There is a way in which we can speak for students and make their contexts and potential clear in a time when universities will have to be more flexible. This year applicants will face challenges their predecessors will not have faced, many of which will exacerbate inequality in mobility and which are evolving in front of us. It has been well documented that our most disadvantaged students have found working at home unsustainable and that this is having an impact on their achievement and progress. All students will find accessing work experience and online enrichment activities difficult, with a paradoxical excess and dearth of choice, and it is not hard to imagine that the students we most want to reach in order to widen participation will find these challenges most difficult to overcome without additional support. I am impressed by that, it’s not an easy time to be making future plans, I can barely make a choice about tomorrow’s dinner as the stock at my supermarket is so erratic.
In this context, the university admissions juggernaut moves on as though students had not had a day out of school and teachers have all remained at work. It seems that amidst this chaos there are still plenty of students applying to university.
I do not envy the role of the teacher right now some students in school, some not in school but everyone needing to be educated, exasperated parents asking you to set work, but not too much work and constant changes in guidelines being issued. For some reason everyone thinks you’ve only just reopened when you never actually closed and then of all people, Andrew Adonis, thinks you’re not doing enough compared to private schools and wants to start up the ‘lazy teacher’ chant that comes around at least every year. Thank goodness the summer break is here and we can all get away on a well-deserved…oh, maybe no.
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