The COVID experience was one of the most challenging in the history of the school. Five years on, we look back in amazement at the monumental efforts our school, and every school, had to make in order to support each other and make school work.

Communication with students, staff, parents and governors was crucial and new channels and media had to be discovered and created. Official guidance needed to be acted upon, and customised to our circumstances. We needed to recognise the range of impacts on families in differing circumstances. This was brought home to us early in the pandemic with the loss through COVID of Lenny McLaughlin, father of our Classroom Assistant manager Deborah McDowell. Deborah’s loss, and her fortitude in returning to support our statement students and the CA made a deep impact.

We were also very conscious of the impact on the families of health and care workers, where a parent had to move out of the family home for an extended period, or the children had to move to live with grandparents, in order to allow the parent to continue working in a health or care setting with the inevitably strict COVID precautions.

Our staff worked from home to support our students in their academic work, particularly those in the examination years, and in dealing with the loneliness and isolation which lock-down brought to us all.

Through our OldScholars, we became very aware of the nightmare working conditions of so many in hospitals, care homes, among those attempting distance social working etc. and our gallery of photographs shows the strength of purpose and the strain.

Then came the shaky return to something approaching normal, with its own pressures. Students had missed out on so much learning together. Arrangements had to be made to ensure the required social distancing, mask wearing protocols, arrangements for isolation where infection was suspected, one way systems, spaced out classroom seating arrangements, hands free drinking fountains, warm clothing when the windows had to be kept open, online parent consultations, COVID marshals…

Check out the evidence!