North East school leaders say no to summer opening
There has been speculation around whether schools should open during the summer holidays due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis, however a Schools North East survey has shown that almost 75% of school leaders don’t believe schools should open during the summer.
Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield advised opening schools over summer at the Education Select Committee earlier this week.
Longfield said: “If we stick to the numbers of classes that are going back right now, that could be 8 million children that have been out of school for six months by September. “We looked at figures of kids not going online, that was before their parents went back to work, and before the sun came out for any length of time, and frankly before other things became more interesting.”
Logngfield referenced research which found that two-thirds of children were going online for schoolwork for less than two hours a day. For disadvantaged students this was 90%. Obviously, the learning loss caused by school closures and the impact of this on disadvantaged groups is of significant concern. A recent EEF report looked into possible estimates for the increase in the disadvantage gap caused by learning loss. The median estimate indicates that the gap would widen by 36%. However, the estimated rate of gap widening varied substantially between studies, meaning that there is a high level of uncertainty around this average. Plausible “good” and “bad” estimates range from the gap widening from 11% to 75%.
School leaders in the North East have overwhelmingly indicated an opposition to proposals for a summer opening, with almost 75% of those surveyed preferring not to open during the holidays. The survey included 746 Head Teachers, Governors and School Business Managers. It is perhaps unsurprising that school leaders are reluctant to open through the summer. Not only would it be outside of staff contracts, making it logistically difficult, but the past two months have seen schools step up in extraordinary ways to support their students and local communities.
Our school leaders and teachers have been working harder than ever as the ‘fourth emergency service’ during this difficult time and calling on staff to provide more during the summer is potentially a heavy additional burden for staff who are already stressed and have been putting in long hours to respond to this crisis.
Additionally, the current situation around extending the opening of primaries has been a fraught and difficult process, with many schools not having been able to open safely yet; few schools have opened in the way that the government had hoped. The same issues around social distancing, staffing and PPE that are occurring now, would also apply during the summer, providing further and significant logistical challenges. Head Teacher’s and Teaching Unions have also been opposed to summer opening, with many already concerned about the safety of schools extending their opening ahead of summer.
In order to dig deeper into the concerns around learning loss, Schools North East have been holding conversations with experts who have been researching this issue, including Professor Greta Defeyter (Northumbria University) and Professor Paul von Hippel (University of Texas at Austin). Their research suggests that opening schools for formal lessons across the summer months is not the best way to address learning loss, and that if schools were to open during the summer it would be more necessary to do so for mental health and social support reasons as opposed to academic lessons.
Interestingly, in the Schools North East survey, opening for emotional or social support was the least popular reason for opening despite growing recognition in the sector that mental health will be at the forefront of any return to school or ‘recovery curriculum’. This may be because school leaders feel that if an extended opening over summer is supposed to deal with learning loss, then it should have an academic focus.
Director of Schools North East Chris Zarraga said ‘The survey results clearly show that opening over the summer is not popular with NE school leaders.
‘Our school staff have been working extremely hard during this crisis, many are already feeling stressed and exhausted due to this, and to ask staff to open over summer presents a number of difficulties and risks to their wellbeing.
‘If the Department for Education does intend to look at options for schools opening over summer, these must be flexible and at the discretion of school leaders to allow it to happen safely and not negatively impact staff.’
Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson has previously stated that there is no intention to open schools over summer, and the Government is facing growing calls to drop it’s aim for all primary students to return later this month, making any opening of schools over summer less likely.
