Date: 17/12/2020

By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEA Trust.

We’ve reached the end of the first term back after the lockdown and partial closure for schools. Getting everyone back safely has been a massive challenge, but I believe that this has been a huge success for all of our schools. Children have been happy to return, staff have worked tirelessly to make everything as near normal as possible and parents/carers have shown great support. This year has certainly reinforced the need for everyone to work together to achieve common goals. Education is most successful when we can find ways of working together with parents and carers to support a child’s education.

For many of us, 2020 has been the most challenging year of our lifetimes. Although we have a long way to go and no doubt more to endure, we can all hope and pray that 2021 lives up to the promise we hold for a return to a much more normal life.

While for most, Christmas is a time of joy and celebration, for others it is the most difficult time of the year. I am very proud of the efforts of our pupils and staff in their fundraising and donations for charities which will help make Christmas a little better for some, such as Cash for Kids and the Wansbeck Valley Food Bank.

This Christmas, many of us are also faced with difficult decisions during the relaxation of the rules on social mixing, such as whether to see relatives we miss, but who are elderly or vulnerable. We can only hope that the brief relaxation of rules doesn’t bring another spike in Covid-19 cases in the New Year. The Department for Education have announced that mass testing will be available for secondary schools in January, which potentially could be a great help in not having pupils and staff self-isolating unnecessarily. However, we await guidance and support as to how we can safely manage a mass testing site within a school and to how this can be staffed without disrupting education.

In my previous job as a Headteacher, we ended the last day of term with a whole school Christmas assembly. For the school I led, that meant almost 1400 pupils and staff in the Sports Hall, something which would be unimaginable in 2020. When I closed the assembly, I always gave out the same message. I did this for two reasons, to remind everyone of the true message of Christmas but also because I was always acutely aware that there would be very different experiences on Christmas Day for some pupils compared to others.

My message was that giving at Christmas should be about more than presents and that simple acts of kindness mean so much more than you think. Whether this was offering to do the washing up after Christmas lunch, agreeing a ‘Christmas truce’ with the brother or sister you always argue with, or making a phone call to a lonely relative or neighbour.

It is lovely for all of us to give and receive gifts on Christmas Day, but for me the light that shines through the darkest time of the year comes from kindness and compassion towards each other. I hope that everyone in our school communities has a wonderful Christmas and that 2021 brings a much more hopeful and happier New Year.