The college canteen is full of noise. Groups of students crowd around the tables, talking and laughing. It’s chaotic, but full of life and the budding friendships of a new academic year.

This was the scene in colleges around the country in the autumn of 2019. Fast forward 12 months and the picture is very different.

In autumn 2020, social distancing rules mean that learners who choose to visit the canteen have to sit at separate tables, alone. Many avoid it altogether and opt for a packed lunch, which they can at least eat in the company of their course mates - the only people they can mix with on the college site.

Gillian Lonsdale is transition and support leader at Bolton College, located in one of the areas of the UK that has been worst affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. She says the college’s atmosphere is markedly different from previous years. Temperatures are checked before entry, masks are provided for those who have forgotten them and timetables are staggered to minimise the crossover between course groups.

“It’s much, much quieter in all areas,” she says. “We’d usually have all manner of enrichment activities up and running, but at the moment that’s just not possible.

“For the new learners, to some degree, they don’t know what they’re missing, but staff can see the impact. The potential to make friends and form a wider circle outside of your course is usually huge in college, but that’s just not the case at the minute.”

The positive effects of the kind of social interaction that Lonsdale is talking about are myriad. Friendships have been found to reduce the likelihood of dropping out of college and to increase immune response, as well as, of course, enabling young people to develop the social skills they will use throughout life. But how can colleges encourage these connections when they’ve been tasked with keeping people apart as much as possible?

At London South East Colleges, this has been a concern for leaders, explains Clive Ansell, vice principal for foundation studies and student services. “We realise the importance of social contact and interaction for young people,” he says. “At this early point in the term, it has been very important to support students to socialise and get to know one another, albeit in a Covid-safe environment. We have invested in additional outdoor seating and terrace areas so students can spend time outside. The numbers of students allowed in common rooms is limited, but demand has not been huge so far.

“We are also continuing to offer a limited number of enrichment and extracurricular activities, although we are having to follow the rule of six.”

Social distancing is essential for colleges to continue to offer those all-important enrichment opportunities, but it also brings unavoidable challenges for young people, who are trying to establish or maintain their social worlds, says Ola Demkowicz, a psychology of education lecturer at the University of Manchester. She was part of a research team that surveyed 16- to 19-year-olds about their experiences of life under lockdown, hearing from more than 100 young people about having to stay at home and then readjust to a new way of life in the aftermath.

“There’s a lot of anxiety about the rule of six, for example,” she says, “not just in terms of limiting social life, but bringing its own social dynamic because people have got to make these decisions about who can come to what. Having to navigate these new rules and not be able to naturalistically spend time together is definitely an additional stressor.”

And after so long away from face-to-face interaction, she continues, there are understandable concerns about returning to it, with many respondents “concerned about being a bit socially awkward and having social anxiety for the first time”.

Silver linings

Yet despite these issues, Demkowicz’s research has also turned up some benefits of the new normal, with the altered social landscape bringing opportunities for change. “There were things that they highlighted as positive, in some cases around prioritising relationships differently,” she says. “Some of them said it made them think differently about who they wanted to kind of be in contact with. There was also this interesting idea of the relief of lockdown with social pressure being lifted, not having to worry about saying the right thing or doing the right thing or wearing the right thing.

“There was a lot of complexity in there around that; they were missing their friends but at the same time really valuing having some space. Those experiences coexisted.”

However, being able to see the nuance of their situation doesn’t mean that young people haven’t struggled with the experience of lockdown. The pandemic has robbed many students of traditional rites of passage, particularly those who were in Year 11 during lockdown, who weren’t able to take their GCSE exams, attend the prom or experience the excitement of getting their grades in person, as they coped with the government’s U-turn on how results would be awarded in August. This all took a significant toll, Demkowicz says. “You only get to do those things once, and when you’re 16 and 17 they’re a huge deal,” she explains. “So to have those taken away, at the same time as being away from your social group, was actually quite a profound loss to the people that came to share their experiences with us.”

Instead, those students, like most of us, experienced a massive shift to online life; and the situation hasn’t changed much for some since the days of full lockdown. Blended learning is now a feature of many FE courses, and much of college-organised socialising has moved to the digital realm, too, including online welcome events to introduce new classmates.

