Recently, I was asked the question, “After the pandemic, what message would you give a politician?” Here’s what I’d like to see changed about our schools in the UK.
- Increase the space for each child in school,
- Provide three times the existing sets of books in secondary schools.
- Use desks, not lockers for children in years 7-8 (ages 11 – 13)
- Give most lessons in the home class room until students are 14 or older.
- Segregate years 7-8 from upper years
In lockdown under Covid, people have reported the spread of Covid among school children. If you see how crammed together they are in their classrooms, you’d understand why. Take a worse case, a class room built in the 1950s for teenage boys, who apparently were smaller than today’s teenage boys. Add a teacher. Add a learning assistant or two. Add all the bags and music cases that the students must now carry around with them. And you’ll be unable to move unless you have similar agility to them and can climb over them and their stuff, and no-one complains about you touching them to keep your balance as you pass.
Children in secondary schools move between class rooms for different lessons, and the relevant text books are kept in those rooms. During lockdown, children had to stay in their rooms and the teachers had to hoik the books around the school. Now, if you loaned each child the book for the year, then it would already be in the class room. If each student had a desk in their home class room, a desk in which they could keep their books, a classroom that other students didn’t use, then the teachers wouldn’t have to carry books around and students would have a more secure home base.
Children get bullied. Bullying happens between classrooms, in the corridors. Less movement around schools will reduce congestion on the corridors, some of which are barely two metres wide anyhow. Under lockdown, some head teachers kept the younger years away from the older, and discovered that bullying dropped a lot. Segregating those younger years helped them settle in more securely, and so would having their own classroom.
Such changes would reduce congestion, opportunities for bullying and weight lifting for teachers. The children should also feel more comfortable and safe, which will make it easier for them to learn – the aim of our schools.
This links to architects who design educational buildings: https://www.tgescapes.co.uk/blog/education-how-big-should-send-classroom-be
How big should a SEND classroom be?