What has it been like working in alternative provision this year? The short answer is that it has been really, really busy. As a leader, it’s been horrible to have to stand up and say “I don’t know what I’m doing here”. But none of us has known what we were doing.

Schools like ours can be quite isolated. We’re very lucky that we’ve got really good relationships with our partner secondary schools, but I think if you work in alternative provision, and you aren’t outward facing, you don’t have colleagues to talk to about the decisions that you’re making.

Over the past year, everyone has become more open to sharing what they’re doing; there’s no competition in leadership about who’s the best at managing Covid. Everyone wants to get it right. Nobody wants better results than other schools, like they sometimes do with exam results.

Covid: The risk of referring to ‘catch-up’

Remote learning has been a mixed bag. We had some children who completed more work independently than they ever did when they were in school. But there were some children to whom we delivered devices, and to whom we gave support online and over the phone, who still would not engage.

We were lucky that we were in a position to say, “if they aren’t working online, why don’t we try to get them in school?” Because we’ve got a small number of children, we were able to be really individualised in our approaches.

We’re an attachment and trauma-informed practice school so, in terms of teaching the children skills of self-regulation - and building their brains to further develop executive function and metacognition - that’s all part of who we are as a school anyway.

We haven’t done anything extra, we’ve just made sure that we’ve aligned our assemblies and our tutor times with stuff that’s useful for the world they’re living in now.

We’re not saying the word “catch-up”. A lot of our children feel that they have deficit areas already or that they’ve ruined their schooling. If you’ve already missed Year 10 because you had severe anxiety or you were in hospital with an eating disorder, you don’t need to be told that it’s worse now and you’ve lost a year. We don’t want to further perpetuate that media narrative that will have a detrimental impact on how our children see themselves and what they see their future looking like now.

I’m glad that we are starting to return to what used to be “normal”, but I’m still really concerned about all of the socialisation work that we do with children and everything we do from a relational approach. They’ve had no practice at that. That’s the bit that I’m worried about.

And I’m worried about the students who struggled with attendance anyway. We’ve spent so much time setting up remote learning and then, suddenly, it just isn’t there as an option anymore. What about the kids that it worked really well for? Was this not the opportunity to rethink how we assess learning? Was it not the opportunity to rethink how people access it?

It seems likely that the return to “normality” is going to be a missed opportunity.

Leanne Forde-Nassey is headteacher of a pupil referral unit in Hampshire

This article originally appeared in the 19 March 2021 issue under the headline “‘Catch-up’ is not in our vocabulary”