For instance, City and Islington College in London put together an extensive freshers fair, says student-engagement manager Emma King. Events varied from unstructured chat cafes to HIIT workouts, yoga classes, poetry workshops and information sessions on sexual health, stop and search, and mental health - all of which were held online. “What was very important was that social element and getting the students involved in knowing each other around particular things that they are interested in,” she says.

But how well can these digital interactions replace real-world socialising? Robin Dunbar, emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, says they shouldn’t be thought of as a long-term solution. “Online interactions are good as sticking plasters, but they don’t seem to be very good in terms of maintaining a long-term relationship,” he says. “You can’t stare into somebody’s eyes or hug them, and it’s difficult to know whether what you’re being told by the other person is the case or not. It’s important to physically interact with people from time to time.”

Dunbar’s renowned research on friendship found that our social worlds are made up of a series of layers, each with a “declining emotional quality”. The innermost layer is made up of a small number of best friends who can provide deep emotional support; the next is a layer of good friends with less intense relationships, and so on, until you reach the outer layer of acquaintances.

“For that innermost layer, you have to contact the person at least once a week or the friendship will begin to decline,” says Dunbar. “All friendships are fragile in respect of the amount of time devoted to them. The quality of a friendship depends critically on how frequently you contact the person and we know that tends to work better if it’s face to face rather than digital media.”

Demkowicz’s research likewise found a complex picture here. Many of the young people reported that they felt lucky to be able to at least video chat with friends, while others struggled with the format. One said: “I feel lonely from my friends because they like doing Zooms but I can’t sit for that long and listen so I get frustrated and end the calls or don’t go on, and feel left out.”

You might assume that missing out on that in-person contact with friends would be having a long-term negative impact on wellbeing. Yet, the picture in colleges seems to suggest that this may not be the case. Instead, students already seem to be bouncing back. For example, Ansell says that the counselling team has seen an increase in students seeking support over the lockdown period for “mental health issues and other social problems”, but adds that since students returned to campus, their incidence has decreased.

Likewise, at Bolton College, Lonsdale says that they have seen students experience less difficulty than expected.

“I anticipated a lot more anxiety and fear than there actually is,” she says. “It’s not been that way for the majority of our young people. We are seeing small amounts for mentoring on dealing with anxiety in coming back into college, but it’s to a lesser degree than I anticipated.”

Space for reflection

Nonetheless, for those students who are still struggling with the changes to how they can socialise, Demkowicz says the most important thing college staff can do is to offer young people “the space to reflect on how they’ve experienced this and what their concerns are going forward”. This is a process that will require time and training.

“One of the things that we’ve seen is that when it comes to mental health and wellbeing provision, staff don’t always feel equipped, in terms of their skillset and their own wellbeing, as well as with the burden of the workload,” she continues. “It’s ultimately about what the government is doing to support those schools and colleges. It’s no use to ask for that kind of provision and then not actually support it.”

This support will presumably be particularly important as the country faces ongoing local restrictions within the three-tier system, or the potential for another national lockdown.

However, there is light on the horizon. Demkowicz says that it’s not yet possible to say for sure how students’ social skills are likely to be affected in the long term by continuing to be distanced from friends, but she suspects they will be OK: “Young people do tend to be relatively naturally able to adapt, developmentally speaking. Assuming there’s a return in the near future to being able to have time with friends consistently, I’m not clear we could say that we’d expect to see a substantial difference in social skills.”

Dunbar agrees: “My guess is that the effects of lockdown aren’t really going to affect people’s personalities. If any group was to have difficulty, I’d say it would be introvert girls: they tend to have a smaller group of friends so need to invest in them more heavily, and so they risk losing them. Generally, girls tend to worry more about their friendships.

“But it would take a very, very long lockdown to derail you completely at that age. Young people are quite resistant to disturbances because evolution has made them resilient. It’s a risky world in many different ways so they have to be able to bounce back - and they usually do.”

Zofia Niemtus is editorial projects and content manager (maternity leave) at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 6 November 2020 issue under the headline “Bouncing back from a life less social”