Due to the coronavirus pandemic, our education community has faced so many new, difficult and, at times, heartbreaking challenges:
- Making impossible decisions about how to keep schools open for vulnerable children and children of key workers whilst safeguarding staff and pupils alike.
- Making distressing personal decisions about prioritising duty of care: to our schools, our pupils, our colleagues, our own families, ourselves?
- Knowing that many of pupils will be enduring hardship, hunger and limited support due to challenging home environments and trying to set up additional means to help them.
- Setting work online, navigating new and perhaps unfamiliar platforms often without sufficient training or time to plan, continuing to communicate with, teach and care for pupils online.
- Supporting Year 11 and Year 13 pupils whilst urgently gathering evidence for assessment grades and managing the uncertainty about how exam results will be awarded.
- Juggling work and home, including caring for relatives and neighbours, often also homeschooling, and dealing with the pressures and worries that brings.
As school leaders, teachers and support staff now plan how to emerge from lockdown safely, we, at Mindfulness in Schools Project, just want to thank you all.
THANK YOU for the work you are doing in our schools with our vulnerable children and children of key workers.
THANK YOU for the work you are doing continuing to support our children’s learning.
THANK YOU for caring about the welfare and wellbeing of your school’s children and families.
THANK YOU for the risks you might have taken on behalf of the communities you serve.
Please be kind to yourself, look after yourself, and take care.
