Locking Down and Catching Up: How Pupils Make Sense of a Curriculum for Recovery

Presentation by Richard Pountney, at the ECNU Webinar: Childhood, Curriculum and Culture in Diverse Contexts, December 15, 2020 . The closing of schools in England, owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, in Spring 2020, save for on-site education for vulnerable children and children of critical workers, has impacted on teachers, parents and most of all pupils. The practical issues include feeling unprepared to resume a range of activities, and the danger of those children most in need of school as those more likely to miss out (Sharp et al., 2020). The phased return from the Summer includes priority for 15-year-old pupils preparing for important examinations, offering reduced timetables, some face-to-face contact and support to supplement pupils’ remote education. These responses involve three sets of options (not necessarily exclusive) (Andrew et al., 2020): making students’ experience of home learning more equal; bringing students back into schools at different times; and offering extra resources and additional support to students to help them catch up once they are back at school (Lucas et al., 2020). This paper reports a study of schools returning from lockdown arising from the Covid-19 and the efficacy of a mentoring intervention for pupils going into the final year of secondary education. The intervention involves a positive education program based on the Positive Youth Development (PYD) perspective, taking the form of a programme of online mentoring sessions carried out by recent graduates, organised according to a systematic curriculum of activities and tasks carried out collaboratively with the pupils. The specific objective is to investigate, within the context of a curriculum for recovery, the specific teaching practices and resources that help pupils to return to the school, environment, to recover a sense of wellbeing, and to re-establish habits of learning, in order that pupils can imagine and plan their futures.