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WE L LBE I NG SPEC I AL www.teachwire.net | 71 healthyteachertoolkit. wordpress.com @healthytoolkit Andrew Cowley is deputy headteacher at a primary school in south London and co-founder of the Healthy Toolkit Twitter account and blog. He is also the author of TheWellbeing Toolkit (Bloomsbury Education). confinement will leave an impact we can only guess at. If we expect our children to have a ‘normal’ school day from9am to 3pmwith digital learning, we riskmaking them reliant upon a screen. Many pupils in areas of social deprivation don’t have access to a computer or laptop and may not have wifi. Their parents may need access to the only device in the house for their own working-from-home commitments. We’ve spoken to children and parents for many years about digital safety and safe screen times, yet here we are setting work that in some cases can only be completed online. Staggered return The acid test for schools will come when we return, be that in the summer or September. We will have to face a plethora of challenges that, truth be told, we needed to plan for from the outset of this crisis. Schools will have a lot of anxiety from children, parents and staff, triggered by months of confinement at home and social circumstances that few, if any of us, were prepared to face or capable of dealing with. Resilience will have been tested to the nth degree, tempers may be short as the pressures of unfamiliar domestic regimes and the realities caused by the inevitable economic pressures begin to bite. The harshest truth of life in the time of a pandemic is that we are going to have to deal with bereavement in school communities, more than at any time in our careers. Can we return to ‘normal’ when the children come back? Any notion that children will walk into school and pick up exactly where they left off is naive at best. A staggered returnmay suit some children better, as six months out will mean they need retraining in the means of learning and of school expectations of behaviour. Children who normally find attendance a challenge will likewise need support. Parental mental health will have to be recognised and supported, as will that of our colleagues in the most challenging circumstances we have known. Let’s remember too that we aren’t merely facing this examination as a school but as part of a community. The only certainty? That the schools we come back to need to be very different from those we left behind. We began with a brief history lesson. History will judge us for our role in this story. The schools which will be judged most favourably will be those who have at their beating heart not a spreadsheet but a strong moral compass. TP “Any notion that childrenwill walk into school and pick up exactlywhere they left off is naive at best”