School: to return or not to return, that is the question?

This blog was going to have all sorts of personal things in it, form working Mum guilt, to the educational experiences I’ve had with my boys schools (not great). From the excellence I’ve seen from some of my teaching friends, to the farce of PPE in the police force and my husband attending one the first suspected C19 sudden death in London and us ending up in isolation the week before schools were closed. From having one son with special needs to one head teacher telling me it is not her role to discuss my son’s education with me. But there aren’t enough words, and frankly, I’m bored of hearing myself talking about it. So I’ll summarise.

It’s still quite a long read, but if you are a frustrated parent, you might want to grab yourself a cup of tea, or if it’s been one of those days, a glass of wine and see if you can join us in our third way.

I’m entitled to send my sons (K Year 6 and D Year 8 Grammar school) into school because of key worker status. However for a whole host of reasons, including the fact that my company #Citrix had given a global work from home order, so I am at home every day, and that I naively expected a remote education (by that I mean actual virtual teaching), I decided to do the socially responsible thing. What we were all being urged to do by the Government and keep them at home and frankly it’s been educationally awful and personally an emotional rollercoaster. All I can say is thank goodness for an amazing husband, the dog and chocolate.

Now with K in Year 6 going back to school, there seems to be a stark choice. Go back to school with social distancing, reduced timetable and little contact with friends; or continue with worksheets and answers sent home via email on a Sunday and no contact at all from teachers. For my elder son, the school has made it clear, there’s little possibility of return before September, but his education is slightly better as he has some video lessons, around 3-4 a week and that has only been put in place in the last few weeks. If he does go back because of key worker status, he will do what he does at home, but sat in front of a school PC instead with none of the home comforts.

I don’t believe either of those is a good choice. I respect teachers and the profession of teaching enough to believe that it cannot be done via worksheets alone. That it requires human interaction, seeing and hearing them, the transfer of knowledge from one human being to another. In fact the dictionary definitions are “impart knowledge to or instruct (someone) as to how to do something” and “cause (someone) to learn or understand something by example or experience.”

It’s a really tough gig and not one I can do as I found out when I tried to help my eldest D with his English homework! My parents were both secondary school teachers, and there’s a reason I did not follow them into the vocation!

So if going back to school in the proposed way is not a good choice, and carrying on as they are is not a good choice, what’s the alternative?

What if there was a third way?

As usual, technology is at the heart of the solution I’m proposing. But we need to remember that it’s also true that you can throw as much technology at the problem as you want, but it requires a culture and willingness and innovation from teachers to embrace it and see it through. As the guardians of our children’s future education, I’m sure the vast majority would be up for the challenge which keeps them and our children safe.

I’ve stolen the below from a paper that my equally inspired and frustrated colleague Stephen Twynam and I have written and have been sending in to MPs, Cabinet Members for Education and just about anyone we can find who will listen (and many who won’t). What we are proposing could be up and running quickly, cost efficiently, securely and importantly #sustainably. It would prevent tonnes of old devices being sent to landfill or taking up valuable space in cupboards and offices.

I took inspiration for this in part from the amazing work of Vodafone Foundation with their Instant Classroom programme which educates hundreds of thousands of children in refugee camps across the most deprived areas of the world.

The Challenge

Supporting disadvantaged pupils on remote learning during the Coronavirus outbreak

As outlined by Gareth Williamson in his Covid-19 update on 19th April 2020, this will be achieved in the following ways:

1. Ensure as many children as possible can access online learning to help disadvantaged young people who sit key exams next year.
2. Provide laptops and tablets for those children with social workers and care leavers to help them stay in touch with the services they need, keeping them safe and supporting home learning.    

Problems to Overcome

• In the current climate, it will be difficult to source computers and tablets due to high demand
• The cost of purchasing new devices and having them prepared and made ready for disadvantaged children
• Training on how to use the devices and the services they will access
• Provisioning of the education services, such as Google Classroom or other tools
• Ongoing lifecycle management of the devices e.g. antivirus protection and updates + insurance
• Teacher access to equipment and networks of sufficient quality to strea

My Approach

At Citrix, we help people work better. That’s what we do, but it’s not why we do it. We do it because as work gets better, life gets better. As people’s work life improves, their personal life improves, and as their personal life improves, their community improves, and the effect continues to ripple outward.

What I'm proposing is a technology consortium with a different approach to providing the digital equipment needed for disadvantaged young people to get an education in these difficult times. It would help to deliver on the Government's agenda of making sure that no one is left behind, whilst also being secure and sustainable.

My proposal is that we partner with Computer Aid (https://www.computeraid.org/) who are a charity that have the facilities to collect unwanted computers and devices from organisations in the UK, wipe them ensuring full asset tracking and GDPR compliance and rebuild them usually with Windows 10, but we could work with an organisation who can turn them into Chromebooks as well and get them into the hands of those who need them most. Full social distancing would apply.

This would allow education authorities to curate the right content for the right learner. For secondary schools and colleges who are already set up on Google Classrooms or Microsoft Teams. If a school is not set up as would be the case for a lot of primary schools, we have vast experiences with turning around implementations quickly, see our blog on our help with NHS organisations, Taking the IT drama out of the Covid 19 crisis.

I’d like the Department of Education to lead the call to companies up and down the country to open their IT cupboards and bring out their old laptops and desktop computers. I believe it would have a similar response to the request for scrubs for the NHS and the UK ventilator initiative and could get computing equipment into the hands of digitally disadvantaged children and young people quickly and effectively.

The Outcome

• Support disadvantaged pupils on remote learning during the coronavirus outbreak by getting the necessary technology into their hands
• Providing a secure and curated learning experience for those who need it
• The money saved by not buying new laptops for the children can be used to;
• Ensure that the teachers have the best resources to provide the lessons from their homes
• Provide children with offline resources such as text books to reduce the strain on their eyes and neurological system
• Providing a lower cost and more sustainable ICT solution, giving better value to the tax payer             

There’s also a sustainability angle, by recycling old computer equipment, we would be ensuring they don’t end up in landfill (yet) until they have reached their full potential. If sustainability is your bag, we’ve just released a whitepaper on this subject which you can download here #citrixsustainability

So what do I want you to do?

Our apathy let’s us watch children flounder... don’t be a voice that impacts, step up to the third way. Help us help the digitally disadvantaged children of the UK

I want to get this solution in front of the Department of Education, all the way up to the top, so please, let’s use the power of social media. Please like share and comment to spread it far and wide.

And if the Department of Education aren't as clued up as they ought to be, let's just start anyway. open up your IT cupboards, bring out your old laptops and computers and send them to Computer Aid, they have a list of students and schools waiting for them, they just need the hardware to respond.

I'm going to start by tagging some people I think would be interested in the comments to get the ball rolling