22nd March 2020.

The younger children skipped out to their parents as usual, blissfully unaware of the water rising up the school drive. First mentioned on distant shores. Then on Italian slopes. And now at our door.

The older children were more frenetic, understanding the strangeness, but with no reference point with which to anchor their questioning minds.

The parents stood mute.

Two hundred or more people, who would usually be loudly sharing trivia, gossiping, and discussing plans for the weekend, stood stunned into silence.

Each contemplating the uncertain solitary world which they were about to enter.

It would be 165 days before we would all stand on the playground again – and then on little white dots, keeping each parent 2m apart.

It would be 484 days before we would school our children without restriction.

It feels now like some distant dream.

I know it happened. I was at school every single day throughout the whole crisis (mainly because it gave me an excuse to get out of the house).

But there is an unrealness to my recollections. A sense that this was something that happened in a movie.

And so as we arrive at the fifth anniversary of Covid, I reflect on what happened to our education system as a result. The lessons which propelled us forward. The challenges which we still face.

So, what did Covid teach us about schools and schooling?

The recent BBC item on the effects of Covid on children five years on, highlighted many of the scars which Covid has left on the education system. Anyone who works in education will tell you that schools, and children… and society… has been impacted.

But many of the fears which we harboured at the start of the first lockdown never materialised.

But many problems which we never dreamed of did.

We learned that children immediately forget much of what we teach them.

This seems a bit strong, but hear me out…

We sent our children home for the best part of a year (227 days to be precise). And whilst we did our best to provide remote learning, the children missed about 90% of the professional teaching which they would have otherwise been exposed to.

We fretted in 2021 about the long-term impact on academic outcomes (my own children were in their GCSE and A-Level years). That it would take a decade to recover this lost learning.

But, in truth, most schools are reporting outcomes in 2025 as good (or better) than in 2020. Indeed, most schools recovered this academic loss within 24 months.

Which begs the question: how much of our teaching actually sticks and how much is forgotten within a matter of days, weeks or month?

Educational researchers had a live, whole nation (well, World) experiment on the effects of stopping all education for a period of time. We should really be mining this for insight into how young brains learn and retain information because, the anacdotal evidence suggests, that most teaching has no long-lasting impact on memory. It is a huge opportunity to understand better how young brains encode information, but this seems to have been missed in the rush to resume business as usual.

There is certainly no lack of curiosity as to ‘research-led practice’, so we need to start reflecting on this paradox more deeply.

We learned that schools (and, importantly, pre-school settings) teach children how to socialise.

While we were fretting about whether children would remember how to use fronted adverbials, the real crisis was unfolding in slow-motion… in plain sight… but without anyone really noticing.

Most of us see schools as a place for learning (because they are). But Covid has taught us that their function in socialisation is perhaps as important in creating young humans capable of navigating our complex social world. Anyone who has been working in education in the aftermath of Covid will tell you that sending children home for 227 days had a far greater impact on their ability to socialise positively with their peers than their ability to learn.

Tantrums and refusals in Key Stage 2 (unheard of for the first 20 years of my – now nearly 30 year – career) are common-place, as children’s understanding of their social context broke down when their world shrank to their immediate families.

Don’t get me wrong, we have seen a recovery in the last three years, but if you are looking for scar tissue on the lives of young people who lived through Covid – there ability to socialise confidently and ‘roll with the punches’ is still evident. A general lack of resilience to new experiences is common in many schools in a way which didn’t previously exist.

We learned the value of technology in connecting

During Covid, I read an article imagining the impact of lockdowns on society in 1990.

In this imaginary scenario, there would have been no home learning, no Zoom assemblies, no social connection online, no internet… no mobile phones… We would have been alone with the three TV channels available, themselves paralysed into continuous repeats of the Two Ronnies.

So it is important to remember that technology played a big part in lessening the impact of Covid on our ability to connect with others.

Before Covid I had been a Headteacher for over a decade, but had never attended a Teams meeting (I didn’t even know what Teams was). Now, most of my meetings are on Teams and allow far greater productivity than in the ‘before years’ when I’d drive for half an hour to attend an hour long meeting. So let’s not pretend that technology has not enormously benefitted our lives – the professional positives outweight the negatives significantly.

But we accidentally gave our children the keys to Pandora’s box

Just as we were locking our families away in their homes, with the digital world fulfilling our need to connect with others, we gave many immature brains the keys to Pandora’s box.

I worry that Covid accelerated an existing trend whereby children were given access to material which did not support their well-being. I believe that, one hundred years from now, those that come after us will view our attitudes towards children and the online world the same way we view the Victorian’s use of children to clean chimneys (i.e. ‘deeply unwise’).

The solution? We need to treat the online world in the same way we would treat any other real-world threat to our children: by putting up guard-rails around it and enforcing rules to keep everyone safe. We have little difficulty deciding that children playing on railway tracks should be actively avoided, and yet, letting children play in an online world with a million strangers who can drag them into dark digital corners is apparently fine and requires little or no legislation…

We learned the importance of talking to very young children – but have done nothing to educate the public about this.

Again, a national-scale experiment took place five years ago: what happens when very young children have a very limited number of adults to interact with?

What we discovered is that the impact of this on very young brains was siginificant, leading to an explosion in speech and language delay, which is still manifesting itself with our current EYFS children. The reasons behind this are extremely complex and need urgent academic study to understand. However, my personal view is that the lack of verbal interaction in childrens’ lockdown world was again exacerbated by the digital dummy which we gave our children to passify them during those long and boring Covid days. Children don’t learn speech off a tablet the way they do from real-life conversation, and yet we have done literally nothing to educate the British public of how to get their young children off to the best start through conversing with them.

This would cost almost nothing and have enormous advantages. And yet, despite educators knowing this is a huge barrier for some young children, we have chosen to do nothing to support families of children aged 0-5.

As a society was learned that attendance was optional.

The decline in school attendance levels has been one of the most pronounced impacts of Covid, as the social norm of attending school (or work) every day was shattered.

Sir Martyn Oliver is not the only professional who has correctly identified the link between attendance, Covid and adults working from home.

Pre-Covid, children needed to attend school because adults needed to attend work. But that has changed and having your child at home has l lesser negative economic impact on families than it would have previously have done. And so a generation of children (and families) are starting to see schools as somewhere that is ‘optional’. This has been linked to an increase in requests for flexi-schooling (which, personally, I disagree with for all the reasons above) as well as a emidemic in emotionally-based school refusal, with schools sometimes complicit in allowing children to disappear into a non-attendance black hole – where no services or support is ever forthcoming to support the child’s return.

We learned that the government’s Covid recovery strategy was crap.

There’s nothing more to say about it, is there?

But we learned that we were capable of astonishing innovation as a profession.

Within days of the closure of 22nd March 2020 my school, like every school in the land, had transformed our practice to meet the current crisis.

I said at the time that every educator in the land deserved a medal for this. Not a metaphorical medal – an ACTUAL MEDAL… with a big red ribbon… and some latin inscription declaring us national heroes.

And if we were the answer in that crisis, then we must also be the answer to these ongoing problems.

We must stop waiting for a cash-strapped government to do something to solve these Covid-inspired issues. Don’t get me wrong – government really does need to act at scale to resolve everything we’ve discussed here, but the sad fact is that I can’t see that happening any time soon.

So we must organise. We must be the community leaders and shapers of children’s lives which our families need us to be. We must innovate. We must be bold. We must act to solve the problems our sector faces.

And whilst we would ideally have organised government programmes to give power to our elbow, if necessary, we must we prepared to act alone.