The US journalist Doug Larson said: “Bad news travels fast. Good news takes the scenic route.”

He’s spot on. 

And the sad thing from the perspective of schools and colleges - both leaders and teachers - is that there is a great story to tell about education amid the convulsions of the Covid crisis, but it’s one that just isn’t being told.

We got a glimpse of that good news story this week from a slightly unexpected source - wait for it…roll of drums, please - Ofsted, an organisation more normally associated with wagging its finger in our direction.

A survey developed by the inspectorate and carried out by YouGov found that close to nine in 10 parents believe their child’s school has handled Covid-19 well. When we consider the conditions under which schools have been operating, the rapid response to swirling changes in circumstances that schools and colleges had to make and the potential for parental criticism in such turbulent circumstances, this very positive response is incredibly impressive.

Covid and schools: Parents praising the efforts of teachers

Let’s just remind ourselves of some of those conditions: partial closures; remote learning; laptop shortages; face masks; lateral flow tests; bubbles; safety adaptations to school sites and timetabling; the cancellation of public exams (not once, but twice); constantly changing government guidance; track and trace responsibilities; pupils and staff having to self-isolate; supporting vulnerable children during lockdowns, and the chaos of the free school meal vouchers scheme. You can probably think of a few more.

All of these topics have required careful handling and communication, and the survey results suggest that this has overwhelmingly gone well. It is quite an achievement.

I’m sure we all remember the tendency among some commentators during the course of the crisis to be quick to criticise schools. 

Indeed, the education secretary himself - during an attempted crowd-pleaser of a speech in the House of Commons - advised parents to complain to Ofsted if they were unhappy with their school’s remote learning provision. You may remember how this rather wonderfully led to many parents contacting the inspectorate not to bury schools but to praise their efforts.

But such cheap politicking is, I suppose, now all water under the bridge, and there’s little point in dwelling on it, other than to say perhaps that the efforts of the education sector in all its forms appear to have been thoroughly vindicated.

A job well done

We can’t, however, afford to be too self-congratulatory. The Ofsted survey also reveals some significant concerns around the impact of the pandemic on children’s learning loss, and their mental and physical health. 

As we have always said, the pandemic will have affected children very differently. Some will have fared perfectly well - particularly if their parents had the time to support them at home, and they had access to a laptop and a stable internet connection. But others will have struggled - and this survey gives us an idea of the proportion affected. 

So we know from the survey that around two-thirds of parents are concerned about their child’s learning loss, and about the same percentage about their child’s mental health. 

For some of these children, it will be possible to make up for that lost learning, and address mental wellbeing issues, simply through a return to the regular routines and support mechanisms that schools always have in place.

But it is clear that longer-term and sustained additional support will be required for a proportion of these young people - which, of course, brings us back to the importance of the education recovery plan that we expect to be announced within the next few weeks.

The arguments are already well-rehearsed and I won’t go through them again now - other than to say that it will need to be built around both the educational needs of children, through approaches such as small-group tuition and extra classroom support, and mental wellbeing, too, which is where more opportunities for enrichment and activities might be very helpful.

Schools will, of course, do the fine detail that will be required in planning what is most appropriate for their children. But they will need a really robust broad framework from which to select their options. And, of course, they will require the funding that is necessary to deliver these programmes.

What this week’s survey from Ofsted has clearly shown is how good schools and colleges are in responding to this unnerving rollercoaster ride of the pandemic and the challenges it creates. And I have no doubt that they will bring the same calm and purposeful approach to the recovery phase.

Of course, you won’t read any of this in the wider press, but at least you are reading it here. And, if nothing else, all of the teachers and leaders out there, feeling exhausted and anxious and under the relentless Covid cosh, should derive some satisfaction from a job well done. 

Because even if this good news has taken the scenic route, it reminds us what’s been achieved and by whom: you.

Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders