of term, many schools were sending whole year groups home, while others were “tripling up” classes in dining halls. In other schools, headteachers are taking on cleaning duties to keep the gates open and some semblance of education provided.

While many of us who don’t work in schools (or hospitals, for that matter) might have taken Boris Johnson at his word and simply got our lives back to something close to normal, teachers have been at breaking point.

It is also worth bearing in mind those school staff who had managed to avoid catching COVID were attempting to prepare thousands of children (many of whom will have experienced significant learning loss over the course of the pandemic) to sit the first formal GCSE and A-level exams, and the first Sats for more than two years. Not an easy task at all, especially with hundreds of thousands of students themselves being forced to stay at home every day because of the dreaded double line on the lateral flow.

I spend a lot of time talking to teachers in focus groups about their lives and the groups I have run in the last few weeks have been tough going. After two years of keeping schools open (sometimes just for key workers) while also transforming the entire educational offer into a digital proposition has really ground them down. Many are on the verge.

Headteachers, especially, are completely fried. I know of several who have — literally — not had a single day off since the start of the pandemic.

Much has been said about the need for an ambitious and well-funded “education recovery plan” for the millions of students who have had their schooling, and their life chances, so badly disrupted in the years since COVID arrived at our shores.

This is, unquestionably, correct — and it is a tragedy that the prime minister has failed to live up to his earliest commitment to make such an initiative a huge national priority.

But even if the government were to surprise everyone and adopt the right plans, it would all come to naught if teachers and heads were walking away from the classroom burnt out by what has been demanded of them in the last few years.