It has been wonderful to be able to welcome our boys back to school in recent weeks. We hope that we have now seen the last of national scale restrictions on school attendance.
As schools returned last month, there have been more restrictions and protective measures imposed on them than at any point during this pandemic – face coverings in secondary classrooms, weekly testing for pupils and staff and those identified as clinically extremely vulnerable unable to attend. Of course, a number of our boys continued to attend throughout January and February where their parents’ work was critical to the coronavirus response or if they had particular needs. Our Nursery boys were also able to attend school throughout this period of lockdown. Whilst we hope we are now following the roadmap to greater freedoms and there are certainly many reasons to feel optimistic about this – including the rapid rollout of a programme of vaccination – schools and wider society are still likely, it seems, to need to be mindful of coronavirus for some time to come yet. There has been a great deal of debate about children catching up on lost learning and various numbers have been plucked out of the air attempting to quantify this in numbers of hours, or school days, terms and years. This seems to play to the rather industrial model of education this government has favoured since Michael Gove was Education Secretary – teachers delivering knowledge to pupils to be filled as vessels. We saw it particularly in the early stages of remote teaching and learning where many judged that unless a teacher was in front of a class delivering content to pupils, then they couldn’t be learning. Understandable in the rather panicked early days of the pandemic, it is a rather ineffective, uninspiring and generally unsustainable model of learning not really supported by evidence of what works or that admits the important role that students play in their own learning. In some areas, the arrival of coronavirus has accelerated the delivery of course content. Many of our boys are ahead of where they might otherwise have been. There have been fewer other distractions in school, including valuable ones such as sports fixtures and concerts. As much as there is to be done to restore learning habits and skills, the issue at this time is not simply one of more hours or delivery through extensions to the school day or term dates. If there is any catch-up to be done, it is just as much about pupils’ personal, social and character development. As soon as conditions allow much of our catch-up at Newcastle School for Boys will be based around sporting, musical and other valuable co-curricular opportunities, not solely on curriculum content. Newcastle School for Boys is an independent school for boys aged 3 to 18 in its Nursery to Sixth Form provision based in Gosforth. For more information about Newcastle School for Boys, visit www.newcastleschool.co.uk or contact admissions@newcastleschool.co.uk