Learning Through Lockdown: The Impact of Coronavirus on Education in Scotland
We appear to be live so I'm saying good morning everybody and thank you for tuning in my name is John Mitchell and I'm chairing this morning's gathering I've been asked to say a few introductory remarks about Scottish Books Long Weekend it's a special online event that celebrates Scotland's books and authors and publishers brought to you by Publishing Scotland and Books from Scotland with Creative Scotland over the weekend you can hear discussion about fiction non-fiction children's books young adult books and if you haven't done so already please go to booksfromscotland.com and check out the other events on offer take a look as well at the online bookshop scottishbookslongweekend.bookshops.org supports independent bookshops throughout the UK you browse the shelves for books written or published by the participants including our three panellists today and also another plus 10 percent of sales through the site will support Publishing Scotland's work in promoting Publishing Scotland's publishing sector please shout at the festival to all your friends and family if you're on social media give us a follow at @scottishbooks on Twitter or at @booksfromscotland on Instagram and don't forget the hashtags #scotbooks and #scotbookslongweekend special welcome to our guests Katherine John and John I'll introduce them in a minute and secondly to those of you who've tuned into the event it's hoping to examine the problems of learning and lockdown primarily the learning of our younger people but also to examine some of the possible solutions to those problems or some ways to address them whether that's about the actual process of learning or whether it's about the emotional and mental health issues that have affected our youngsters and students in lockdown. My name is also John, John Mitchell
clearly it helps to be called John to be a part of this event my qualifications for chairing this I think I worked as an English teacher for five years many years ago my only claim to fame in that respect is I was David Tenant's English teacher for six months and then I spent 31 years working in educational publishing and sales marketing and publishing textbooks and revision guides for the Scottish curriculum and I wrote a column for the Times Educational Supplement Scotland for 29 of those years and then I retired a few years ago and I know that learning had changed a lot already since I retired but it's changed beyond my wildest imaginings in the past 14 months and to just to discuss those changes, we have three experts in their respective fields, John Rutter is head teacher of Inverness High School gives away john well you've got your name there you maybe don't need following careers in the international international development, tourism and journalism John's taught in areas of both affluence and social deprivation before moving to the highlands he's written a large number of geographical textbooks academic papers online resources and articles on adventure tourism and motorcycling and also via the Times Educational Supplement Scotland Katherine Hill is UK director at Care for the Family she speaks and writes on family matters is a regular author for the Huffington Post and the author of several books including the most recently published are you on a Katherine Scotland's book 'A Mind of Their Own' building your child's emotional well-being in a post-pandemic world she also leads on care for the family's policy agenda representing the organisation at government level and she's married to Richard four grown-up children and two grandchildren and a little extra quote to the piece I was given to tell people about you Katherine is that Samantha Callan director of family hubs network says that Katherine breathes confidence into parents that they have what it takes to help their children grow into emotionally healthy adults and finally John MacPherson is director of Bright Red Publishing twice winners of the UK independent educational publisher of the year award John has been publishing educational resources for 20 years through all manner of curricular changes and challenges, he's also a member of the board published in Scotland so welcome to you three thankfully for everyone I'll be shutting up now for most of the time unless it gets contentious if any of our viewers have any questions in these discussions please feel free to jot them down on the chat section of YouTube and they'll be passed on to me to ask the panellists but first of all some introductory remarks and John Rutter you've probably been closest amongst our panellists to the the front line of what's been happening in our schools and to our students and their teachers during lockdown, how was it for you? So well it's been it's been an adventure that's for sure over the last 14 months thanks John I mean we have learned a lot about education I think and about the education system and also about our children and our families over the last 14 months and I could talk at great length about all the things that we have learned but I thought I would concentrate on three different aspects of what's gone on over the last year or so this morning so the first one would be for me to talk a little bit about digital literacy I think and the fact that as soon as we went into lockdown most of the learning moved online and it was basically in three weeks we had to come up with a plan that would normally take us three years to formulate so it was a bit of a rush and I think through the first period of lockdown last year we were very much learning as we as we went along as all our children and the pupils in the school went online so it was quite difficult really getting all the resources and coming up with lessons that would still engage pupils while they were off school and while they had significant worries about other things as well we know whether it was family health or their own health but we did get everyone online and over the course of the year we refined that obviously so that by the time we came to the second period of lockdown I think we were much better equipped for producing things like live lessons and getting proper timetable schedules online for the pupils now not everyone engaged but one thing we did find was that some pupils really really liked online learning and Inverness High School is in an area of multiple deprivations and we have a lot of pupils with additional support needs and other kinds of problems and some of them really took to the online learning of our school refuses we found were actually engaging with lessons that they wouldn't have done while we were in school so there were you know lots of there were positives about it