Observations From The Front
It has been a week now since being thrust back into a busy school full of nearly a thousand people after six months of living safely and solitarily in lockdown. Here are some observations from the frontline of Covid 19, in one of the UK’s worst areas for infection, Birmingham, just days before we return to a stricter, nationally imposed, lockdown…
People are bad at social distancing, even when it is possible to do, which is seldom in a busy school. Classrooms of 30 students plus a teacher are impossible to keep socially distanced and no one is even trying to do so. But as adults, shared spaces such as staff rooms or shared offices have not only, in my school, seen little attempt at changing furniture and marking out safe, socially distanced, spaces, but the teachers themselves - supposedly educated adults - continue to sit close, invade each other’s space and generally live life as if there was no virus.
This is especially true when complaining to each other about how bad the reality is at school compared to the on-paper risk assessments and safety protocols which painted a picture of Covid-security. Colleagues are still leaning in close for conspiratorial whispers about how bad it all is, becoming a further part of the very problem they are talking about each time they do so.
The crammed classrooms not only provide no chance of social distancing, but the alleged 2 metre space for at least the teacher to socially distance from their students is not possible in the majority of these tiny classrooms either. Furthermore, the idea of keeping the rooms ventilated, with doors and windows open, is consistently undermined by students themselves closing windows and teachers not wanting the doors open for fear of disturbing the work in other classrooms. Time and again this week I have entered a new classroom to be greeted by a wave of muggy heat - no open windows, doors closed, lots of breathing going on without masks for a very long time before I got there. A ticking time-bomb of infection. Many rooms don’t even have a doorstop if you did want one.
It is definitely hard to teach while wearing a mask (at least without blowing out your voice trying to be heard through the mask) but there is no reason students in these crammed, unsafe, rooms shouldn’t be made to wear them unless they have a legitimate health condition which makes it impossible. It is the only way to keep things even slightly safe in an environment with zero social distancing and poor ventilation. Yet no school I know of, including my own, is asking for this requirement which has been made a basic part of life in any other similarly crowded public indoor space even where social distancing is possible. That it is not the norm in these classrooms shows utter contempt for the health and wellbeing of staff, students and their families, but at least my school has allowed optional mask wearing in the classroom. Many haven’t. Well done to the students smart enough, and ethical enough, to choose to wear one, even if they are, sadly, the minority in each room.
People seem to think hand sanitiser is magic. A little dab and no thorough washing of hands has replaced proper hand hygiene and no one is checking to ensure the sanitiser is being used effectively. Students “wash” their hands this way, then grab their bags, etc. which remain unsanitised. Teachers, moving from room to room to teach their classes, hands burdened with boxes of resources and equipment, are not physically able to sanitise their hands upon entry to a classroom without dropping everything, so they don’t. The box of resources is never sanitised.
When those in charge do not take the threat of Covid 19 as seriously as they believe children should be in school, they don’t really care if the precautions on paper actually work in practice - it is merely box-ticking to allow the school to reopen and complaints or issues brought to their attention about the possible failings of that box-ticking are greeted with the general attitude that “nothing is perfect” and none of this really matters anyway.
Related: school leaders being denied multiple holidays due to ever-changing government “guidance” since March have become short tempered, irritable and not interested in hearing anything negative right now. They may well throw personal insults and unprofessional blanket charges at you which question your professional integrity and character in full view and hearing of students and colleagues in the middle of a busy playground (say during Monday lunchtime last week) simply because you have a disagreement on what is and isn’t safe.
Related: I have a personal risk assessment for my return to work due to my clinical vulnerability to Covid as an asthmatic and so far many of the things necessary to mitigate against that risk, which my school are meant to assure me will be in place are either not in place or inaccessible to me until some unknown point in the future. Until then I’m just meant to deal with it.
Everyone who coughs chuckles “it’s not Covid”. Very few, if any, have an actual negative test result which confirms that and don’t seem to understand that Covid can be asymptomatic and the point isn’t coughing per se, but spreading potentially infected droplets from the cough.
We are still looking out for the three classic symptoms of high temperature, new persistent cough and loss of taste or smell in students and staff, despite recent research, and international reports, suggesting, in the young people we are teaching, Covid is more likely to present itself as gastrointestinal issues. This means a likelihood possible Covid cases are going to be missed, and certainly won’t be tested for.
