Political ideology has hijacked coronavirus school reopening debate in Australia

We’ve heard plenty from the Prime Minister, premiers and parents, but few in power seem to care what educators on the ground think about reopening schools amid coronavirus, writes one teacher.

I have heard a lot of politicians talk about the move to resume face-to-face teaching.

We heard NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian speak on the Term 2 return. This came after Prime Minister Scott Morrison referred to his private school educated children as “being baby sat in the hall in front of computer screens”, and how we must start to re-open our classrooms to more students.

What I have not heard in this debate is from the teachers themselves. While I feel completely overwhelmed at everything I need to do, I also think it is important our community hear from teachers and what this has been like for us.

Term 1 was chaotic, and teachers worked exceptionally hard to switch from face-to-face teaching to remote learning in a short space of time.

The workload was unbelievable — all normal planning, teaching and assessing occurred simultaneously while engaging with professional learning to use new technologies, resourcing learning to be delivered remotely and then the physical facilitating of learning via these new remote platforms.

As Term 1 finished, in my school we had planned to deliver remote learning for at least five weeks, but had adequately planned for the whole term.

What does ‘adequately planned’ mean? This is where there is a disconnect between community, government and actual teachers.

School closures and reopenings have created havoc for parents, teachers and students alike. Picture: AAP/Dean Lewins

For my faculty, it meant changing our planned scope of learning, ensuring that students could access content, create meaning and then have some work to share which we could use to assess understanding.

This is without the changes we made to the HSC assessment and teaching plan for Term 2 to ensure that none of our students would be disadvantaged when the dust settled.

We changed what we were going to teach, how we were going to teach and how we would assess learning. We then gave ourselves a week to decompress during the first week of the “holidays”.

During that week however, the Prime Minister decided to politicise education further, using his national address to essentially blame teachers for any hardship families were experiencing.

This was followed by Berejiklian further damaging teacher wellbeing by stating all face-to-face learning would recommence in week 3 of Term 2 (with other states expected to soon mirror).

To say this had a negative effect on teachers would be a huge understatement. My colleagues have cried at the thought of what this means for them, and not a single teacher can fathom how the model will actually work.

Underlying the glaring fact that is impractical and unworkable, is the reality that for teachers this is simply additional work to redo/undo the planning that they had completed late in Term 1.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison referred to his two children as “being baby sat in the hall in front of computer screens”. Picture: AAP/Lukas Coch

Why is it so unworkable? We are talking about seven days per student, a mere 35 hours of classroom time.

What difference to learning is this going to actually make? If 25 per cent of every grade are on site each day, how are the other 75 per cent being taught?

It is not even a plausible model to assume remote and face-to-face teaching can happen simultaneously.

What we will see is the same lesson delivered face-to-face multiple times to the cohort in front of teachers, thus meaning any righteous claims that student learning is the reason for this return is ludicrous.

The students at home each day will have a reduced quality of education, as their teachers will be ‘on class’ instead of available to support their learning.

And now we wait, to hear exactly what ‘principal discretion’ means.

Together the unions and the various principal associations have argued against this mixed model. These are the bodies representing the teachers in the classroom – people who have a realistic position on how this will work.

But it falls on deaf ears.

This is because it is not a model based on what will work, but rather a political move to appease parents and one that will ultimately be detrimental to student learning.

This teacher is head of department currently employed in an Australian school and wishes to remain anonymous.