as well as some of the negative we know it was very hard for parents and for some of our families as well and not everybody has an environment at home that is set up for online learning so the second point I would make would be about the engagement that we had and that our pupils and families had with learning and with the school and this was hugely variable for some classes we would be looking at 30 to 50 percent engagement online and some pupils just not engaging at all which is very difficult to promote from a teacher point of view to know what's going on at home now we engaged a lot with our families over there the period of lockdown we have a great guidance team and our teachers are very interested in how their children are getting on at home so there was a lot of pastoral work going on and it was obvious that health and well-being for a large number of our pupils and their families was it was they suffered under lockdown and under successive lockdown and this has come back to school as well since we've returned and we have some pupils who feel quite dislocated some who really are not used to being in a classroom setting many of them are glued to their mobile phones as they were when they were when they were out of school but one of the things that we have learned really again is that the importance of teaching and learning in particular as being a social activity and a lot of pupils do not respond to having to learn at home on their own so there are ways we can get around that with digital learning as well and we probably need to look at these in more detail for how we look at learning and teaching in schools in the future but one of the positives that did come out of it was I would say a greater understanding between parents and the school about how we both operate so we now know a lot more about our families we know a lot more about their troubles and what affects them in the time outside of school and they know a lot more about us and I think this probably goes across the country as a whole that there is perhaps a renewed respect for teachers in some areas where there wasn't before I know that I mean locked down learning in my own house was it was an absolute disaster and you know and I'm quite experienced in education so we know that things were tough at home and the third thing that I would like to talk about or one of the things that we learned from lockdown was about our assessment system and the fact that it it quickly became obvious that relying on high stakes end of school assessments for pupils and it and an exam system that was devised perhaps in the Victorian times was not robust enough to cope with long periods outside of school so pupils last year suffered from this where we had teacher judgments that were responsible for coming up with the grades for pupils and if anything this year has been even more of a problem really when we've had pupils in school than out of school then they all came back to school and then whole classes were off school because they were covid isolating and the assessment system is really not built to cope with this so one thing that we would hope to look at as we come out of lockdown is whether we can think of a better way to be assessing our pupils at the end of their school their time in school and there is a forthcoming review of the work of the Scottish Qualifications Authority which will fit into this but there is a lot of work and a lot of discussion in Scottish education in particular about what we could do to make sure that the qualifications that people leave school with genuinely recognises their achievements during their time in school okay thank you very much a lot of questions arising in my mind there you mentioned the possible review of the SQA which I seem to recall was announced about 20 minutes after the First Minister had given her full backing to the current arrangements of the SQA perhaps comparable with the football board mentioning full confidence in their manager I don't know but yeah that's a debate that has run a long time I think will still continue to do so, some fascinating stuff there I'm going to move on now to John Macpherson as a publisher with a huge interest in educational topics and John I guess in the same way that John Rutter was affected and had to react very quickly to the events of March last year you had a similar experience but with a different set of priorities or perspectives yeah yeah it was then it was a very odd time I was casting mine back to this and it was sort of we come off the back of some recent change the qualifications to courses and assessments anyway so we kind of got to the point by the end of 2019 of having caught up on in terms of publications and things with changing them so in the run-up to sort of January February into March you know we felt you know one foot in publishing one foot in education in that sense so the business was doing quite well and then along came March and you know pandemic global pandemic you know all of the threats that seem to arise from that around about the middle of March you know exams were cancelled schools were closed and so yeah I mean from a publishing point of view from a business point of view certainly and you know it started off by just trying to take a really deep breath and then took a few more really deep breaths to sort of think you know what do we do as a small business to try and navigate our way through this because schools would be a large sort of part of our market and jobs large part of our market these places were going to be closed and no idea no real idea how and what the learning provision would be or how what we do we'd slot into that learning provision and in sort of weeks and months ahead so it felt like a very uncertain time and you're right we had to try and react quite quickly to that and which you know fortunately as a small company we're able to do, we don't have huge resources but we had and we feel that we had the ability to try and change what we did quite quickly so I mean the biggest changes straight away was remote working we moved straight to remote working one of my marketing colleagues and her husband was a doctor in the covid ward in ERI and we made the decision very early that we couldn't all work together we wouldn't be right so we all knew working so it was out of the office we paused all of our publishing and we paused all of our new books for the rest of the year because we didn't feel confident that if schools were closed and if shop workers would actually have a market to take them and sell them so that was a big decision we went to all the teachers that were writing our books and you know education professionals who's you know all the work that they've done over the