Prisoners of our past

We are all prisoners of our past. We view events through the lens of our previous experiences and often project onto others opinions and motivations they simply do not have. These imperfections in our understanding of the world around us are exacerbated rather than mitigated by social media and the internet. Evolution has favoured pattern recognition skills over complex analysis.  Consequently, we are vulnerable to seeing things as we think they are rather than in their complex, messy and contradictory reality.

Mark Twain said, "I've lived through some terrible things, some of which actually happened", succinctly highlighting the unreality and unreliability of both anticipation and memory.

There was an interesting example of this last week when HMCI Amanda Spielman attempted to articulate complexity, 

Her thoughts were 'reported' by TES and 'rereported' in the Twitter echo chamber, which jumped on this as further evidence of 'horrible Ofsted' not caring about hungry children or not caring about teacher workloads or just not caring. I suspect she was trying to say something much more nuanced.

It is perfectly possible to care deeply about all of the following:

• the loss of learning from Covid
• the loss of livelihoods from Covid
• the dispropotionate impact of both of the above on those already disadvantaged
• the huge and unjustifiable variation in education offering between schools in similar contexts, largely due to an absence of planning at both governmental and local authority level but also at school level
• the impact of all of the above on teacher workloads
• the sheer scale of the recovery work needed over the coming years and the complete failure of the DfE to acknowledge and fund this

These are not mutually exclusive or contradictory ideas. In fact they are largely interconnected. The messy truth is that some schools prioritised support to their most vulnerable families, some schools prioritised remote learning, some schools did both, some schools did neither, some schools prioritised in school support to key worker and vulnerable children and some schools prioritised the wellbeing of staff. But all children have lost significant amounts of learning and all schools must be involved in the long and slow process of rebuilding for all children.