With schools set to reopen a week today, dividing opinion across the country, a Kent grammar school head teacher, Ken Moffat, explains why he thinks pupils and teachers will have to adapt to a ‘new normal’....

It goes without saying that the last two months have been the most surreal of my 32-year career as a teacher and I guess that must be the same for everyone.

I can’t help feeling like a half-pay ship’s captain circa 1816. Every day I go to work to encounter a handful of colleagues and even less students - the sons of key workers we are looking after. We have remained open every day since lockdown, including throughout Easter, though it’s been difficult to feel a real sense of purpose.

Even though we had been preparing for it for some weeks, the transition from real to Virtual Langton happened more smoothly and suddenly than any of us thought possible. I have to pay tribute to the teaching staff at the school who have been heroes during the steepest professional development journey of their lives, delivering the curriculum through Google classrooms, Google Hangouts and Google whatever. To say it was a shock was a massive underestimation. It is impossible to imagine what this would have been like without the advanced technologies we have at our disposal.

We have guaranteed continuity of learning and delivery of the curriculum with a good 80% of our students keeping pretty much on top of everything. I know that most of the staff ended up working longer hours than they would have done in school. However, I am keenly conscious that this may have not gone as smoothly in other schools where students may be less keen to connect and I regret the inevitable widening of the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

Which all begs the question of when it will end and when schools will return to normal. The clamour for schools to reopen has become a peculiarly emotional one. The school had been shut for only eight school days before articles began appearing by journalists insisting that if schools didn’t soon reopen, the cost to the mental health of students would be colossal. The irresponsibility of some journalists and columnists has been deeply unsettling for us all and not in the national interest. Oddly, however, our experience of mental health issues has been the opposite.

Far from being the snowflake generation, our students have shown levels of resilience we could not have previously expected from them and, actually, the absence of daily competition, in all its forms, that comes from close proximity to peers has led to removal of poor self-esteem issues. Our wellbeing team, despite being available throughout, has seen a big slump in take up. Call it a national crisis, and people’s own sense of personal crisis seems to diminish. To build resilience we believe you need challenge and, boy, has this been a challenge. It is important that adults take a positive lead here. Education, at its heart, is simple; it is older people helping younger people become older people and we need adults to be resilient and not succumb to an increasing crescendo of babble about how and when schools will reopen. We will reopen, but because of what we have all learned we can never now go back to normal.

"We have no idea how safe we are"

To add to the sense of surrealism, we have ordered masks, for those who wish to wear them, and hand-sanitising stations, and are laminating like crazy to get our new one-way system up and running before significant numbers of students return. We hope to be able to open towards the end of June for small numbers of Year 10 and 12 students. We have no idea how safe we are. The government has said all along that we should follow the science, but when scientists themselves disagree, it is very difficult to know who to follow and why. Reopening schools has become an iconic symbol of national recovery.

This is where parents are going to have to step up to the mark. You may have to ask your employer for time off to drive your children to school, because you won’t want them on public transport. You will have to provide packed lunches as social distancing requirements will mean we will not be able to provide a hot meal. I note Nicky Morgan quoted in The Sunday Times saying that schools should reopen because “there are children who rely on school for their hot meal”. Since when did that become the primary purpose of schools and why can’t children have hot meals during lockdown? Morgan, of course, still showing all the ignorance of how schools operate that she did as Education Secretary.

Historians looking back on this crisis will note the success of the Project Fear phase. The government underestimated how keenly we would listen as they changed their description of Covid-19 from being a relatively harmless illness that most of us would deal with as we would a common cold to something that could carry off 100,000 fatalities or more. A recent poll suggested 81% of parents would now be reluctant to allow their children to return to school in June. The public’s reluctance to emerge from lockdown is understandable, but we need to show courage now and accept that coronavirus is likely to be part of our lives for some time to come and is something we shall just have to live with.

There may be more lockdowns, staff and students may get ill and maybe September won’t be the clean restart most of us are hoping for. I sincerely doubt whether there will be much competitive sport between schools next academic year and social distancing measures will continue to impact in all sorts of ways we haven’t yet imagined. But we have to get back to business.

What is important and what we have to take forward for our young people is how to focus on the positives of this. You will be tired of the phrase “the new normal”, but we cannot and should not simply return to our old ways of working. Teachers and students will always need face-to-face interaction; that’s why teachers enter the profession and that’s how the majority of students learn best. But, maybe now we don’t need it all the time. For a school like The Langton, we have to ask whether we need 1,300 people getting up in 1,300 different homes across the county and driving to a single location five days a week?

Probably not; we will have to think creatively and embrace some of the freedoms that this weird experience has given us. In the same way that I hope other areas of society will now rethink the daily commute in sardine-packed trains. The way we set cover work when colleagues are ill and the meaning and purpose of homework all need examining to see how they can be improved by what we have learned through working virtually.

It’s still surreal and will continue to be so for some months yet. The new normal may take time to establish itself, but we owe it to ourselves to make sure it is a better normal, a sleeker normal and a more efficient normal. Otherwise this crisis will have done what none of us wanted it to; defeated us and set us back on course for more years of austerity.

Ken Moffat is head teacher of Simon Langton Boys' Grammar in Canterbury.

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