last year or 18 months and we're facing this crisis alongside us we had to go to them and say we have to pause this because we're just not confident about what's going to happen next to how things are going to be and so I mean fortunately for us all of the my experience of working with educational professionals is they are fantastic I mean they were all brilliant about saying absolutely fine do what you have to do to get through so that that felt like quite a good boost when we were facing a difficult situation and it helped us deal with what was ahead of the business and what was ahead of the business at that point was really just trying to get it through and to see how things settle down which as the summer progressed things did settle down a bit schools did go back in in august I mean there was a lot of talk around how it would go back how it would be it changed the law change was the only kind of running constant but those did go back to certain extent what we did notice very early was how much our online sales straight to parents just I mean normally it would be maybe ten percent of our business I mean that increased five full in in April and May which would normally be quiet months for us because the exams would then be certainly and so I think the home learning provision meant that and it kind of compensated for the loss of school sales we never completely compensate for that but a huge demand from homes from parents to try and get resources to their students were quite fortunate because we've always done a blended kind of digital we've done our study guides but there's been sort of digital online materials which are backed up and which has always been entirely free and we noticed that the access to that from parents and students they were looking for anything they could get their hands on to keep them you know to create lessons and things like that we took a little material from our books and we put that online we put it on Twitter and I was just checking back our Twitter impressions at the end of February were about 50 000 and by the end of March just by the end of March like 10 days after the lockdown was 255 that's just one social media platform and that was us Tweeting tasks tests you know free material effectively but just trying to put anything out there that we could that might help you know people stay engaged teachers to use that kind of thing so we did see right at the beginning a really big shift in our audience and what they wanted and we had to change quite quickly to deal with that so that was yes interesting talking of your audience John our audience here you must be psychic because um somebody's just been asking what panellists have any thoughts on on how we balance in school the digital advance the school work in school and the digital learning once the pandemic has died down and I will come to you Katherine in a minute but does these two are more involved with school issues at the moment I wonder if you and or John had any thoughts on that digital learning provision how we balance it and I mean from a publishing perspective I've felt for a long time it has to be a real blend and you know there's always going to be room for books hard copy whatever you want to call it and you know hard resources in that sense but I feel that our resources have to be flexible we have to be accessible in a variety of different ways I mean john will be able to see more about how students will access material home but certainly from speaking to our authors and writers they will act in so many different ways they might be on a laptop they might be on a phone you know in ways that they are looking to access content but from a publishing perspective we have to be really flexible about that and there's one thing that covid has underlined for me is that all of the content that we have at Bright Red we're we're good at the moment offering it in different ways we've tried to do a bit of that with the resources that we have but from here on that needs to grow a lot because I think a really blended flexible product from a publishing perspective is probably going to suit the needs of teachers and students much more and presumably John that's something you're experiencing at the front line change yeah yeah without a doubt I mean we were quite lucky in Highland in the four years or so ago the decision was made to give a Chromebook to all pupils from p6 upwards and so we were in some ways more prepared than some other local authorities for moving online but obviously it's taken off in in a lot more in different ways now I mean all our classes in school throughout the year group will have a corresponding digital classroom through the Google Chrome through their their kind of suite of software so you know every class is there and so if people's miss lessons now it's a lot easier for them to catch up and also teachers can set work to be done at home which can then be brought into the classroom it's a thing it's called flipped learning and it's been around for quite a while but that there is far more of a digital presence in schools at the moment and people pick up on the online resources that companies obviously like Bright Red and others are producing and incorporate them into their lessons so the wealth of stuff out there is just it's phenomenal it's the main problem really is having the time to sort through all them finding you know what what's good and what isn't so yeah yeah I completely understand John I was gonna come back to John Rutter's issue about the the SQA and what the pandemic has meant and will mean for qualifications but I feel Katherine's been sitting there for 20 minutes and hasn't I'd love to just chip in on that previous conversation like the digital before I wrote a mind of their own and my book before that is called 'Left to Their Own Devices? Confident Parenting in a World of Screens' and just to I think say that digital devices we all know have been an absolute godsend to our young people through the through this time because they've particularly are teenagers who the teenage years are a time when they are seeking to establish their identity away from parents away from teachers and they have been holed up at home you know with their parents and so they've been doing that online and for the first time ever I think our children have a number now attributed to their sense of self-worth so it's measured you know by how many likes they have how many followers they have and in terms of our work at care for the family we've had so many parents concerned about the amount of time they've been sending on spending on screens in the last year because of course they've been on screens all day doing their schoolwork and then wanting to relax on