At the end of a second year of interrupted schooling thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, Victorian teachers are circumspect.
“Last year, we got away with it,” says Melissa*, a primary school teacher in the northern suburbs of Melbourne.
“Everyone was quite worried about the kids, so we really worked hard to make sure they didn’t fall behind. I destroyed myself; the parents, for the most part, pushed themselves as hard as they could. This year, there was a lot of fatigue.”
By the time the Delta outbreak hit in June and New South Wales and Victoria went into lockdown, the “novelty” of remote learning had worn off. When students returned to school in October, the effects of 18 months of broken and remote schooling had compounded, Melissa says.
“Almost none of my students have moved from where they were in the middle of the year,” Melissa says of the children she teaches in grades prep, one and two.
“Nobody can tell the time, nobody can do fractions, nobody can spell anything and nobody can write. If there’s one thing they won’t do for their parents, it’s write. They’ve had two years on and off of just not being taught spelling.”
Melissa is not alone in such observations. The preliminary Naplan results released in August were trumpeted by the Victorian government as evidence that the state’s students had defied the interruptions of the pandemic on their schooling. Teachers and researchers alike are awaiting the forthcoming release of the more granular data this month.
But there is scepticism that those detailed results will tell the whole story, especially as – since the tests were performed in May – they will not encompass the most recent extended lockdowns in NSW and Victoria, which, anecdotally, were some of the hardest. And they cannot measure the level of social understanding or personal growth in students, or show the overlapping of family circumstances, socioeconomic conditions, social status and temperament that contribute to how individual children learn.
Tim* teaches in a Catholic primary school in Melbourne’s south-east. He says he’s worried most about his incoming grade twos.
“Overall the remote learning plan was good, but in some places kids were more disadvantaged – where English is their second language, where the kids didn’t have laptops or the internet, or they had dual-income families working essential worker jobs and their parents were not able to support them with remote learning – that was very difficult,” Tim says.
While the children’s learning suffered, he says, more concerning is the fact they have had two deeply formative years without the intensive socialisation of school.
“When we came back to school after the last lockdown, the kids couldn’t interact with each other properly,” Tim says.
“They didn’t know how to take turns, or how to have respectful interactions. They’d been online for so long they had trouble focusing on real people. They might have said things they didn’t mean while online that they wouldn’t have said to someone’s face.”
Tim and Melissa both say that their young students needed intensive social and emotional learning activities when they returned to the physical classroom, as they grappled with the behavioural expectations that came from learning and interacting with other people in the same physical environment.
Malcolm Elliot, president of the Australian Primary Principals Association, tells Guardian Australia that this is something primary teachers are seeing across the board in places where remote schooling was prolonged.
“We’ve seen plenty of examples of children who have gone backwards in their socialisation. Where they had made progress in learning how to collaborate, work with others, and be in the school environment, this has declined. There’s a period of catch-up certainly needed there,” Elliot says.
Older children with more capacity for self-direction seemed to better cope with online learning than younger children, but Elliot warns that this depends a lot on highly variable individual circumstances.
“Many students have been in circumstances that have been far from ideal in lockdown periods. Students experiencing disadvantages have become no less disadvantaged during the pandemic,” Elliot says.
“The circumstances between people vary markedly. There are children in our community, and we have to open our eyes to this, for whom school is their safe place and their home is not a safe place. They will have experienced setbacks in their learning. Some students, particularly socially, will go backwards.”
Lessons from remote learning
John Hattie, emeritus laureate professor at Melbourne Graduate School of Education, says the key lesson from Covid schooling so far is “don’t presume”.
“Every kid deserves to be evaluated and assessed on their own merits,” Hattie says. “Don’t presume that certain categories of kids did better or worse. So-called gifted kids, for example, overly depend on their teacher – they are often very compliant and reliant on their teacher. They suffered in Covid too.”
Hattie says we ought to be asking why, from the data made available so far, remote learning appeared to work so well in so many cases. It would be a mistake, though, to presume it worked for all children.
“I’m not Pollyanna in believing that Covid was brilliant; it wasn’t. But there’s no question for the majority of kids, though, the key issue [with remote schooling] was [its effect on] friendships. So I’m not going to ever advocate for distance learning, but I do think that a lot of the stuff we learned from Covid should be applied going forward.”
Critically, Hattie says, schools shouldn’t be too hasty to return to old habits.
“There’s a massive move to rush back to the old normal. Most children know how to play that game, but there’s a large percentage of children who aren’t well-served by the old normal. What an incredible opportunity to learn from Covid about what makes a difference to those children.”
Catching up for lost classroom time
The Victorian government has provided money for tutoring to help catch up any students that have fallen behind, which has been gratefully received by schools. It shakes down to an allocation of about $15-$18k per school, though, which means the programs can only target a small cohort or subject.
Elliot seeks to reassure parents who might feel responsible for their child’s learning gaps due to their circumstances during lockdown.
“Parents shouldn’t feel like they’ve done anything wrong, provided they’ve been kind and thoughtful and loving towards their kids during this time. Any deficit in learning can be repaired and may not take as long as we think.”
Still, teachers aren’t expecting smooth sailing ahead.
“I don’t know how long it will take to catch kids up because it depends on how interrupted next year is and that depends on Covid,” says Melissa.
“In a normal year, really going for it, six months and I think they’d be fine. But that would assume a normal year where everyone’s not tired and families are stable. Everyone planned for a normal year this year and then it didn’t happen. I don’t feel like I can look ahead to a normal year.”
* Names have been changed for privacy reasons
