We have just finished our latest lockdown here in New Delhi owing to Omicron, and welcomed students back to school for the first time since Christmas on 7 February.
While it was disruptive, after several rounds of remote teaching and learning, it’s fair to say we, like most international schools around the world, have developed plenty of adaptations, innovation and new ways of working - many worth retaining whatever the future holds.
With this in mind, we’re optimistically developing a Living with Covid roadmap to ensure we reflect on what we have learned and how we retain the benefits for the foreseeable future.
Teaching and learning is of course a big part of this but there are also other elements linked to wider parental engagement, pastoral care and induction that are equally important.
1. The first week of term
One of the most notable changes we’ve made is that the first week of each term is entirely online.
Our children come from more than 60 countries, which is a lot even for an international school, and with so many rules and regulations on quarantines, visas and people settling into new accommodations, moving it all online has removed a lot of the challenges and pupils can start to get into school life from the comfort of home.
Doing this termly makes sense, as parents take children on holidays or visit their home country during our breaks, too.
This first week is very much a working week for the students though, with regular lessons as well as pastoral activities. With pupils well-versed in being online, they have taken this in their stride.
Our parent community also supports the approach because, as mentioned, it removes concerns around lengthy quarantines or visa applications getting in the way of learning and, so far, has meant we have had no community transmission between students in the school either.
Keeping this into the near future seems sensible to ensure we can welcome the full community of pupils into school in week two with everyone on the same page.
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2. Welcoming new parents
Given our hugely diverse pupil cohort, it is no surprise to say that we also have a hugely diverse parent cohort. We pride ourselves on our sense of community, so how we induct and onboard new families is very important for us.
During the pandemic, with the physical closure of the school, this could have been a lot harder to achieve, but we found plenty of innovative ways in which technology could help us.
For example, we extended the concept of buddies from children to new families. Normally, new pupils are given a buddy to help them get to know the new school they are joining. To cope with the pandemic, we matched existing school parents to buddy with new parents - linking those who shared the same nationality and language.
We then introduced them on Microsoft Teams so the buddy parents were on hand to answer questions and help support new parents, talk to them about the school and help them to settle in their child(ren) to the new school routines.
We also knew we wanted to make it easy for new parents to find the information they needed about the school, so we turned to an online platform called Firefly to store the information that parents would need - such as schedules, documents and videos - for induction day in one location.
Teachers interacted with new families two to three weeks ahead of the start of school, taking them through the main school routines, explaining how to navigate Firefly and Microsoft Teams, and helping them understand our modes of communication and how to access important information.
This avoided subjecting parents to information overload at a time when life was already complicated enough, and made it easy for them to find what they needed when required.
These efforts clearly had an impact as 80 per cent of our new parents gave us overwhelmingly positive feedback about the online induction. We will make this a key part of our Living with Covid plans.
3. Student wellbeing
As for most schools, student wellbeing continues to be a key area of focus.
We converted many features of our wellbeing programme to online versions and we have found that students have been more forthcoming and less reticent about requesting counselling in this medium.
As a result, online support has been accessed by far more students and has proven to be as impactful, if not more, than face-to-face interactions - not least because you don’t have to wear masks.
Of course, there are some considerations. For example, we use Microsoft Teams for online counselling sessions but we have a clear policy that sessions are not recorded and because sessions take place from home, students need to ensure they cannot be overheard whenever a session is underway.
This is why we plan to continue to provide face-to-face counselling as well as an online service - there are nuances that need to be considered for both approaches.
The pandemic has reinforced our vision of enabling all to “thrive, believe, succeed”, but we know we can only do so by focusing on the collective wellbeing of all students. Taking what we have learned from the pandemic and adapting it for the future is a must - just as it is for welcoming new pupils and parents.
Despite the silver linings the pandemic has given us, all of us in education know that human interaction is fundamental to education and we would not want to return to schooling under lockdown.
But living with Covid has required innovation, experimentation and evolution - and so we owe it to ourselves, our staff, our parents and our pupils to ensure we harness the best of what we have developed to continue to provide the best education experience possible.
Vanita Uppal OBE is director at The British School New Delhi
