How about a back-up school? - Anne Rooney

We've all had enough of online school and there can be few people who really love the patchwork of home learning of recent months. No doubt some children have had good materials and experiences, but some have had bad. While the circumstances of individual children vary hugely, the quality of material available should have been even and high, but it wasn't. I've corrected spellings in sheets about spelling before passing them to the child. The child has noticed the presenter getting the maths wrong in a maths video. Some of the images in the questions are too small to see (and we're looking on a laptop, not a phone). And there are those videos that feature a woman holding a hand to her ear to encourage viewing pupils to give a spoken response, which she then pretends to have heard. They are both creepy and misleading. These six-year-olds have spent half an hour on Teams video where their teacher can hear them and now you expect them to know that you can't on your video? Think this through!

But the point isn't the mistakes. This stuff was cobbled together at short notice and multiple times around the country. Why didn't we have a back-up plan for education? It's not as though we didn't know a pandemic was likely in the next few years. Never mind. How about we have a back-up plan now? If there were a a properly funded and expertly produced bank of learning materials that could be accessed by anyone who needed it, that would reduce the burden on teachers in the future and increase the learning of children next time around. Even in non-pandemic times, it would allow children who are off school with illnees or mental health problems to continue their studies if/when they are well enough, and make it easier to fit back into the classroom later. It would help parents who choose to home school. And when there is a disaster — whether a local one like a school flooding or burning down or a national one like a pandemic — everything would be in place for learning to continue. 

I know not every child has the technology to access a resource like this, but schools have been lending equipment and could do that more easily in future if it were built in and planned. People and businesses have donated unused equipment; schools can keep a bank of this and it will be easier in normal times to amass and distribute it more evenly. (Of course, it would be way better if it were properly funded rather than relying on donations, but let's be realistic...)

Good online learning materials are not just a normal classroom lesson videoed on a phone and uploaded. I used to develop online learning materials in the 90s and even with the far more restricted technologies we had then, there were different approaches to how material is delivered to make it engaging. We have many experts who could be gainfully employed making a national bank of materials that cover every school day of every school year. Of course, individual schools teach different things on different days, but while we have a prestrictive, perhaps restrictive, National Curriculum, it is clear what all schools are aiming to achieve in any given term. This wouldn't be something to use if you had two days off with a cold, perhaps, but if you knew you had six weeks at home with a broken leg, of if your school burned to the ground — or if the entire country went into lockdown for several months — it would be truly valuable. We have lots of services we fund in case they are needed. Your house probably won't burn down, but you wouldn't defund the fire service, would you? 

I'd also say, make it universally available. If UK educational materials could be accessed by children in remote areas of other countries, in war zones, on boats — anywhere — it would cost us no more but be a generous bit of overseas aid. Not pushed on anyone — not surreptitious colonialism — just available.

It goes without saying that this must be not-for-profit. Pay a good fee for the materials and for their updating and maintenance. Don't try to make money by sub-licensing or making spin-offs. Just provide something we can fall back on when we need to. What do you think?

Anne Rooney

Latest book, Salariya, 2020 (ebook)/2021 (print)