‘Build back better’ was a broken promise to our children

The Education Alliance had been a multi-academy trust for five years when Covid hit, but the first lockdown was the real birth of #TeamTEAL. Until then, our identity had not really formed. During the strangely beautiful spring of 2020, it burst into life.

I stepped out of the house on the morning of 20 March this year to warm sunshine and that unmistakable smell of spring. It could not have been more evocative of that springtime five years before, when our lives changed forever.

My Schools Week lockdown diary was written three weeks into the so-called school closures, during an Easter break that wasn’t one – the first of many such school ‘holidays’.

We were open for key workers’ children, and we were working harder than ever to support the NHS, local charities and each other. My team’s sense of purpose and commitment to public service was palpable – at times I couldn’t keep up with their creativity about what more we might do.

They were firing off emails and messages constantly, checking on each other, developing online learning, organising supermarket vouchers, food parcels and toiletries and working out how to make PPE for the NHS.

It was amid that flurry of communication that the #TeamTEAL hashtag emerged. And today, many of us now wear #TeamTEAL lapel badges – not as a cheesy corporate thing, but as a reminder of how we come together in our most challenging moments.

The truth is that it was exhilarating at times. Leading without a blueprint, setting the course as the government struggled to catch up with the creativity and drive of a generation of school leaders whose strength was being forged in the furnace of a national emergency.

But it was terrifying too. The spiralling death toll, the empty streets and the very real fear. I asked myself almost every night for two years: “Have we done enough to keep our people safe?”

I look back with enormous sadness at the missed opportunity

Of course, we had no clue we would be locked down so long. Becoming experts in contact tracing, setting up testing centres, teaching with masks as Omicron tore through the population and millions stayed home; all that lay ahead.

So did the devastating reality of being consistently let down by a government that cared too little about children and school staff: the failure on food vouchers, the disaster of the laptop rollout, the exams fiasco, the refusal to fund catch-up and the secretary of state’s suggestion in parliament that parents should report schools to Ofsted.

I look back now on everything we did with enormous sadness at a huge, missed opportunity to make things better post-pandemic. Remember “Build Back Better”? What happened to that?

In March 2020, we were told there would be no performance tables and no inspections for the foreseeable future. And what did school leaders do? We worked harder, collaborated more and solved problems in the most creative ways imaginable.

Yet when lockdowns ended, the DfE and Ofsted could barely wait to return to zero sum, competitive accountability and high-stakes inspection. We had moved so far beyond all that and become so much better as leaders, and they just didn’t get it.

And what of the children who came through it, the famous Gen Z, the kids that Gen X and Millennials love to bash as flaky and weak?

In my experience, they were incredible. They were asked to give up significant parts of their childhoods to save the lives of others, to not see their friends, to lose months of school, to miss first parties and proms, to swab their noses and to wear masks in stuffy classrooms and corridors.

And they did it all. Stoically, resiliently following all those rules that were there to protect others.

During the second lockdown, I drove my daughter to see her friend every Sunday. They were only allowed to meet outdoors. It was a freezing February, and they walked around a village clutching hot chocolates, sitting apart on a bench and shivering. They followed the rules to the letter.

Meanwhile in Whitehall…

#TeamTEAL has endured, but is it any wonder #TeamGB feels more divided than ever?

In 2020, sector leaders chronicled school ‘closures’ through a series of ‘lockdown diaries‘. Five years on, our diarists reflect on their entries and the pandemic’s ongoing impact. Read our ‘lockdown legacies’ here