Last Wednesday, as Messrs Johnson, Vallance and Whitty addressed the nation wearing their doom-faces and calling yet again for “the slides”, Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was tweeting upbeat messages: “Measures [announced tonight] will… help keep children and young people in childcare, school, college and uni, with their friends and teachers.”
Meanwhile, my youngest son (15, in his GCSEs year) was staying late after school – a small, oversubscribed, non-selective independent outside London – for a pizza and ping-pong evening, celebrating, in the words of the parental email, “how hard Year 11 have worked this term”. On Friday afternoon, however, there came another communication: “Dear parents/guardians. Please see attached a user guide for learning at home and how to use Microsoft Teams…”
Warning bells rang, so I called the school. “Please tell me you’re not planning to shut?” “Not at all!” I was reassured, “This is just a round-robin email to cover those children who are off.” Fair enough.
Within two hours there was yet another email. This one, ominously, from the head: “Following the Government’s announcements… a spike in cases… parents questioning whether events should go ahead… decided to avoid mass gatherings that could pose a risk to our community… Art trip to London postponed, tomorrow’s sixth form dinner cancelled, Year 11 Saturday maths revision sessions are virtual… term ends early next Wednesday.”
Verily, a seasonal (ding-dong very un-merrily) blizzard of cobbled-together decisions spurred by a “spike in cases”. So what? Was anybody actually unwell? Clearly, this snap decision echoed the equally nonsensical omicron-related guidance: work from home – but go to the pub.
It struck me that, by ending the term early (but not right away), the school was virtue signalling to appease those snowflakey parents “beginning to question whether our big events should be going ahead”. But why hadn’t it canvassed all the parents for their opinions? Haven’t these children already lost enough of their all-important education?
It was bad enough that my son’s excellent, in-person Saturday morning maths GCSE revision sessions were now going online (the iGCSE maths exam is in early January and his class is halfway through the two mock papers that will presumably dictate grades should the exam be cancelled). Even aside from its academic remit, the school’s Christmassy extra-curricular events are its beating emotional heart. On a Year 11 parents’ WhatsApp group, one mother admitted that her child (who joined the school in Year 9 but had been unwell in the last week of their first Christmas term) had now missed two school Christmases and could in fact leave the school without having attended any of them.
At which point something snapped; I’d already been through the chaos of my elder son’s cancelled A-levels (at another school) in 2020, so I fired off a furious email to the head, copying in anyone else on staff whose email address came to hand. No reply. The following morning (having watched my son fail to access the remote revision class on his laptop, reverting to using his phone) I fired off another. No reply.
On Sunday afternoon I stood watching my son playing football alongside another mother who works closely with the excellent, lockdown-resistant parental pressure group Us For Them (mission: “that children must be placed front and centre in all decisions impacting them and the wellbeing of children should be a guiding principle of public policy making”).
