Shirebrook Academy head praises pupils for rising to the challenges of Covid-19 curbs on school life

That’s not to say that we have abandoned all activity beyond ‘ordinary’ lessons, but we’ve had to think of different ways to deliver them, including presenting and hosting events over the internet.

For instance, at the start of the year we had an online presentation from Gogglebox star Bassit Siddiqui, who gave students a talk about resilience, and this year’s Year Six open evening had to be done online.

For this, we turned to student power to help us by showcasing the school themselves, using their own words to describe what they like about their learning, department by department, in a video posted on YouTube.

I am a great believer that the best people to talk about our school are the students and what they had to say was fascinating, so you could say giving students the opportunity to share their thoughts in this way has been an unexpected upside of the Covid-19 restrictions.

But then so has the way the students have conducted themselves in school, especially when the restrictions include our staff members having to walk from class to class each day while the students have to stay in place, leaving whole classes alone during break-times and changeovers.

Traditionally, that would be seen as a potential problem, which is why unsupervised time has been minimised and why, as a teacher, the prospect of leaving a class of students alone is not desirable.

Now, we have no choice, but in fact the changeovers have gone very smoothly, with the students spending the time having a quiet chat and getting ready for their next lesson instead of taking advantage.

Knowing this, and understanding how they’ve risen to the challenge at a time when school life is full of challenges is a good feeling, which helps to make up for the fact that so much of what we enjoy doing in school is currently just not possible.

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