Lockdown could launch a long-overdue digital revolution in education.
For most of the last year, my two children have been home-schooled. Neither by my choice, or theirs. I never really got why some parents chose to home-school, and I’m totally baffled now.
The media reports have focused on disruption to exams. But I can’t help thinking of the simpler formative experiences that kids are missing out on. The sports days, the school trips, and so on. Everything in our calendar has been cancelled, and we’ve stopped even being disappointed.
One up-side, perhaps the only up-side, has been the enforced pivot to digital delivery.
During the initial closure of English schools in spring 2020, the commitment seemed a little half-hearted: that’s not a criticism, probably just a reflection of the initial novelty element, followed by a sense that it wouldn’t last that long. A bit of blitz spirit, and some unusually good weather helped too.
Second time round, in early 2021, things feel very different. We’re in it for the long haul now, and teachers’ expectations are much higher.
Both kids have multiple Zoom calls daily. The local secondary school already used a digital solution for classes and homework; the primary adopted Google Classroom. Work is set in PDFs and Microsoft Office documents; and in our case at least, returned as Google Docs or photographs. Sure, it could all be more efficient, and better organised, but it’s working well enough.
What we’re producing here is a generation of kids who are completely comfortable, not just with technology in general – smartphones and games consoles had that covered – but with the normal, practical technology their parents all use every day at work. And this is a good thing.
At some point, be it weeks or months, the worst of this pandemic will be behind us… and the kids will return to the classrooms.
Do we actually want them to return to an experience built on exercise books and joined-up handwriting? I don’t know about you, but most weeks I don’t find myself handwriting anything longer than my signature. (And even that’s getting pretty rare.) We can stop talking about digital skills in the future tense: they are an integral part of every job, trade and profession now.
I sincerely hope our school leaders and civil servants see this for what it is: the best opportunity they may ever get to leap forwards in our delivery of education. I know you all have a lot on your plates right now, like not killing your staff and pupils; but you need a plan for what happens when we eventually emerge from this tunnel, into the light. A plan which doesn’t abandon the skills our kids have acquired in the last year. Skills they will actually need as adults.
And I hope the digital industry – people like the Raspberry Pi Foundation, experts in open source software, and the production of computer hardware so cheap they literally give it away on the front cover of magazines – recognises that this is their moment too.
Where their focus has historically (and entirely admirably) been on steering kids into STEM – as is immediately obvious when you look at any of Raspberry Pi’s communication, and the ‘maker’ software they bundle into their OS – they must see the greater opportunity here.
It’s said that all jobs are tech jobs now. Well, right now, at this very moment, all education is tech education.
We need to decide if we want to embrace that, or abandon it, when it’s no longer our only option. And if we’re going to embrace it, we should already be thinking about how.