The spring term is usually a positive time for teachers, a chance to start afresh with the promise of brighter days ahead.
However, this year, because of the Omicron variant of Covid, the term has started under a dark cloud, with schools and teachers facing their biggest challenge of the whole pandemic.
There is huge uncertainty about what the coming weeks will bring. Will the highly infectious Omicron variant rip through schools like Delta did last year, causing staff absences and class closures? Will pupils have to return to home learning?
At least schools in Wales knew what the start of term was likely to look like before Christmas, and were given extra time to prepare for any potential disruption. In England, the timing and nature of communication to schools has been less than ideal.
It’s also encouraging that Estyn has read the situation on the ground in Wales and recognised that in the middle of the Omicron wave pilot inspections under the new framework should not proceed, and have been suspended until February.
Unfortunately, the Welsh Government hasn’t read the situation in the same way. It still thinks it should be full steam ahead when it comes to designing an entirely new curriculum for implementation in just eight months’ time.
We’ve talked about the need to delay Curriculum for Wales implementation on several occasions during this pandemic, but the rationale for doing so now is more apparent than ever.
The problem is, we don’t know what the situation is like on the ground. What are the statistics around teacher availability for curriculum reform? How many teachers are actually in school and completing curriculum design work? And how will this situation change in the coming weeks?
This links to a wider issue in education that we keep coming back to – the need for more evidence-backed decision-making. Too often our political leaders and policymakers base their decisions on what ‘feels right’, or what will be popular, rather than on the evidence.
Policymaking needs to factor in evidence, research, data and statistics, and for that to work we need people who are statistically literate, who understand what the data is telling them, and who have a deep understanding of what’s happening on the ground.
We know politicians and their advisers have a very difficult job at the moment. But we don’t believe the education policy advisers in Wales up to this point have had the requisite balance of skills, experience, statistical literacy and common sense they need to give the best advice.
The pandemic should be used as a catalyst to make changes for the better in education policymaking. First, we have to acknowledge that the pandemic is going to have a considerable long-term impact on children, teachers and schools. It’s not just about getting pupils back in the classroom, there’s going to be a whole host of mental health, social and family issues to deal with as well.
There are some big, important decisions to be made about children’s lives as we recover from the pandemic and we can’t afford for those to be left to political wonks based on what they think the electorate will like or what they can sell to teachers.
Instead, we need politicians and advisers who aren’t just driven by winning the next election, but who make decisions based on the evidence that considers the whole picture.
We recently discussed some of these issues on our podcast. Click here to listen.