David Penberthy: Should children be going to school amid COVID-19?
You’d think that in the midst of a pandemic governments could come together to keep families and teachers safe. But as COVID-19 carries on, so too do the mixed messages, writes David Penberthy.
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Aside from the practice of selling used cars and toiling in the vineyard of truth as a tabloid newspaper journalist, one of the most derided professions in this country has historically been teaching.
While the used car salesmen and those of us in the press might be a lost cause, the past few weeks is hopefully forcing a national rethink when it comes to the perception of teachers.
The sledge has historically been that teachers are in it for the holidays, the pupil-free days and the 3.30pm knock-off, and moan at any extra professional expectation that goes beyond the bare bones of classroom teaching.
There have been times when the Australian Education Union has done little to challenge that cliche with a militant approach to workload questions.
The reality has always been that many teachers go above and beyond the prescribed hourly demands of their jobs, and regard their profession as more of a calling than something that merely pays the bills.
Health workers have always enjoyed respect in this country and are rightly being hailed for their courage and commitment on the coronavirus frontline.
Conversely, the teaching profession has suffered from a lack of respect. That lack of respect will hopefully be erased by this pandemic, because Australia’s teachers now form the educational frontline in a complex logistical battle against the spread of this virus.
The battle is made more confounding by the absence of clear agreement in a practical sense as to whether teaching in a traditional classroom setting is safe or unsafe in the age of COVID-19.
From a journo’s perspective, I think it is currently counter-productive for the media to play its traditional role of identifying and amplifying any little gap or inconsistency in public policy, and revving it up as a crisis of governance.
We are in the midst of a real crisis. It is a health crisis and an economic crisis. We don’t need to go looking for new imagined crises to beat them up into a lazy lead for page three or the evening news.
But with that qualifier, it is genuinely hard to wrap your head around the competing messages from the states when it comes to the safety of teachers and students in face-to-face schooling.
Scott Morrison is presiding over an unprecedented national cat-herding exercise with the eight state and territory leaders, each of which has peculiar local quirks and needs when it comes to the provision of services.
After National Cabinet met on Thursday, it felt like the Prime Minister decided to abandon efforts to maintain a veneer of consistency when it came to school policy, and confront reality by saying the states can do pretty much what they like.
If you look at just two states that share a common border, Victoria and South Australia, you have a position where the Victorian chief medical officer was launching himself on social media ahead of Cabinet saying mass face-to-face schooling risked spreading the virus, while to the west in SA, the chief medical officer was saying the polar opposite.
None of this is a criticism of either of them. It is simply a statement of fact as to how confusing it is for those of us with children, for children themselves, and for the teachers who have to front up every day amid all this inconsistency.
My two teenagers’ school here in SA declared at the end of last term that it was the school’s preference that every child who could stay away and learn remotely should do so.
In the state education system in SA, teachers were given four pupil-free days ahead of Easter to prepare for what seemed to be a potential shift to remote learning in term two.
But now, less than two weeks on, the SA position is that the schools will remain open in term two and where possible every child should attend. In Victoria they’re being told not to.
My second youngest child has just started preschool. He was there for a few weeks in term one, but we pulled him out a few weeks ago, thinking we were doing the right thing, and now wondering if we might be doing the wrong thing.
We got a letter home from the preschool recently asking if he would be attending in term two. Umm, maybe? Can you give us a hint? Can I phone a friend?
Perhaps the gulf in practice between the states comes down to party politics. Daniel Andrews is a left-faction Labor MP who as Victorian Premier is much more likely to be swayed by the industrial concerns of the AEU about teacher safety and stress than a Liberal Premier such as SA’s Steven Marshall.
All I know is that I have four friends who are teachers and their assessment of the whole landscape ranges from a sense of real unease at being compelled to work in a classroom, to a shoulder-shrugging ambivalence amid the weirdness of it all.
In a communications sense, clarity around school policy has been the biggest weakness in the national approach to coronavirus.
As with my earlier comments about the conduct of journos in a time of crisis, my reasoning on this issue as a parent is to say, well, stuff it, I’ll just do what I am told locally by my school and my state government.
I would say the same to parents in Victoria too, and in every other part of Australia.
Fitting in, keeping calm and carrying on is what our country needs now. It’s one of the key reasons we have got such a good-looking curve, even if the schooling part of our approach makes very limited sense.
As for the teachers, they deserve to hear a couple of words that often elude their profession. Thank you.