I was fortunate enough to get away to East Anglia for a few days at the beginning of last week; time to recharge and contemplate the immediate past. What a simply extraordinary period of time. As I had guessed, getting everyone back in would be hard at first – very hard – but then, as we all became accustomed to the routines and demands of the redesigned day life fell into a groove and most things became possible. That doesn’t mean that the new ways of working are easy, as they are not; some matters remain by turn strange, frustrating and irritating even. The need to remember to don a mask when crowds are unavoidable and social distancing is inevitably compromised. The deliberate step aside off the path to avoid traffic moving in the opposite direction. The need to be at arms’ length even when your help is needed. The need to say ‘no’, even when an activity is educationally desirable, students are willing and a teacher feels that the level of risk is acceptable. I didn’t enter teaching to get in the habit of saying ‘no’, but sometimes that is how it now has to be.
A now a second lock down beckons, though the political imperative of keeping schools, colleges and universities open means that we will be little affected for the present. So far we have been very lucky in that there have been no positive cases reported within the BWS students population, and attendance has consequently remained high. I am sure that our time will come – it’s bound to – but I feel confident that we have done as much as we can to prepare. The use of MS Teams is now firmly in place across all departments and teaching staff, and Heads of Academic Departments have had time to ‘war game’ what will need to be done should there be a need to resort to remote learning for a proportion of the school population. The whole school risk assessment is posted at https://www.bishopwordsworths.org.uk/main-school/home/coronavirus-information/ and is reviewed weekly, so if you have any comments or suggestions then please do send them in to Graham Lloyd (Deputy Head) at gl@bishopwordsworths.org.uk so that we can consider them.
Despite the increased national restrictions I really do want to try to make the experience for our students over the second half of this rather bleak term as special as it can be. We will still work hard to try to make things happen for them. As I sat with my telescope at the edge of the Blakeney Marshes watching the scuttering waterfowl and shimmering flocks of waders, I was also turning over in my mind what might be possible in the coming weeks. I emerged with cautious optimism; we are all going to be tested by the second lap, but there is still a huge amount that we can all do to make things happen for the young people at Bishop’s.
SDS