screens in the evening and I think what I've wanted to say to parents is just let's just throw the rule book up in the air for for this particular moment because it's not so much how much time they're spending on screens whilst we're in lockdown and coming out of lockdown but it's what they're doing on screens and of course if they are online and using some of these incredible provision for education that's very different than scrolling through Tik Tok at two in the morning so yeah and we're trying to teach our children to manage this themselves when we're not there at their shoulders when they haven't got teachers managing it so that would just be a little contribution on that subject I think okay thank you Katherine I meant to say John R I hadn't realised that about Highland providing Chromebooks for all of those students a wonderful part of your employers of course but Katherine thank you for that contribution on that aspect perhaps I could move us on to the emotional mental health aspects of what this has been like for our youngsters and I would obviously well I'll go hold up the your other book which is just out from Muddy Pearl a small independent Scottish publisher 'A Mind of their Own' and that was published very very quickly I'm also having been in publishing I'm awestruck by the speed with which you produced it and it is as I said earlier available on Bookshop.org why did you choose to write that book? well the truth is I was actually began writing it way before the pandemic so I began before we'd heard of a place called Wuhan before social distancing had become a word that we used in our everyday vocabulary because certainly in my work at care for the family and just seeing through yeah the children that we're in contact with as well the rising levels of mental and emotional ill health in our children anxiety in particular and so we I wanted to do something about that because I know that in the same way that parents know how to build their children's physical health so we get them to eat their broccoli and we put boundaries on screen time and we limit sugar and all the rest of it there's stuff that can be done in the everyday things of life in the home and at school to build their emotional well-being and it's harder to spot and we don't it's harder to we don't talk about it in the same way so I was really keen to do that and began writing the book and then the pandemic came and it just became even more timely so there was quite a lot of work to do in going through it and making it appropriate for the pandemic and there's a whole chapter also on parenting in the pandemic and beyond so it is yeah it's very current but I think in July 2017 one in nine children had some kind of mental health disorder or difficulty and by July 2020 that had risen to one in six so that's actually five in every classroom and I'm sure people listening in and fellow panellists will know that from just everyday encounter with with kids in the classroom and yeah the pandemic has just made things 100 times worse and they really are growing up in a different world I think than we grew up in very different pressures there's just one little story was that I begin the book with actually and as a psychologist child psychologist and she's talking to a group of parents about the issues that their children are facing and that she's seeing in the children that come to her for help and then a lady interrupts and she's already been a bit vocal I think in the QA and she says these kids they just need to toughen up when I was their age and the psychologist puts her hand up and says madam you were never their age and you know I think that psychologist was right and there are different pressures and particularly now this side of the pandemic huge pressures on them but there's loads of things that we can do to support them both at home and in the classroom so yeah that's what the focus of the book is about I'm glad you brought up that anecdote because I was going to mention it myself but you told it far better than I could but it there is this balance between like the people who have been they've been children so we knew what it was like when we were their age but it struck home very strongly to me that yeah they haven't been children in this age and Jeremy Clarkson last week was talking about how you know mental health all this mental health issue when I was young it was you felt a bit sad and that's another extreme and not very helpful to to the debate I feel yeah the children's society had an exhibition recently and they had an online shop it wasn't a real shop but it was and they chose items that represent modern childhood and the ones I don't know what we would have put in it for our generation but there was a child stab vest a self-hate notebook containing dark thoughts a mobile phone case with messages of fear and worry and anxiety concealer makeup and I think that kind of says it all really and that was before the pandemic so yeah that negativity self-image is obviously something that has been exacerbated for many during during the pandemic having said that I'm guessing well I'm thinking about something in the paper this morning which we've talked about some positives that came from the pandemic on introverted children were finding that they blossomed the wall floors blossomed was the headline because they suddenly realised that they were able to contribute more than they'd been able to before and the ones who didn't like putting their hands up could do it digitally or whatever I don't know John either John positive things to emerge from from these last 15 months for you yeah I think that is one of the positives as I was saying before you know that we have well every school has lots of pupils with different kinds of additional support needs and some of them have really come on during the pandemic because they have not had the angst I mean we have a number of children who find it really difficult to get into a classroom because of anxiety issues and so not having to do that has really given them the freedom to as you say express themselves online and to show us just what they are really capable of and with digital learning you know there are so many different facilities that we can use to help pupils with all kinds of additional support needs whether it's you know visual impairment you know you can you've got speech-to-text tools on the classrooms that we have you know you can enlarge text you can do all sorts of things and it is very interactive as well in a way that perhaps they wouldn't respond to in class so I think going forward from that we have to have a much greater concentration I mean we've always had it really but to improve our knowledge of pupils individual needs