Wiltshire headteacher warns covid impact will be seen for years to come
Pupils who transition from Year 6 to Year 7 during the first lockdown have collected their GCSE results this week
A Wiltshire headteacher is warning that pupils are still being affected by the covid pandemic, half a decade on from the virus forcing education settings across the world to close.
It comes as the first cohort of the students to move from primary to secondary education in England collected their GCSE results yesterday (21 August).
Stonehenge School headteacher, Carole Dean, says schools have had to evolve the support they offer pupils, saying the impacts of covid on education are likely to be seen for years to come.
"Next year's year 11, they also would have been year 6 at the end of in the second locked down for COVID," Mrs Dean told Greatest Hits Radio. "I also think if you work out how children have developed in the early years, there's that sort of sense that everything's a little bit behind where it should be."
During lockdowns, students were put into 'bubbles' in a bid to prevent the virus spreading. But when a case was identified within the bubble, the whole group was sent home, forcing children to switch between online and classroom learning.
Mrs Dean said it's had an impact at on some of the most basic things, including toileting and phonics skills.
"That sense of delay is highly likely to keep coming on through, I think until the generations work their way up through and out of school," she told us.
Additional support needed
Mrs Dean said that the latest cohort of GCSE graduates required additional support to catch up with literacy and numeracy skills, as well as extra help with mental health needs and work to ensure pupils are attending school.
"Because that starts a secondary wasn't as smooth, it made it feel as if actually coming back to school was a little bit of an option for them and therefore we've had to do a lot in order to make sure that actually they understood the importance of being with us in order to be successful," she said.
The Stonehenge School head revealed that she'd needed to expand the pastoral care offering to pupils to ensure their needs were met.
"Lots of things have had to evolve, particularly the amount of support we put in place for children's mental health," she said, saying the pastoral team is far more extensive than it was five years ago.
Mrs Dean added: "We pay for lots of different type of interventions, we provide access to counselling. We have a counsellor that comes in, but I've also got some really highly skilled staff who we've trained to become experts in supporting all different sorts of needs.
"It's changed the different levels of support that you we find within the school so that it isn't all about the academic and it isn't all about the teaching and the learning necessarily."