COLIN CAMPBELL:Kids let down time and again in a strike-riddled year
Strikes by staff over threatened job cuts at the University of the Highlands and Islands rounded off a truly grim year of disruption in the education system, one in which schools were hit desperately hard.
Like many grandparents I was called in as a support service for my youngest offspring on days when their school was closed due to strikes, with their parents in essential jobs being at work, as they were all through Covid.
Strikes, strikes, and more strikes it seemed.
How many times did this happen in 2023? We lost count. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total number of days when schools were in lockdown in this strike-riddled year reached into double figures.
Of course grandparents don’t mind lending a hand. And the children had been given some computer-related homework to do. But at one point during the last three-day strike, this time by Unison workers, following on from the teachers, I felt a surge of anger.
Here they were yet again in the front living room on a midweek morning when they should have been at school.
That stifled anger for me was exacerbated by one overriding fact.
From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s I didn’t lose one day of education because of a school strike. In 13 years of primary and secondary education, not an hour was lost because of walkouts by teachers, janitors, dinner ladies or anyone else. That was in an era when the unions and their leaders were dominant, in the ascendancy and much more militant and aggressive than they are now.
Bodies were left unburied in major cities, uncollected rubbish piled up on the streets, and walkouts occurred everywhere at the drop of a hat.
But through all this, schools were left untouched. It was almost as if it was taboo to deprive kids of their education. That was considered one step too far.
How things have changed.
Did the prolonged period of Covid inactivity almost subconsciously weaken the iron rule that kids belong in class for most of the year and nothing else is acceptable? Week after week, month after month during Covid children were at home and although there were online classes of perhaps some benefit, the classroom seemed very distant.
Compared with the Covid era, being off school for a day or two now might almost seem no big deal. But it all adds up and the disruption to education in recent times would once have been seen as catastrophic.
Things have returned to normal now. Back to the normality I and so many others knew when every single day outside holiday time was a school day.
Let’s hope it stays that way and that 2024 sees a complete end to the disruption which marred and blighted the last 12 months.
Schools need to be open, children need to be learning, that is the natural and essential order of things, and nothing and no-one should get in the way of it.
