Don't let learning and participation work evaporate along with this year’s GCSE and A Level exams
Teachers will be helping the 'coronavirus class of 2020' when they get back to school, and arts organisations should be working on their relationships with schools too, building bridges with them now, before it’s too late, says Sally Bacon.
As my son, like countless other students, watched all his GCSEs evaporate in front of his eyes in March, he was reflecting on the value of school and what it means to him.
The first thing he said was ‘I always feel safe there’, before he talked about the value of seeing all his friends, and being with teachers he likes and gets on well with, and who encourage him. Years 7-11 were already receding in his mind, being packaged and weighed up and considered. He may have been part of a 100% terminal exam system he never asked for, and which was ultimately too flawed and fragile to withstand a crisis, but he did so within an environment where he valued the people and the sense of security they gave him as paramount.
Those teachers will be there for him when he returns for Year 12, and he has two more years before he will leave the safety of school. Geoff Barton of ASCL is keenly aware, like my son, of what’s important now: ‘My hope is that we come out of this more strongly demonstrating that it’s the human stuff that matters in education – the relationships, the socialisation of young people, the sense of an older generation preparing the next generation’... Keep reading on Cultural Learning Alliance
As my son, like countless other students, watched all his GCSEs evaporate in front of his eyes in March, he was reflecting on the value of school and what it means to him.
The first thing he said was ‘I always feel safe there’, before he talked about the value of seeing all his friends, and being with teachers he likes and gets on well with, and who encourage him. Years 7-11 were already receding in his mind, being packaged and weighed up and considered. He may have been part of a 100% terminal exam system he never asked for, and which was ultimately too flawed and fragile to withstand a crisis, but he did so within an environment where he valued the people and the sense of security they gave him as paramount.
Those teachers will be there for him when he returns for Year 12, and he has two more years before he will leave the safety of school. Geoff Barton of ASCL is keenly aware, like my son, of what’s important now: ‘My hope is that we come out of this more strongly demonstrating that it’s the human stuff that matters in education – the relationships, the socialisation of young people, the sense of an older generation preparing the next generation’... Keep reading on Cultural Learning Alliance