There will be a lot of rumination and reflection next month when we reach the second anniversary of that tumultuous week in March 2020 when school buildings were closed and exams were cancelled.
Amid all that turmoil, many consoled themselves that the pandemic would shock education into fundamental and necessary change.
Yet how much will really have changed when the dust finally settles?
Also this week: Scottish students to receive more support for 2022 SQA exams
Covid: 10 days that shook Scottish education
Exams: Are Scottish students the world’s ‘most over-examined’?
Assessment: Scottish standardised tests to cost £17m over five years
Editorial: Teachers should know how deeply appreciated they are
The upcoming Muir report - expected later this month - promises a level of reform in Scottish education, but nothing the government has said these past two years has paved the way for anything particularly radical.
Indeed, there often seems a grim determination to hold on to pre-Covid certainties. The inequities of Scotland’s exams system, for example, remain a live and highly problematic issue, and the return of national exams for the first time since before Covid is not shaping up to be a smooth ride.
Will Covid bring education reform?
At primary level, too, the Scottish government continues to insist that its unloved standardised national assessments are worth the effort (and rising costs) no matter how often, and by whom, it is told otherwise.
Meanwhile, here at Tes we may have optimistically predicted that, given all their gargantuan efforts during the pandemic, attitudes towards teachers may be reset. And perhaps that is the case in some quarters, but - with pay negotiations dragging on interminably and the most recent offer dismissed as “shameful” - the government is not generally perceived to have displayed a lot of love for teachers.
Corroborating evidence for that view, many have told us, has been the insistence that teachers keep school buildings open even when efforts to make them safe have not exactly inspired confidence. A move to improve classroom ventilation by sawing off chunks of doors, for example, this week served to fuel already simmering discontent about Covid safety measures in schools.
On the plus side, there is due to be a significant reduction in Scottish teachers’ class-contact time from August - something teaching unions have been demanding for many years - although details on that proposal remain thin.
We are, first minister Nicola Sturgeon said this week, “close” to the point where the requirement for face coverings in secondary classrooms will end. That would, 15 months after those rules were introduced in November 2020, be a significant milestone on the way to a post-Covid world.
At this stage, however, it does not seem certain that the pandemic will have changed Scottish education in any profound or fundamental way.
Henry Hepburn is Scotland editor at Tes
Over the coming weeks, Tes Scotland will be reflecting on the impact and potential legacy for Scotland of two years of Covid, and we would love to hear your thoughts.
You can contact us via henry.hepburn@tes.com or emma.seith@tes.com, or on Twitter: @Henry_Hepburn and @Emma_Seith