and to come up with a kind of individual educational plans based on the needs of individual children now that's an easy thing to say it's a bit harder to put into practice when um we're constantly looking at diminishing resources but I think we should concentrate quite a lot of our effort in making sure that the learning experiences that we give children not all the time but quite a lot of the time are tailored to how they will respond it can't be all the time because obviously people have to learn to grow up with things that are outside their comfort zone as well but I think we have to strive for a balance with all that yeah certainly my experience of being anecdotally from friends and such like is that the positives that can be taken out of sort of locked down learning in that sense are that you know pupils have had to learn sort of flexibility they've had to learn to organise themselves differently to maybe find ways to motivate themselves and so they'd learn ways to sort of interact with digital technology which is beneficial to them if they go on into the workplace which is increasingly digitalised if they go on to university which certainly on the back of all this will be sort of maybe more and sort of differently organised in terms of how they'll learn and it wouldn't it would harm them in that sense but that's not all pupils and the other end of that spectrum is very close friend of mine has them has a daughter and in fourth year trying to do n5 this year and she has really struggled you know she has struggled to do the work from home to get back into school to pick up and it's a crucial year and I'm sure John you'll be able to tell us plenty of you know plenty of examples of students that something that hasn't worked for them through lockdown but they've struggled with it you know particularly in the as you say when you get to the sort of hard the high stakes you know s4 s5 s6 years then it can really impact on what's happening to them now that moves me on slightly to talking about the home situation there John I was going to ask Katherine about how lockdown and home-schooling has affected families because you've done you know you've got material in there about family relationships and the strength of family relationships in the chapter on the it takes a village which I found hugely reminiscent of my own upbringing but it's very different in today's world I should mention thank you for the comment from the audience who the comment came in I think it was when you were speaking Katherine saying that was such an insightful thing to say unfortunately I don't know what it was that was being said at the time it certainly wasn't when I was speaking I know that it may be nice I saw it pop up I think it was when we were reflecting that they're growing up in a different world than we are and the pressures are different I think it was that but I might be wrong so oh here we go it was about the psychologist there we go yes so thank you very much audience member Katherine yeah effect on family relationships whether it's to do with education or even beyond that yes and I think I mean I just want to echo really what John and John have said about for some children actually it's not all been bad news and for those that haven't had to negotiate you know cliques in the playground they haven't had to worry about what they look like actually there's been some positives and many parents have found and single parents as well all shapes and sizes of families that the chance just to just to simplify life a bit to have meals together and to slow down has been good but I think overwhelmingly it's been incredibly stressful you know I just I think teachers need a gold medal every single one of them my son and my daughter-in-law are teachers and I think as John said earlier that I think we have a greater respect now and greater honour really for the teaching profession when we've seen when parents have been trying to do this at home and trying particularly those that are working at home trying to home school and homework to go on a video conference call to help a child with their maths to the digital divide meaning that not all families have had access to screens and it has been incredibly stressful for many parents and the thing is that our children pick up we I often say that as parents we were the keepers of the atmosphere in the home and we're stressed so that children get stressed and there's one story in the book about a dad whose child was doing his maths online and he came upstairs and the child was he had a bang and the iPad was smashed against the wall and this child just couldn't keep up with the pace of the slides and something had just flipped so I think overwhelmingly it's been really tough and it's just a lot of change and as adults we we kind of can conceptualise what life was like this is now locked down and somehow we we know that we're going to get back to some kind of normality it will look different but our children can't do that for them it's just all change and for many it's been overwhelming so there's been some good but I think most parents just need a great boost of confidence and just to know that little by little there's lots of practical things that they can do including working with school because that is crucial to help their children's emotional well-being as well as their learning one of the fascinating things I found about the book was your mixture of anecdotes reinforcing studies and vice versa you would illustrate and give practical advice suggestions top tips activities and when parents should zip it and not come up with the things that parents tend to want to say to their children and I wondered if you feel well you know if Katherine first of all and then John and John are there other lessons to learn from this and strategies that we can adjust adopt just before you answer that one of the ones I really got hold of was you talking about rewarding effort not achievement some practical tips for parents on that and again anecdotal stories to highlight how that could be done so that hit home with me but feel free to expand oh wonderful yeah so at the end of every chapter as well as there being some really fun cartoons that do make you laugh by David McNeill who yeah he's a great cartoonist there's action points and also activities so there's about four action points really practical things that you can do in the everyday ups and downs of family life and then an activity you can do together as a family and I know one of those in one of those chapters is exactly what John just said is try and praise effort and try and praise character rather than just success because we live in a world where our children are pitched against each other