Geoff Barton: How the week that ‘changed education forever’ unfolded 

As someone who is not remotely superstitious, it felt to me that on Friday 13 March 2020, the world of education changed forever.

For me, it all began on a train.

On Wednesday 11 March 2020, I was on my way to Birmingham for the Association of School and College Leaders’ Annual Conference. In hindsight, knowing what we now know about what was about to happen, it seems unthinkable that a conference of 1,000 school and college leaders was taking place at all.

But at this point, Public Health England hadn’t advised against holding public gatherings, so there I was on a train clattering across the East Anglian fenlands and heading towards Birmingham’s International Convention Centre.

Covid-19 lockdown

I found myself surrounded by a carriage full of giddy party people en route to a much larger public gathering - the Cheltenham races. The beer and wine were already flowing.

This was a journey of literal high spirits. But there was also something ominous in the air.

Just two days earlier, on Monday 9 March, the Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte had imposed a national quarantine, tightly restricting the movement of the population. He warned places further north in Europe - countries like the UK - to act swiftly and to lock down before this new, unknown disease took its grip on us.

By the end of the week, Ireland and France would do the same.

Attendance and fear

Back at home, some parents were already keeping their children off school, alarmed by rumours of what harm coronavirus could do. Examination boards had begun to quietly discuss how growing absence rates might affect the summer’s planned exam series and what mitigations might be needed.

And then, on that morning of Friday 13 March, then education secretary Gavin Williamson took to the stage as the keynote speaker at the conference. He thanked school and college leaders for doing all they could to maintain a sense of normality. He then reported that there were now “almost 600 cases of the coronavirus” diagnosed in the UK.

The cogs of closures, at that moment, had begun to be set in motion. By the following Monday, that figure had officially risen to more than 1,500 cases, with at least 35 deaths.

Covid cases on the rise

At breakfast on the second day of the conference, I slipped into the hotel restaurant to grab an early, unsociable breakfast. In the background, Sky News was relaying news of hospitals in Italy struggling to cope with the burgeoning levels of illness - and of deaths.

In that empty hotel restaurant, the young woman serving breakfast came over to my table.

“May I ask you something?” she said. “I’m from Portugal and my family are saying I should go home before this virus reaches the UK. Do you think I should leave?”

“I’m no expert,” I said. “But, yes, I think you probably should”.

At that moment, the sense that something major happening across the world but now coming here had hit me. And clearly many others felt the same.

School closure decision

Heading home that Saturday evening, Birmingham city centre felt unnervingly quiet. My train was almost empty.

Three days later, at short notice, I was asked to an urgent in-person meeting with Williamson. I headed there with the NAHT school leaders’ union general secretary Paul Whiteman and the Confederation of School Trusts’s Leora Cruddas.

Walking through a near-deserted Whitehall, we speculated on what the meeting would be about, concluding that the summer’s examination series would probably need to be curtailed because of absence rates in Years 11 and 13.

But the subject of the meeting proved to be much more significant.

Williamson and a couple of officials came into his seventh-floor Department for Education office. He opened a red folder, then - ashen-faced - looked at us and said: “Because of the rapid spread of coronavirus, I need your members to know that they will have to close their schools and colleges this Friday.”

Lockdown was upon us.

Communication and reassurance

It changed the nature of my role as general secretary immediately. I headed back to Leicester and, as well as writing an email message to members on the forthcoming closure of educational institutions, I recorded a video message as well.

This began a period in which I was donning a shirt and tie for the camera, while sitting in pyjama bottoms or shorts, peering into a phone or iPad, sometimes doing a dozen media appearances a day, trying to explain what we thought we knew now, trying to help to explain what might happen next.

Behind-the-scenes discussions were increasingly urgent and dramatic.

Exam cancellations

How to ensure that GCSE and post-16 students could get a grade in the summer even though the exams weren’t going ahead?

How to reassure an anxious profession that the mitigations put in place (face-coverings and, later, on-site testing via lateral flow tests) would be sufficient to keep them safe, even though then prime minister Boris Johnson called children “vectors of transmission”?

How to persuade parents to send their children back to school when the lockdown was over? How to challenge that lazy media trope that teachers were blocking the reopening of schools?

Long ago, my predecessor at ASCL Sir John Dunford taught me that leadership is 10 per cent doing things, and 90 per cent explaining why you’re doing them.

Well, those Covid months were, for me, largely about communication, working with an amazing ASCL team who would synthesise the endlessly-changing public health guidance into the three key messages I could convey to members each day and, via television and radio interviews, relay them to parents.

We were telling the story of why our schools and colleges mattered, and why children and young people needed to be there. And, in truth, it’s a story that we’re still trying to tell.

Lessons from Covid

Five years on, what did Covid teach us about our education system? It certainly exposed its deep-rooted inequalities.

It shook some young people’s confidence in the long-standing mantra that if they worked harder then they would get better results - the rogue algorithm saw to that.

Covid fractured the long-standing social contract with parents that - for almost all young people - the best place for them to be each weekday is in school.

But it did something more and little talked about.

Covid showed us just how important human interactions are, and the extraordinary capacity of great teachers and other staff to prepare young people - in person - for their future as citizens.

It showed us that the stuff we still fixate on - the easily measurable debates about accountability measures and inspection - is nowhere near as important as giving young people opportunities to learn and practise how to relate to each other, to experience the arts, to talk, to listen critically, to know how to disagree agreeably.

Our schools and colleges are the last safe places for children and young people to learn these things and much more. Covid showed us that.

But the story isn’t over. And although I’ve stepped out of the spotlight, that long shadow of Covid still hangs over everyone in education.

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