Adapt and Overcome - Lessons Learned During Lockdown
It goes without saying that the disruption caused by Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdown impacted almost every aspect of school life, and like so many others St Bartholomew’s CE Multi-Academy Trust was forced to take swift action, to ensure pupil learning could continue and staff remained safe.
Here, Christopher Dryer, Director of Finance and Operations at the Trust, discusses how they adapted throughout the spring and summer term, the new processes put in place ahead of reopening and some of the positive learnings from lockdown.
With the goal of ensuring every school was getting the support it needed and also meeting compliance regulations set by the DfE, St Bart’s looked to form a central services team approximately two years ago.
Designed to take on many of the day-to-day administrative and communication tasks, this freed up our senior leadership team to focus on issues like school improvement, the curriculum and teacher development. The fact we already had such a well established shared services team in place stood us in good stead when the pandemic hit at the beginning of the year.
Across the Trust, the central support team was responsible for boosting internal and external communication and ensuring all staff and parents were contacted with updates as and when necessary. In the early days of school closures, the advice from the government and the DfE changed on a daily basis, and it was vital everyone was kept informed.
Seamless transition to home learning
Luckily, to minimise our reliance on onsite servers and filing cabinets, we’d already begun moving many of our admin systems onto the cloud, making life much easier. The back office support staff could easily send out email updates and even set automated alerts to avoid confusion or panic.
Having implemented the Access Finance and Budgeting software 4 years ago, our finance team could make a seamless transition to remote working, still able to access key reports, data and continue to manage the Trust’s finances through the uncertainty. Not only did this minimise any additional and unnecessary stress, we could rest assured that the team were meeting key deadlines and targets, as well as continuing to pay suppliers.
Throughout the spring and summer terms, we provided home learning packs that could be printed off from home or collected from the school via a carefully managed process. As our Trust is entirely made up of primary schools, digital learning wasn’t a feasible option, so we instead arranged regular catch-up phone calls and kept in close contact with parents via email.
The rise of e-learning
While digital alternatives will never replace a teacher, we’re looking to embed technology into the classroom over the next few years. The primary school curriculum is far less progressive than in secondary schools, with a much slower uptake of online learning platforms, however, lockdown has certainly opened our eyes to the benefits of digitalisation and I’d say we’re now far more effective in our use of technology.
It’s taken an immense amount of planning to get pupils back into the classroom - from risk assessments, to implementing new handwashing stations and staggering start/finish times - it’s been a real team effort and has shone a light on the ethos of the Trust.
As we look ahead, we’ll continue to keep a close eye on government guidance around cleaning, PPE and, of course, keep a close eye on the new track and trace system, with the shared services team remaining as integral as ever in keeping processes running smoothly.
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