Children must not lose out in these days of kitchen classrooms

ALMOST overnight, and with virtually no warning, Scotland was turned into a nation of home educators.

The morning rush to send children off to school with packed lunches and PE kits is a distant memory.

Now we’re clustered round kitchen tables as our homes become not just sanctuaries from the virus, but also offices – and classrooms.

And this sudden conversion took place in the midst of a burgeoning dystopia, which has severely limited our access to the outside world.

Stress levels are rising, and there are conflicting reports about when schools will re-open, probably because at the highest levels, no-one really knows – there are still too many variables.

For the single parent working from home with two primary-age children, it may well be impossible even to contemplate educating them; the priority is, rightly, to maintain household income.

And it’s not much easier for two parents, juggling meetings with colleagues on video-conferencing apps while trying to teach times tables.

It can be a humbling experience that reminds you of how much you’ve forgotten from your own school days.

Watching the BBC’s Bitesize TV programme yesterday with my two children, aged 11 and 9, the mental arithmetic questions were more challenging than they should have been – but that was before I’d had my morning caffeine fix. (That’s my excuse anyway).

Indeed, the BBC has stepped up to the plate in admirable fashion with tailored education content – its much-derided digital channel in Scotland has found new purpose as a platform for material from the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE).

A few weeks ago, with the Easter ‘break’ in prospect, most of us were willing to accept that the transition to weeks, or months, of home education would be a bumpy one.

Now, with the summer term under way, parental patience is beginning to wear thin.

There’s a piecemeal approach, and some schools deserve credit for coming up with clever schemes for remote learning.

But many parents feel they’re in a void, left to negotiate a maze of educational websites of wildly differing quality.

John Swinney’s home learning guidance yesterday was threadbare stuff, with the usual pointers to online material that might prove helpful.

For the most disadvantaged children, with no wi-fi or computer access, this isn’t much help.

Isn’t there now an urgent case for ensuring rapid delivery of the hardware needed to prevent these youngsters severing all connection with their educators?

It’s true that there isn’t an infinite supply of taxpayers’ money, and bailing out business at risk of going to the wall is needed to prevent economic meltdown.

But we can’t write off the prospects of thousands of children in the process.

Before the pandemic, Mr Swinney was in charge of the SNP’s chaotic reform of state education.

It focused on closing the ‘attainment gap’ between the best and worst-off children – but even under pre-virus conditions there was scant evidence of progress.

Educationalists warn that the long summer break can undermine learning – weeks away from their desks mean pupils’ brains are out of shape by mid-August.

(Kitchen classrooms: Scotland is a now a nation of home educators)

That effect is exacerbated this year thanks to lockdown.

For children from middle-class homes, the chances of bouncing back quickly are high – not so for their poorer counterparts.

The youngsters in homes where daily survival is proving tricky, or impossible, are most at risk of becoming the forgotten victims of this crisis.

And yet the official response to the problem has been patchy and underwhelming.

The £31million Education Scotland quango is stuffed full with well-paid education experts.

But there’s little indication of proactive intervention on anything like the scale required.

A plan from the Reform Scotland think-tank for an army of online tutors ran foul of concerns about the fact that many of them wouldn’t be registered with the General Teaching Council.

Before the pandemic, this might have been a fatal objection.

But is it really good enough in the middle of a pandemic, when parents are at their wits’ ends – and there’s a chance that our already struggling education system will take a giant step backwards?

One educationalist pressing the case for more organised home learning told me: ‘The government pretty much told us to go away and not to worry our pretty little heads about it.’

True, if government was caught on the hop by coronavirus – and increasingly it seems planning was woefully deficient – then the lack of focus on home schooling is hardly a surprise.

Yet the threat of a pandemic that would bring life as we knew it to a shuddering halt has been on the radar for many years.

In an era of makeshift hospitals, and as the virus death toll continues to rise, it’s clear that the machinery of government has had other, more pressing priorities.

Containing the virus has been the central mission of ministers and their officials.

But as the lockdown grinds on, few parents can have any confidence that a structured and nuanced plan to replace formal schooling is in development.

The upheaval has been toughest for older children after exams were axed, with teachers using coursework to predict final marks.

The sclerotic bureaucracy of state education in Scotland is under immense pressure – but must parents have been prepared to cut it some slack.

That grace period can’t last forever.

As Professor Lindsay Paterson of the University of Edinburgh wrote at the weekend, home-educating parents should concentrate on the basics.

They mustn’t worry about replicating the school day – instead home in on the ‘three Rs’.

One of the main criticisms of the CfE has been its rejection of rote learning of the kind that some of us will remember all too well from childhood.

The cardinal sin now is to allow pupils to get bored.

But the ‘boring’ bits – such as committing times tables to memory – are crucial building-blocks.

One of the ironies of this strange period of enforced familial hibernation – or incarceration – is that kids might benefit from leaving the CfE behind for a while.

It’s trendy, woolly stuff, for the most part – one lesson teaches pupils how to claim benefits. Talk about setting the bar low…

The original architects of the CfE envisaged abolishing traditional history lessons, until a backlash forced a U-turn.

Now subject rationing is rife, and the entire initiative is in disrepute.

Perhaps the lockdown will prove an eye-opener for some parents – underlining how much the standard of learning has suffered.

But there are reasons for optimism: as a society, we’ve never been more connected, or easily contactable.

For some former office workers, that brings with it as many setbacks as advantages – work follows you around on your smartphone.

Now your colleagues can be summoned via the Zoom app on your iPad or mobile (choose the ‘audio’ option to disguise your lockdown dishevelment).

It’s just as useful a tool for kids.

Smart ‘solutions’, as IT experts call them, were unthinkable until fairly recently, and unknown to previous generations.

The challenge ahead for ministers as this weird stasis continues is to ensure that technology is properly harnessed – and educational disaster is averted.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on April 21, 2020.