Recovery Curriculum
From 20th March 2020, schools were closed for all except a few pupils because of the worldwide pandemic. The UK went into lockdown, meaning that people could only leave their homes to buy food, exercise and carry out critical work.
This left parents and carers home educating their children with the support of school. Children have experienced loss of social interaction with their friends, extended family and their teachers. They have lost their usual structure and routines as they are not able to attend school and extracurricular activities. They have been without their usual freedoms, playing outside and visiting leisure areas. Some may have experienced bereavement of friends or family. All of our children have suffered some form of loss.
Percy Main will address this through the development of a recovery curriculum.
Documents
What is a recovery curriculum?
The recovery framework is based upon the work of Barry Carpenter and the Evidence for Learning team, which sets out the importance of recognising the trauma and loss that children will have been through during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Successful transition for children to enable them to once again become efficient and confident learners is key. The way in which we do this is to acknowledge and accept the losses that we have all been through during the pandemic.
Loss of routine means that we are likely to have at some point had disrupted sleep patterns, change in coping mechanisms, worried or become confused at lack of routine.
Loss of structure would indicate that we may not have been following the same structures for learning that we have previously been accustomed to, we may have worries over lack of control and in particular change, we may have lost out on our right to carryout important transitions in our lives such as SATS, end of year parties, plus other end of term celebrations.
Loss of friendship whilst we haven’t lost friendships and those people still remain in our lives we will not have been able to interact with them in the way we were previously used to, we grieve for the deeper social interaction and connectedness that friendship and relationships bring.
Loss of opportunity many children and adults do not understand why school was closed, why we were no longer able to meet up with our friends and had to remain at home and indoors for most of the day. We do not understand fully why the decisions were made and for children in particular, they do not have the understanding that the Government made the decisions to partially close schools and that it wasn’t their teachers or other school staff who took those decisions. For this reason, it is vitally important that we help children to understand that their safety was and is our primary concern.
Loss of freedom for some children and adults school offers a place of escape, somewhere that they can be who they want to be and allows a sense of freedom to explore, make mistakes and to learn from them
The primary focus of the recovery curriculum is to ‘help children to recover from their loss of routine, structure, friendship, sleep, opportunity and freedom’
