It’s been a really busy day but it was started with some really good stuff. We had our third Young Leaders meeting and it was really well chaired by a year five pupil who managed the meeting brilliantly, making sure everybody got to share ideas and getting the actions down on paper. I can see this being a great success.

I then moved on to linking a number of schools using Microsoft Teams. The plan going forward is to link by Google Classroom so they can personally link together but in the world of Covid, to have approximately 25 children and young people sharing ideas, presenting, creating videos and power points to tell others right across the country what’s great about their school and what could be better, was truly fantastic. This was the bulk of a very busy morning interrupted inconveniently by another Covid case.

There isn’t anything that any of us can do when these Covid cases arise and it is really hard on the heart, although an easy decision, because we are following the guidance. To send bubbles of children home (in this case, some whom already had two weeks isolation earlier in the school year), education is going to be continually disrupted throughout 2020/2021.

Whilst the announcement that results will not be used to judge a school is pleasing, days are busy and when they are so much so that the letter to the bubble of children going home isn’t sent until the evening, the extra tasks, however small, all add up and take a toll on a positive staff and great people.

A member my own family is currently in hospital with Covid. The energy really has been zapped. It’s so hard that you can’t do anything: you can’t go for a visit or anything else other than the phone call to see how they are; internally you feel like you’re taking more of their energy by talking to them, so the conundrum of that is a difficult one. We will keep fighting and doing what we believe we should be doing whether in our jobs as leaders of a school or in our personal lives at home.

Decisions are made all the more harder because people don’t follow the rules and the guidance. They don’t keep the distance when they should do and they all go and get tests as a precaution, which is very much blurring their starting dates of isolation. Science is a wonderful thing and I wish people would just follow the advice and the guidance. I know people worry but let’s not make the situation worse by doing things that we shouldn’t be doing.

At the end of the working day I was on a Teams meeting at the same time as the Zoom webinar about remote learning – and at the same time as holding a meeting in my office with staff who said men can’t multitask! Think again.