Too few teachers or administrators are adapting to the idea that we shouldn’t be passing around pieces of paper from person to person. Books are still be collected in. Notices which could be emailed are being handed out on paper. Students still have to sign in and out at my school and form long, non-socially distanced, queues to do so. Old habits are hard to break, and working on instinct makes us susceptible to lacking reflection and the necessary upgrading to new contexts.
Related: for some reason we are still having face to face assemblies with whole year group bubbles at my school. I have yet to hear anything said in one which could not have been emailed, or delivered via a pre-recorded video. This unnecessary risk in the name of routine and tradition at a time when the country is about to face a ban on gatherings of more than six will be incredibly hard to justify if it causes anyone to get sick.
Bubbles were always going to be tenuous in a secondary school where the specialist subject teacher moves from bubble to bubble, potentially spreading infection from one bubble to another, but not all teachers seem to understand the purpose of them was not only about limiting infection, but about identifying those in need of self-isolation should an outbreak still occur. A well kept bubble means if student A gets a positive Covid result, those they have been in close contact with ought to quarantine too. We can only know who they are in close contact with if the bubble is maintained. Students moving seats, mixing with other bubbles in corridors or on the playgrounds, etc., mean the chain of contacts gets harder to identify and risks either a more significant number of quarantining students is needed, or people who need to quarantine don’t get asked to and go on to infect far more people than is necessary.
Related: Covid 19 does not keep to business hours. The teacher who “gives a little leeway” before morning registration when bubble groups invade another bubble’s designated areas on the playground because “otherwise they don’t really have anywhere to play football” does not understand that doing so risks the same potential spread of infection as allowing it after morning registration too, or anywhere else in the school. Likewise, the fact our student bubbles are broken on buses to and from school, or at home when they reunite with siblings in other bubbles, or even other schools, is not a reason for us to be lax about keeping the bubbles pure during the school day wherever we can. If anything it gives more reason to be more cautious where we can because every increased risk of exposure in other contexts makes the likelihood of an infected child coming into school stronger. If they are doing these things outside of school we should be working harder to maintain their bubbles in school, not adding further opportunities for an already active virus to spread further.
When classrooms are not socially distanced, mask rules are inconsistent and incoherent, and students see teachers breaking protocols, the message we send them is that this is all some silly joke, and they don’t need to take it all that seriously because we’re not, either as teachers or as a wider society. Kids are smart. They spot bullshit a mile away. They look for holes in arguments and cracks in systems. And they talk. They share their observations. As the week went on, more and more started to bend and stretch the new rules and see what they could get away with. Too many discovered the answer was: they could get away with quite a lot because many of us overseeing their behaviour also were breaking and bending the rules, both at school and in wider society, hence the area’s heading into wider lockdown.
I asked several classes of mine if they felt safe from Covid at school at the end of the week. All said no. I asked them if they had broken their year group bubble at any point in the day the day before. All said yes. Students are moving from building to building for certain classes, where specialist equipment requires certain rooms. The corridors remain packed despite most classes staying in the same room for each lesson. Enough students have to move - for PE, art, music, science practicals, computing, etc. - during each changeover that there are always a few bubbles intermingling on the stairs and in the hallways even though we have tried our best to minimise movement. I certainly don’t feel safe or “Covid secure” as I work each day and it feels like only a matter of time before an outbreak will occur. Worse, everyone seems aware of this and resigned to it. That alone is enough to undermine the efficacy of the systems that have been put in place: if most of us think they don’t work, then few will invest in ensuring that they are followed. What would be the point?
After a week working in this ridiculous new world, dragging myself from building to building, classroom to classroom, to teach from the front in the weird, disconnected, nature demanded by the new safety protocols, without shared resources for the students, re-creating every lesson as best I could to try to make them work in this new environment, while seeing every hour that passes yet another reason why none of this works, then returning home to the news last night that my city, and the town where I live outside of the city, are both subject to stricter lockdowns from Tuesday because none of this is working anywhere, I am starting to know some of what Sisyphus felt as he dragged that rock up that hill, only to drag it down again and again.
Work is freedom. Infection is strength.