My blog

Tag: Students

  • Opinion: Diana Blamires on the need for live learning in the home

    Opinion: Diana Blamires on the need for live learning in the home

    Diana Blamires

    The recent plummet back into homeschooling has shown that the gulf between setting homework and live classes could not be wider. In some cases, it will mean the difference between passing and failing GCSEs, or worse, a career succeeding or failing.

    Assiduous students will most likely succeed with or without live sessions, but there is a huge swathe who will lose out if there isn’t a full diet of Zoom-style live engagement every day. This is why MP and Chairman of the Education Select Commitee Robert Halfon’s decision to call for the government and Ofsted to urgently come up with detailed guidance for online provision is so well-timed.

    Boys are most vulnerable; peer pressure dictates that set work should be done as fast as possible, not as well as possible, and the rest of the day is usually spent on the playstation. Once we hit the anniversary of the first lockdown, some students will have lost almost a year of their lives to such recreations. They will have shot down their chances of success with too much time spent on the wrong kind of screen.

    What’s more, lazy students forfeit their place on the top table by pretending to do their work when in fact they are inputting random answers just to get the work done. The students whose parents have time to check that Seesaw, an online learning app, hasn’t been swapped for social media will succeed. It’s easy to look like you’re top of the class when you’re on Tik Tok.

    Social media depicts earnest children and parents at the kitchen table with laptops, but don’t be deceived: for those with challenging children the struggle is untenable. When asked to do set work, many children react with defiance. This leads to the offering of sanctions or bribes, and the defiance continues. Some children are immune to sanctions and bribes, and for a significant number of challenging children no work is done. And parents, working from home, are most likely at their wits’ end.

    This scenario is being played out in countless homes by families (or worse, single parents) every day. Some parents resort to violence or the child lashes out, and the situation escalates. Zoom work calls are abandoned and siblings are left traumatised; parents have breakdowns; children struggle with their mental health. Remote homework has the potential to morph into more serious situations and bring about new challenges for exhausted parents.

    Asking a child to attend a live lesson, however, is not often met with the same defiance. Children want to be with their friends in real time as they are desperately missing interaction. After face-to-face interactions, live lessons are the next best thing. And it is not just private schools who get a glowing report. Some state schools are offering a full timetable of live lessons, and those at the top of the class in the state sector have proved it can be done. 

    Some childrens’ futures are being needlessly thrown down the drain. It’s time to act; it doesn’t take a GCSE in computing to provide a week of live lessons, and they will change lives.

    Diana Blamires is an education PR consultant

  • ‘My absolute worst nightmare’: students react to Lockdown 3

    ‘My absolute worst nightmare’: students react to Lockdown 3

    Georgia Heneage

    Boris Johnson’s recent announcement that we are again heading into a national lockdown will have far-reaching consequences for the economy, for jobs and, of course, for education.

    There has been much talk about the fate of school students and upcoming exams; headteachers have made unprecedented challenges to Johnson’s initial decision to keep schools open and parents have rallied against the government’s handling of school closures.

    But what of the millions of students in higher education?

    The pandemic is already influencing the choices students are making with regards to university in surprising ways: a recent Guardian article highlighted a greater push towards vocational courses like teaching or nursing, and many students are choosing universities closer to home. More generally, there’s been a widespread impetus to apply to university, especially among students in more deprived areas of the country; UCAS expects a 5% jump in applications this year.

    While the long-term effects of the pandemic such as these may be positive, what of the current fee-paying students being forced to stay at home and work remotely? Some universities, like University College London, have advised their students to stay at home past the official government deadline of mid-February. Others have given little to no information on when students can expect to return to normality.

    Hugo Rowse, a first year undergraduate at Exeter, says they’ve had hardly any communication from the university at all.

    “We had one email before the announcements saying it is ‘recommended’ we don’t come back until the 25th of January. I think they’ve used the word recommended to avoid having to pay us back”, says Rowse, who has spent an average 8 weeks on campus and “cannot believe” that they haven’t been told anything about remunerations since the November lockdown.

    “I’m still waiting for some form of contact since the lockdown yesterday”, says Rowse. “Honestly, I don’t know if we’ll ever get any.”

    Rowse says that the situation is even worse for those who have returned to Exeter. “The thing which has caused the most anger is that people who have gone back have sent pictures of locks on our doors and balconies to stop us escaping, which is bizarre. A lot of students have emailed and got no response”.

    “The prospect of going back to university now and being locked in is my absolute worst nightmare,” says Rowse. “I feel so aloof from my course. I just sit here and they send me 16 lectures a week and I just have to watch them.”

    According to Sam Gamblin, charity manager at UMHAN (University Mental Health Advisors Network), there is a big mental-health impact on university students during a national lockdown. “A key issue is the lack of the usual support networks and activities that students might do to keep their mental health at bay,” says Gamblin.

    “Although you can still access things like psychiatric appointments and medication, a lot of students had strategies of keeping well and ‘fitting in’ through community groups and societies, and that’s now completely disappeared.”

    Gamblin says isolation is the key concern among mental health experts, particularly with new students living in new accommodation with people they don’t know, for those living in hostile home environments or with parents unaware of their mental-health issues.

    As Exeter student Hugo Rowse demonstrated, Gamblin says they have concerns about whether students will even want to return to university. “What happens if students want to defer or do something different, or decide that university isn’t for them? This has an impact on their employability further down the line, and there isn’t any advice on what to do if this is the case.”