Date: 14/07/21

By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT

There is no doubt that switching to remote learning brings challenges for all of us. For pupils, it is engaging with a new style of learning in a different environment. For parents and carers, it may be about balancing working from home with the demands of home learning and trying to support your child with their work. For teachers, it is delivering lessons in a different way to normal and trying to find new ways of giving effective feedback to pupils to help them learn.

For all of us, we have no choice but to make it work as effectively as possible. The consequences of not doing so are unthinkable. Our pupils have missed so much school already and there is no guarantee of a return by February half term, so we have to maximise the opportunities that remote learning can bring.

This week OFSTED published a report on remote learning, based on looking at what schools have done since last March. What was very clear from the report is that there is no approach better than another when it comes to remote teaching and learning, with recorded lessons being just as effective as live lessons for example and clear support for using books and worksheets as well as online learning. What matters most is that we try to keep the content of the remote learning as close as possible to what our pupils would be completing in their classrooms.

All of our schools have slightly different approaches to how remote learning is delivered, based on the age of their pupils and the facilities available for pupils to work at home. However all of them are following the same principle of trying to deliver as much of our normal curriculum as possible at home.

There is no doubt that ‘home school’ can be really difficult for parents and carers, and we are really grateful for all of the effort that has gone into supporting our pupils with their remote learning. For those of you who aren’t sure about how best you can support your child, the key is encouraging them to engage as much as possible with the work being set by their teachers. I understand why some pupils find it difficult to engage with a new way of learning, perhaps feeling overwhelmed at times, and some pupils will also be struggling with missing seeing their friends. However it is absolutely vital to their long term chances of success that they engage with remote learning.

This is particularly important for those in the GCSE, BTEC and A level exam year groups. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the Government’s handling of education since March was the failure to create a contingency plan for this year’s exams. Once again our pupils are left with great uncertainty over how their exam results will be calculated. We are promised that a plan for consultation will be published by the end of the week, so hopefully I will be able to explain more about this in the next edition of LIGHThouse.

I understand the anxiety of pupils and their families about how grades will be awarded, and as a parent of a Year 10 pupil myself, I know that it is not just Years 11 and 13 pupils who are worried about the impact of lockdown on the chances of success in exams in 2021 and beyond. What we do know is that the 2021 grades will be centre assessed, as they were in 2020. The best advice we can give our pupils is not to worry, to keep working as hard as they can and to complete as many assessment tasks as they can which their teacher can use as evidence that they are capable of achieving a particular grade. We will provide extra support and materials for this once we have details of how centre assessed grades will be calculated.

Remote learning may not be the ideal form of learning, but for pupils who fully engage with it and try their best, it will make a huge difference to their chances of success when we can all get back to school again. In the words of Zig Ziglar “If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.”