I had a visceral reaction to news that Northern Ireland’s teaching unions want a 13.5 per cent pay rise and will strike if they do not get it.
Paul Givan, the DUP education minister, told the assembly it is “simply impossible” to find the money. More than that, it feels like an insult to children and parents while there has still been no proper reckoning over the pandemic.
Part of that must be an acknowledgement that many teachers and schools put in heroic efforts. At one of my children’s schools, the entire staff spent the whole summer of 2020 in the building preparing for live online delivery of all lessons. At another, individual teachers spent hours every day preparing animations and recorded tutorials.
However, this experience was far from universal. Many teachers and schools did the bare minimum, or less. I am aware of key workers who felt particularly betrayed by how they and their children were abandoned.
In any case, even heroic efforts were not enough. Of my three children, the one who suffered the greatest set-back received by far the best support. School closure itself was the fundamental problem and it could have been largely avoided.
The first lockdown was understandable, given the confusion and panic in the initial weeks of the pandemic. Schools were already half-empty before they sent everyone home.
But it was clear months before the second lockdown in September 2020 that Covid was harmless to children and to the vast majority of healthy adults. It was known the disease did not spread by contact with surfaces, another reason schools were closed. It was obviously counterproductive to close schools to prevent spread to the vulnerable, as children were being left in the care of their grandparents.
Decisions to lock down were taken at Stormont, usually shadowing Westminster, or in Sinn Féin’s case jumping a week early during the first lockdown to copy Dublin.
Read more: Teaching union says educational reforms ‘must be implemented in full’
But teaching unions would have accepted no other decision and sometimes they appeared to be excusing their members doing as little as possible. One of the more infuriating ironies of Covid in Northern Ireland is that all our schools were fitted with a live online classroom broadcast system in 2011, one of the most advanced in the world at the time, to support children with long-term illnesses.
Had teachers been practised with this system, known as Elluminate, we could have had a world-leading lockdown service from day one. But it had never been switched on because unions did not want parents watching their members at work.
The pandemic highlighted the general lack of accountability in Northern Ireland’s school system... No meaningful way exists to raise concerns about a failing school, teacher or head teacher
Stormont officials spent years trying to address these spurious privacy concerns, to no avail. NASUWT, the most vociferous objector, then spent the pandemic complaining its members had to learn new technology. As with teachers and schools, it is important to recognise some unions are better than others.
While there is no point seeking retribution over the pandemic, there should be recognition of what went wrong, followed by reform based on the lessons learned.
Acknowledgement of the scale and needlessness of the disaster would be a start.
Read more: Absence of reflection and lessons learned over pandemic in north is ‘stark’, Covid Inquiry told
It is unlikely to come from the Covid inquiry, which is focused on ministerial decision-making and may not report until the end of the decade.
A practical way to put Covid behind us would be an audit of all its remaining bad practices. Some schools have not restored use of books and lockers, resumed normal extra-curricular activities or even lifted all their social distancing measures, as they find it convenient to continue inconveniencing pupils. The Department of Education should call this out and demand an end to it.
The pandemic highlighted the general lack of accountability in Northern Ireland’s school system. There is no independent inspectorate, only an office within the department, which is effectively marking its own homework. Although schools have boards of governors and can be answerable to other management bodies, in practice the head teacher is in charge and little can be done if they are underperforming.
Of course, schools have to be protected from the bottomless pit of parental complaints but there must be a happy medium. No meaningful way exists to raise concerns about a failing school, teacher or head teacher. Even elected representatives find they are powerless to help their constituents with such problems. A good legacy of the pandemic would be for that to change.
It would also be good to have a minister who spoke out on these views, instead of going native inside the department.