in so many ways even on the television you know there's the Apprentice and Love Island and Britain's Got Talent and even things like cooking and baking and dancing have become a competition and so actually recognising the qualities the perseverance when they've been kind whatever it is and celebrating those and we've got four children and I got so much wrong bringing them up but one thing I think we got right was when they had worked for their exams we used to do a little high-five moment we used to go out for a pizza or celebrate in some way before they got their results just to sort of recognise the the effort and I'm sure John and John would talk about growth mindset which is a really big thing in that you know if we encourage effort and perseverance then our children learn how to grow but let me hand on to one of you for for that maybe Yeah I mean there is yeah over the last few years there's been increasing work done on child psychology and you know the brains of adolescence and a lot of work has been based on there's a there's a psychologist from the states called Carol Dweck who does work on you know growth and fixed mindset some of which is not to be taken as literally as some people have taken it I think but it's a good way to think about how we can develop the effort that our young people put into things and yeah praising for effort not overpraising of course but praising for effort rather than achievement is a really good way to get people to work better and work smarter I would say and unfortunately and I think we might come back to this but we don't really have an assessment system in Scotland that does the same thing that doesn't that praise his effort at the end really but maybe we might come back to that later John yeah and so for in terms of I don't have direct experience of sort of I don't have children at that age and I don't direct experience of teaching children but I've done quite a lot of mentoring and breakthrough Dundee's something I've done quite recently which is sort of mentoring of students and 14 15 16 who are in care on the verge of care and certainly the growth mindset approach with them has been really useful you know and you know they might come from sort of damaged backgrounds where they're sort of saying to you all the things that they can't do well I can't do this because it's just kind of drummed into them they can't do it they just can't do it they're not being maybe being told at home or they've maybe had experiences which told them they can't do it so I feel the growth mindset has always worked well for me towards them and to say well you can't do do it to an extent you don't have to be magic at it you don't need to be you know intimidated by what other people in the class or in your year are saying they can do and do the way you can do it and and build it from there if you're not fantastic at it then well you'll be fantastic it's something else that comes along but it's about the doing of it it's not about how brilliantly you can do it and you shouldn't should stop trying to do something simply because you know your peers might be seeming to do better than you because I think one of the best things I read about or heard about approaching exams when it came from a student's point of view is don't listen to what other people in the class are telling you about what they're doing because it might not always be accurate or true you know just just do what you can do and take it from there so that's kind of my experience of that slightly tied into this it's a slightly different question but I was I was going to ask about John about mental health just a question of mental health for teachers and you know we talked about students and things but you know teachers and it was reported in the test that between 2017 and 2021's partial date of 2021 1500 years have been lost to mental health and issues within teaching and depending on years guys and that's it over the four years and it all totalled up and I think I read the teachers are half as likely to take time off as other council workers that that sounds quite staggering so I do wonder how teachers I know from reports from the front that it's been very hard on teachers but John are you seeing how are you providing for teaching mental health in schools are you finding that problematic? I mean we've got like I said before you know we've got a great pastoral team who who look at um look after the mental health of pupils and we have had help from the Scottish government just coming out of lockdown with their provision of counsellors in schools which has been really useful I mean the council counsellors are really really effective but we have a long long waiting list of people who would who could do with using them, as for teachers mental health yeah it is getting worse I would say I think workload is a serious issue and I know it comes a lot of this instantly gets turned back when you say when you get good holidays and that is true we do get good holidays but it is needed to the immediacy of teaching is incredible when you've got 10 week term at a time and it is completely full on just at the best of times and teachers in Scotland and the rest of the UK do more hours in front of children than pretty much every other high-performing education system in the world and that's a real problem because it leaves little time to do preparation to improve the curriculum and to make you know any kind of strategic moves on what is best going forward so workload is an issue and it has been exacerbated by covid and by the pressures of the assessments that we've had to put pupils through both last year and and in particular this year and we do need to address it because people are leaving the profession and some of the ones who are left are working far far too hard I would say you know there's not a lot of down time during a term and it is a serious issue and again during covid just like the pupils a lot of our teachers really suffered because teaching is a it's a social endeavour and teachers are generally pretty sociable people and they love their kids and they want to do the best for the kids and they want to be in front of the kids and having to do it or behind a computer screen with occasionally minimal engagement was quite damaging for a number of people but we just had to you know keep make sure monitor their own the teacher's mental health from a senior management point of view make sure that they were doing okay and we kept in regular touch with teachers obviously as well as we did with pupils just to make sure that they were keeping on an even keel we have another question from the audience here which as we're coming towards our conclusion sometime soon for all of you really