It has been strange coming back to school post-lockdown. Everything seems to have changed, but, in essence, nothing really has. The students are the same, the material you are teaching is the same and the expectations are the same. 

And yet it has been hard.

In his book Happiness by Design, Professor Paul Dolan states that one of the key features of being happy is certainty. Unfortunately, teachers are now in a world of uncertainty due to the mixed messages delivered by the government. 

Coming back to school, many of us were uncertain of what would happen with regards to year “bubbles”, rooming, staggered starts and so on. Most plans had been put in place without students on site and therefore mistakes were bound to occur.

Senior leaders have tried their best but, like us, they are dealing with uncertainty and they have double trouble: dealing with directives from above and complaints from below, whilst still managing the fallout of this summer’s exam chaos. Who’d be a headteacher, eh?

However, this unique situation has thrown up a number of reasons to be cheerful, and it is really important, in a world where teachers can often be criticised, that we focus on the positives.

Coronavirus: The positives of being back at school 

So, with that in mind, these are some positives I’ve discovered since returning to school. Obviously all schools have arranged themselves differently, so some of this may not apply to all - but I’m hoping that most will.

1. Breaking down silos 

Over the past few years, schools seem to have become more siloed. The death of the staffroom and workload pressure have meant that subject teachers have tended to stay in their own department areas. 

This trend can’t be good. It has an impact on the flow of information, but, more importantly, it stops staff getting to know each other without the prompt of forced fun. 

Bubbles at my school have meant that we no longer have our own classrooms. We go from year area to year area to deliver lessons. This has forced us out of our silos, and we get to see more colleagues as a result. I have spoken to more teachers within the past week than I had done in the past year due to the constant movement around the school. 

This rebuilding of relationships across the school has got to be a good thing, in terms of wellbeing and consistency of behaviour management.

2. Organisation and innovation 

As teachers are constantly moving, we have had to become more organised. Some teachers have always been excellent at this, but others have got away with being a bit disorganised, as normally you’d be in a teaching room that is known to you, where resources are close and you can quickly get things that you might have forgotten. 

As lockdown learning prompted more teachers to understand the capabilities of online learning, being in school now has prompted teachers to reassess their teaching and think of innovative ways of delivering topics without the normal resources at their disposal. 

This is particularly the case for practical subjects, but it is also the case for subjects where you would not have given a second thought to getting students to pass a ball to each other in order to illustrate a concept like productivity. But you do now.

3. We are all in this together 

As most of us are learning as we go along, we can use this opportunity to model resilience to our students. 

Students (and hopefully parents) will appreciate that we are all trying our hardest to provide the best education possible despite current events. If we can show that we can adapt, despite the problems we might face, then our students will see that they can do the same. 

By sharing this strange experience, the bond between us all can become tighter and that can be a really good thing.

Life is hard right now, but it’s important that we try to look for the upsides in this whole experience and discover the ways it will make us better teachers. Lockdown gave us an opportunity to think about online or blended learning, but this new experience also gives us an opportunity to learn more and, for that, we should be grateful... or at least be thankful that our cleaning skills have vastly improved.

Gavin Simpson is the head of economics at Dame Alice Owen’s School in Hertfordshire. He tweets at @MrGSimpson