This has been a tough year - what has been your biggest challenge?

I was in a Zoom session with a group of school leaders, talking about the importance of putting the brakes on, when I had a kind of personal meltdown.

The session was part of our work as a research school. I was explaining why it is always important for us, as school leaders, to stop and think.

“We must be thoughtful, look at the evidence, listen to colleagues and make the best choices,” I said.

That’s when it hit me: we had been so busy trying to adapt our work to support children at home that I had never stopped to reflect on the evidence about home learning.

Since then, we’ve mapped out a much clearer plan of what we are trying to support parents with, and how we listen to them to refine and improve our work.

We already know in the early years that it’s important to encourage playing and conversation. So, we’ve bought boxes of play equipment from a social enterprise called Boromi. These can be distributed to pupils at home. We’re also supporting parents to focus on conversation and curiosity. That’s improved things a great deal.

When you’re in a crisis, you forget what you know. It’s tempting to get busy with innovation and forget all about the cycle of planning, implementing and evaluating. But we need to take the time to really consider what we are doing.

What has been your most joyful moment?

After half term, when we welcomed many of our children back, I stood at the school gate, looking out for one child in particular. His return meant a lot to me.

His family had been through a rough time. At one point in the year, his mother had been furious with us (and with everyone).

“These people don’t like you any more,” I heard her tell the child as she was leaving to take him home that day. It was devastating.

However, the team kept in touch with the family during the lockdown and made sure they had emergency food. “We are always here for you, and we’ll always welcome you back,” I told the mother when I messaged her on WhatsApp to check in.

I hoped to see them again once school reopened. And, sure enough, I spotted the child and his mother approaching the school gates. That was wonderful.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered?

“When we make videos, they’re going to look rough and ready, but I’m sure the children will like them,” I told my staff at the start of lockdown.

I didn’t feel that it was enough to simply tell them to make video lessons, though; I knew I had to lead by example. So I made a video for parents about how The Very Hungry Caterpillar can help children learn numbers.

Unfortunately, I made a total pillock of myself online. But at least that may have encouraged other staff to take the plunge.

It reminded me of an important lesson: there are many better teachers than me in the team. The best thing I can do is to support them and enable them to flourish.

What was one thing you changed this year for the better?

The best thing we did this year was to move our communications with parents on to WhatsApp. Almost everyone in our local community has it on their phone; it’s how they keep in touch with friends and family around the world.

So, we set up WhatsApp broadcast groups for each class. It worked well as a way to encourage parents on to some of the websites that we use, such as lovemybooks.co.uk. It also meant that when lockdown began, we already had a powerful tool ready for communication and dialogue with almost every family we work with.

What was one thing you changed this year for the worse?

As part of our project to improve children’s early communication, I designed a poster about effective strategies. There was a lot of jargon, like “conversational responsiveness”. The text was too small and no one could remember all the different strategies. It was a disaster not to be repeated.

What was the moment that will stay with you for years?

“What did you do at the weekend?” I asked one of the children. Her reply was prompt.

“I went to see Uncle Kiss-Kiss.”

“Who’s that?”

Instead of elaborating (“Oh, I mean my Uncle Chris - that’s what we all call him”), the child just laughed and repeated herself.

Later, it occurred to me that this incident was a neat example of how young children think. That child had no idea that a person outside of her family would not understand a nickname like that, and that more explanation would be required from her to move our conversation forwards. This is an important reminder about the need to model effective communication with our youngest learners.

What do you hope to change this coming year?

I want us to think much harder about racism and unconscious bias. Like lots of people, I’ve learned more about this in the past few weeks, as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, than I have in the past decade.

In particular, I was struck by an anecdote told to me by Lorna Jackson, headteacher at nearby Maryland Primary School. She was visiting the nursery in another school and she saw a child who kept throwing a black doll into the bin. The practitioner kept getting it out. “It’s because black people are dirty,” the child said, when the teacher eventually asked why they were doing it.

Rather than correcting this, the practitioner decided to wash the doll with the child. This was probably well meant but it reinforced the child’s false belief and the racism that they had already learned along with it.

I know that everyone gets things wrong in the heat of the moment, but we have to stop, reflect and learn more about racism. We need to do a better job of combating these beliefs - and that starts in the early years.

This article originally appeared in the 31 July 2020 issue under the headline “‘When you’re in a crisis, you forget what you know’”