is there anything about the last 15 months that has genuinely surprised you that you'll take away from this I'm guessing that might be something that surprised you in a positive way or maybe just surprised you surprised you Katherine jump in okay well I think one of the things that has surprised me uh in in a good way is some children that have shown incredible resilience and you know it's easy to think we've had some quite hard stories and stats already but actually I really believe that there is an opportunity here for hope because Dr Rob Waller who's a consultant psychiatrist from Edinburgh works for NHS Scotland who wrote the forward to 'A Mind of their Own' I was talking to him about resilience and how it's built in our children's lives and I wish I'd known some of this when ours were little in some respects but he said when we go through a difficult situation and a lot of the research is from big big trauma but this has undoubtedly been a traumatic time for us all we go for one of two reactions so we either internalise it so say it's something that's gone wrong say somebody has I've lost a football match one of my journals match oh I'm so rubbish at football you know I missed the goal it's all my fault or we externalise it so they failed their maths tests so you know if only you tested me you blame someone else I wouldn't have done so badly it's all your fault and clearly neither of those are good ways to proceed although they're natural and he was saying what we need to do as parents and as teachers I guess is to stand back and to allow our children to try and find that solution themselves and if there isn't a solution I'm just to allow them to be sad I think someone one of the John's mentioned that before about feeling our children feeling sad allow them to feel sad and then out of that they their our brains are amazing the plasticity of the brain means our brains develop and grow they will learn resilience which then means that next time they'll be stronger so I think that's been my one of my surprises I think that the opportunity that this is for even though it's so tough for them to learn resilience and just to and when we think of the generation that were children in the second world war we don't think of them as being the lost generation we think of them as being the resourceful and resilient generation and I really believe that in homes and in schools we're going to see that quality of resilience rising in our children but there's a way to go and we need to be there to support them in it thank you Katherine John or John things that have surprised you from the the last 15 months from my point of view I think I've been surprised by the amount of goodwill that I've encountered um you know personally and as a business person and from our customers from you know our suppliers and things like that and we started Bright Red in the great recession wasn't that great as I remember 2008 2007 and when things got tight people did weren't that nice you know and there was a lot of bad behaviour out there and it's been reported in the press over the years it wasn't very pleasant and what surprised me this time around and certainly it was a fire point view and when I was talking about our writers and things like that is when we went to talk to people about you know how things were going to go over the next few months that they're almost across the board it was we'll all pull together and we'll get through this we'll all move and do what we need to do so we all come out the other end and that felt like that surprised me I did expect that my fear in March was that things would go the way that I'd experienced them in 2007 2008 and that wasn't the case I don't know whether it's because Bright Red's like more established business now not that sure but generally the good will that we experienced and yeah it surprised me a lot and I was very you know gratefully surprised by that and John surprises for you yeah well we've had the pupils there and we've had you know customers and suppliers and I think I would like to say one of the things that surprised me has been the goodwill that we've had from from parents I mean the support we've had from parents has been unbelievable and you know we've had brilliant emails from them just thanking us for what what we've done for their children we know our parents so much better now than we did before and they know us a lot better than they did before and so even parents who had we've had lots of negative interactions with in the past you know we work with them a lot better now and they they know that yeah we're basically on the side of their children and we just want the best for them that's been brilliant the reaction from parents yeah I would I'd agree although I have no direct contact with schools now myself but I know Tom Cowan on Off the Ball on Radio Scotland whose wife is a teacher was handing them a glorious award a couple of weeks ago because he's seen what it's been like for teachers and what they've done I gather also that parents nights have become a lot more enjoyable/organised under lockdown because of the limited zoom window that people can have so nobody's left arguing the toss over how you're treating their child and holding everybody else up so I guess that's been quite a pleasant surprise if that's how you've done it John we we've done some online meetings but not many it's just it's proved quite problematic but I have been involved for my own children especially the primary age ones on the online meetings and yeah I mean they're yeah they've been good we are heading towards a conclusion in five or ten minutes and and we have another question from the audience what would you like to see change within education now we're coming through this? I know we we've mentioned the assessment system which Katherine is different in Scotland than England but it's the whole issue of an assessment system and how that's happening that may be something you want to talk about or feel free any of you to say anything else you'd like to see a change in education okay well if I it would be is the top of my list would be the assessment system that we have I don't think it's particularly helpful for judging the ability of the vast majority of our pupils I it's not good for their mental health and it does not prepare them for the world of work in which they're going to be operating I think as I was talking before we went on air I've talked to friends of mine about the assessment system and asked them they're all in their 50s and us and when they have a last assessment exam in their to get on in work and the answer is invariably you know when I was at school or when I was at University I that's not to say that exams shouldn't