“There is no right answer [on Covid],” laments science broadcaster and writer Dr Kat Arney. And that’s not good news for schools trying to find the “right” route through the Covid-19 pandemic.

Speaking on the latest episode of Tes Podagogy (which you can watch and listen to below), Arney - author of Herding Hemingway’s Cats and How to Code a Human - explains that the past six months have brought all the existing problems with science communication to the forefront, and “ramped them up to 11”.

And that’s left schools in a tricky position.

It is now common to see research studies being traded against each other to support the legitimacy of any single action - for example, the wearing of face masks or the level of risk that a child poses to teachers.

This is a common problem generally in education: teachers trade studies on pedagogy or behaviour in the same way, brandishing an experiment to prove the right or wrong of a given strategy.

That demonstrates a misunderstanding of science, says Arney, who has written extensively for Tes and was science communications manager at Cancer Research UK.

Science gives us evidence - not instruction

“A scientific paper won’t tell the government what to do,” she says. “And it won’t tell you personally what you should do. It is information you have to integrate. And that is why all of this is so hard for the government, for schools, for parents, for teachers. Science gives us evidence [not instruction].

“Science is not a ‘one and done’. There is no definitive experiment that will show you everything. It is always a step and a process.

Listen to the podcast below or click here

“[And] science at all levels has to rely on a model. It has to control as many variables as we can to try and get some form of insight. Particularly in the life sciences, now we are trying to move towards real-world outcomes, but those are hard to measure as people will not always behave how you want them to do.

“We have to accept that every model and every system has its flaws, but we have to be honest about what they are and what the next experiment you would need to do is to find out more.”

Coronavirus: Is the message clear? 

This links to a second challenge: translation. Yes, a study may find that when humans are told to wear face masks in a certain way, at certain times, transmission of the virus goes down. But what does that look like in reality? As Arney says above, do people actually behave in those ways?

The job of that “real world” analysis falls to behavioural scientists, and Arney says we have to take their work as seriously as the lab experiments.

“I think we really have to, with something like this that is on the ground now, with people’s lives at stake, we do have to see how this stuff manifests in the real world, and it is the behavioural scientists’ job to figure that out.

“A good example of this was in the US where they were trying to model the potential infection trajectory when students returned to a university. They got the physics academics to do it, and you look at the model and you discover the physicists just assumed no parties would happen.

“There is also a very famous example, or joke, where a farmer goes to a university and says he wants them to help improve the yield of his cows - the physicists start the paper by saying: ‘First assume an entirely spherical cow.’”

Poor translation of research

Arney says schools should be used to this already - in her time writing for Tes she was shocked at how few ideas in education had a basis in real-world evidence.

“There are a lot of people writing a lot of books and having a lot of ideas, based on the psychological literature, but have they actually tested it? Most of the time the answer was ‘no, but it sounds plausible’ or ‘no, no one has the money to do that,’” she says. 

In the podcast, Arney explores more issues around the translation of education research into the classroom and the similarities to the problems we are facing now with translation of the research into the coronavirus crisis. And she discusses how heads and teachers can navigate all the conflicting messages about their health and the health of those in their care, as well as those in the wider community.

Individual risk of Covid-19

“There are population-level statistics and then there is what actually happens to you,” she says. “You are an n = 1 study. We can use the [population] information to judge risk, and understand what risk we are willing to expose ourselves to. [But we also have to acknowledge that we] do accept risk every day in our lives - Covid is not the only risk we face.  

“But we don’t often think about those other risks. The thing with Covid is that it is slammed in our face every single day - so we are having to grapple with serious risks in a way we have not really had to before. The immediacy of that risk is very different to, say, the cancer risk of smoking a cigarette.”

That risk assessment will vary widely between schools and individuals, but Arney stresses that what is important is that the assessment is informed by the best knowledge that we have, and that it is updated with new information as it comes to light.

“We have to try and balance and integrate everything together,” she concludes. “It is very challenging for [heads]. [But] when it comes to the government guidance, the government really does have experts working [on it]. And this pandemic has flushed out an awful lot of armchair experts. I think the government have made missteps and poor decisions, but you have to assume the heart is in the right place.”