Perhaps one of the most affected, but simultaneously unacknowledged groups is school-aged children. Kept at home during the lockdowns, home-schooling efforts varied enormously throughout the country, as teachers tried to keep abreast of the ever-changing requirements of the pandemic response, and children - some of whom hadn’t even experienced a full year of ‘normal’ education - tried to rally around the new metrics of the screen, the video call and the online worksheet.
In many ways, the long-term impact of the lockdown on the mental health of young people is only now beginning to show. Even with the best of intentions, the effects of the initial lockdown, its uncertainty and the knock-on implications will inevitably require interventions and potentially widespread changes at a policy level.
Policy changes
With help from funding from the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute, Dr Lucy Wenham was able to investigate the implications of the lockdown experience on a variety of children in a variety of contexts - and her results have clear implications for policy changes that could be implemented in the future.
“Our research investigated the impacts of the mandated school closures with an emphasis on student mental health”, said Dr Wenham. “We monitored the day-to-day realities of attempts at ‘home schooling’ with the backdrop of stress and fear, and we listened to the concerns, hopes and fears of year 11 and year 13 children, who found their high stakes examinations abruptly cancelled”.
One aspect of the research used parents’ diaries to investigate the day-to-day realities of home educating primary-school aged children. Each parents’ circumstances were different, but there were common concerns.
“Our findings pointed to a lack of routine, motivation, resources and support,” said Dr Wenham, “as well as concerns about the children’s emotional and social wellbeing, and their educational progress. Parents had to be creative in their approaches; providing engaging learning activities and supporting them so they could thrive.” Many parents did find imaginative ways to learn with their children, providing education in its richest sense, learning through cooking together or on nature walks. Such informal learning resists quantification and as such can go unrecognized and under-appreciated, as students return to the classroom.
“Our research suggests that schools demonstrate an over-reliance on motivating schoolchildren by external factors, and on test-driven teaching and learning; and the use of online learning technologies was patchy and, in some cases, limited.”
Children work at home during the Covid 19 pandemic. Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash.
High Stakes Issues
The second aspect drew on the reflections, thoughts and feelings of Year 11 and Year 13 students - students who’s high-stakes examinations were cancelled, and so they experienced an abrupt termination to their education as well as an inability to acknowledge and celebrate its conclusion.
“The sense of missing out on ‘rites of passage’ and feelings of loss and illegitimacy added to the stress and anxiety surrounding these high-stakes tests and their cancellation,” said Dr Wenham.
But in the case of complex administrative systems like these, changes are often adopted in practice in schools before they become official policy.
Dr Wenham: “Practice recognises and reacts to local contexts and changing needs much more swiftly, so it can be more flexible, and respond faster. Schools are best placed to act on our findings in their own setting and would be best placed to offer tailored support, as and when they see fit. Our work has been met with a positive response from practitioners, but on the often more glacial policy level it takes time to implement change, although there are signs that this is beginning to happen.” Over the pandemic in fact education policies appeared in abundance, with one Head Teacher bemoaning having to implement more than a hundred policies changes and recommendations, just in the first year of Covid.
“Catch up” needs to catch up
“Policy is very much still turned to “learning loss” and “catch up” philosophies”, she continued. “Although perhaps some of the recent observations around the national tutoring program, concerning a lack of recruitment, take up or success, might imply that policy-makers are becoming aware of the issues”.
Certainly, Dr Wenham was pleased to see this funding now being redirected to schools, as she herself had advocated. “This is a good first-step but the government could go further and completely free up Head Teachers to spend this as they wish, utterly unconstrained and with no strings.”
Before tutoring can be successful, students need to be in the right headspace to learn, so mental health must come first, Dr Wenham argues, and she again emphasizes that schools have the established relationships to be able to do this well. “Wellbeing, agency and hope also need addressing in order for curriculum interventions to subsequently be more effective,” said Dr Wenham, “and even interventions to address these could - and should - be designed and implemented by schools themselves to suit local contexts.”
New Approaches Needed
So, what could be done? Dr Wenham is clear that there are several things policymakers need to implement, if student mental health is to be taken seriously:
“Allocating student grades by re-purposing already existing mock exams, teacher predictions or assessment of previous classwork, when the students were not expecting assessment in this way is a huge source of anxiety for students, and shouldn’t be repeated,” she said. “However, we’ve also shown that high-stakes tests in general fuel stress and anxiety, so their role needs to be dramatically reduced or even eliminated.”
Dr Wenham prefers a more Scandinavian model, where teachers as trusted professionals regularly assess their students and low-stakes tests may feed into this.
“We must support students’ mental health in both the short and long term. Key to this is providing spaces for students to engage in communication and dialogue; to acknowledge loss, and to take back agency and reclaim hope. Shifting the curriculum focus to be centred on the students is essential - embedding a more active student role at its heart, through greater use of dialogue, reflection and criticality.”
Dr Wenham concludes: “Quiet, passive, rows of students is the last thing we need right now. The students need space to speak and to be heard.”