play a part in any assessment system that we have going forward but they at the moment they are the be all and end all and they don't assess people's character they don't assess how they are how good they are at problem solving to the to a certain extent they don't assess group work and collaboration just all the things that the 21st century employers need they test that a very thin band of knowledge I would say and if anything good can come out of this I think we've been shown that the assessment system we have in Scotland in particular is not robust enough to cope with any kind of disruption on a massive scale like we've had and it needs to change Katherine you're nodding your head frantically yeah and I was I know if I jump in on the on the back of that I think just that the well-being being the measurement of the the cornerstone really of success obviously not throwing the baby out with the bath water because academic achievement is really important but there is so much more and things that schools can do to integrate that kind of learning within the curriculum in the relationships with parents in speakers coming in that kind of thing so we are more holistic in what we're measuring and I just wanted to read this just a couple of lines it's a quote from Natasha Devon it's in the chapter of my book it's called oh it's actually in the one the parenting the pandemic and beyond and she was the former UK government children's mental health tsar and she just says this she says this as in this current time is a really good opportunity and she's talking to children to find your driving force a lot of people go through their life just chasing things and they never understand what puts fire in their belly so I asked teenagers if there was no such thing as grades what would you choose to do with your life this period of uncertainty represents a really good opportunity for them to work that out for themselves and I think from what John was saying you know we can a change in the system can kind of add value and encourage that whereas John MacPherson I suspect income tends to derive from selling books for exams well our books will cover courses you know they they're not they're not necessarily focused entirely on the exams and personally I mean people I often get accused as a publisher you love change because you'll just keep you can keep republishing the same books but actually I'd much rather publish different books than the same books again and I've published books for national five and higher or changed them two or three times in the last eight years there's been quite a lot of change over the last the last period with new qualifications coming in and tweaks to those changes and things like that so income does derive from the books that we publish but those books aren't entirely focused on exams and I think the change I'd quite like to see would be a change in sort of mindset when it comes to supporting teachers supporting head teachers and supporting pupils and listening to teachers listening to head teachers I think it ties into the reform or the planned reform review of the SQA in Education Scotland and to try and support teachers more in what they're doing to try and invest more and start lowering class sizes and and doing things that will release our tackle attainment problems I think there's a lot of things that could be changed in Scottish education for the better I'm quite interested to see how the review of the SQA in Education Scotland sort of attempts to accomplish that I'm fairly confident Bright Red will always be able to publish useful resources which students can rely on to do their in-class assessments with our course assessments or whatever you know so it's not I don't feel like that's a huge threat to our business in that way it would change our business but you know our business is changing this is life it's changed a lot over the last 12 months and it will continue to change so you know I don't have a great fear around that but I feel that there are positive changes that could come out of this educational side John's touched on into that sense you know I don't think exams are necessarily a bad thing however they've not been shown to be working that well over the last 12 you know they've been cancelled twice in the last period it's caused a whole load of problems and can an exam system or assessment system be foolproof to deal with that in the future and give a fair deal to the students I don't know I'd be really interested to see if that can happen you know we'll always attempt to publish things that will help then students and teachers tackle those those challenges ahead of them whatever they are so and yes I think there's scope for a lot of positive change okay well we are drawing to a natural conclusion and many questions raised and many potential solutions offered I think because I invite any of you to chip in with anything you want before we close I would thank the audience for their questions and their comments throughout the time and I would also like to thank you three for what was a wonderful blend of positivity about the future tempered with realism about what has happened and what continues to happen but I do see a lot of hope ahead despite the difficult times we've gone through and I guess that's I'm supposed to remind everybody about the the various books available from all of you whether you publish or you write them and there are some of them selection of those are on Bookshop.org link on on the website and anything any of you want to chip in for the last two or three minutes feel free well I think I'd love to say that for our young people the home is that is the primary place of learning but obviously the time where they also spend a lot of their day is school and the more and I think you know this is already happening and we want to just encourage it more to see school and home working together so I think John mentioned earlier about after pandemic schools being much more aware now of what the issues are at home and so if there is an issue how that can be affecting behaviour which will then be affecting learning and if we can continue just to build on that and to work together then we'll be serving our children well okay many many thanks Katherine and John and John I'm afraid if you have got something to chip in with at the end we're about to run out of time so I'm gonna give your book one last wave Katherine thank you very much I haven't got copies of your books John or John but they're on the website okay thank you all for coming along and thank you oh John various waving it's a bit smaller thank you very much indeed for a great discussion and I think I am officially declaring this gathering closed
2021-06-20 13:29
