Keep the world learning: the impact of the pandemic on educators

During the first lockdown in 2020, Elizabeth started to lose her hair. She was working as a primary school teacher in Edinburgh, delivering her lessons over Microsoft Teams. It was an anxious time, so Elizabeth put the hair loss down to stress. It was ‘just one of those things,’ she said. But the bald patch, originally the size of a 20p piece, became bigger. It crept down her parting at the back of her head. Whenever she showered, she found hair in the plug. Whenever she woke up in the morning, she found clumps on her pillow.

‘At this rate, I’m going to need a wig,’ she joked to her friends.

Less than four months later, she did.

The hair on her crown was disappearing and Elizabeth needed to know what was happening, fast. But the NHS waiting list was sixteen months long. Elizabeth booked to see a private consultant, who told her she had alopecia areata. Alopecia areata is an autoimmune condition that causes hair to fall out in small patches. For some people, hair can grow back over time. But within a few months, Elizabeth lost all the hair on her head (alopecia totalis) and then all the hair on her body (alopecia universalis). She received steroid injections to try and help her hair grow back, but they were unsuccessful.

This was still in lockdown. When it came to buying wigs, Elizabeth called her friends over WhatsApp for advice.

‘That was good fun,’ she says. ‘It felt like a big decision.’

It was losing her eyelashes and eyebrows that was the hardest thing. Before, Elizabeth had very dark eyelashes and brows. Without them, she felt she had no definition to her face. She experimented with make-up, started wearing magnetic lashes (‘a godsend!’) and a friend kindly microbladed her eyebrows.

But the return to school was hard. It was hard for everyone, post-lockdown, but Elizabeth looked very different to the way she’d looked before. She wondered if people would be able to tell she was wearing a wig. Would it matter if they did? What would the children say? Her headteacher was extremely supportive and asked if she’d like time off.

‘I said no,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t actually ill, so I thought it was important to keep going. Looking back, I wonder if I did really need time to adjust.’

Elizabeth’s hair loss was a physical condition: her immune system was attacking her own body. However, conditions like alopecia can be exacerbated by stress and uncertainty. Teaching online was difficult. There were weekly deadlines to meet, as well as extensive planning. They had to teach several live lessons a day, over Microsoft Teams, to children and their parents, who could sometimes be critical. Not only were educators ‘on’ for the period of the class, but they also had to be available at any time of day so that, if there were problems with devices or questions about homework, parents could reach them. Many parents were working during the day, so these inquiries would often pile in during the evenings.

‘I think the alopecia was my body’s way of telling me I was stressed,’ she says. ‘Lockdown was an alien experience for us all, and my body definitely knew it.’

Elizabeth was in Scotland, but the pandemic was global. In Western Australia, Sarah was also struggling.

‘Teaching became very traumatic,’ she tells me over Google Meet. ‘It was really difficult when children you really cared about became unwell and had to isolate. There’s also a kind of toxic positivity in the education system. It’s very difficult to actually say what you think and address real problems.’

Sarah has been a teacher for 29 years. Now, she’s studying at Notre Dame University alongside relief teaching and working for Twinkl. Over her 29 years in education, she observed a huge change in the field. Now, she says, there’s an incredible amount of paperwork — it’s ‘off the scale.’ It’s pushing people out of the profession.

‘A lot of my friends don’t want to be in education any more,’ she says.

The pandemic exacerbated all of this. What had been a difficult, time-consuming job, was now overwhelming. Not only was there the teaching, the paperwork and the assessments, but there was also the need to prevent infection and present a united front to children.

‘There were a lot of conspiracy theories floating about,’ Sarah says. ‘We had to be very careful what we said, as we didn’t want to spread misinformation to our parents.’

This was an issue in Canada too. Alisa, now a content writer for Twinkl, was teaching French in a school in Ontario when the pandemic began.

‘It was interesting to see how kids reflect their parents’ views,’ she tells me. ‘There were some children that refused to wear their masks. Every time I went into the classroom, I’d say ‘Put your mask up.’ But then I’d turn around and the masks would be down again. I think strict rules and regulations can sometimes bring that side of children out. They’d say, ‘Well, my mom says that masks aren’t good and I shouldn’t be wearing them.’ At the same time, some parents were really paranoid and their children would pass that on too. They were obsessed with the rules and constantly sanitising everything.’

It was difficult telling children their behaviour was disruptive, obsessive or irrational when the surrounding adults were behaving similarly. Jess was teaching in the UK and noticed signs of anxiety in her class.

‘Some of them were clinging to their hand sanitiser,’ she says. ‘But there were adults doing that too. Children would ask things like, ‘Is my grandma going to die?’ I just tried to be honest. We were all wondering the same things. I said I didn’t know what was going to happen, that I was worried too. You can’t lie to them. There’s still a lot of uncertainty — is the pandemic really over?’

Jess ended up leaving teaching because of stress.

‘The senior leadership team seemed to think we would be fine washing our hands with water instead of soap,’ she says.

Jess expressed that the majority of people she knows in education are unhappy with aspects of their job. Experiencing the complications of the pandemic was one thing. Being a symbol of stability and calm to a class full of children was another entirely. Back in Canada, Alisa says there were times when teaching became acting.

‘It was tough because I didn’t always agree with what the government or school board were doing,’ she says. ‘It was frustrating because it felt like the wrong decisions were being made. I had to turn to the students and say, ‘we might not all agree, but this is what we have to do.’ There were times that I would spend the day putting on a brave face, then come home and just bawl. I was too exhausted to do any marking.’

Kirsty was a teacher in Wales during the pandemic. She’s a single parent, so had to teach online while also looking after her three-year-old daughter. While she was recording lessons, she told her to stay out of the room. Bored, lonely and restless, her daughter started to draw on the walls and sofa.

‘What else was she going to do?’ Kirsty says. ‘She just wanted some attention.’

To keep her occupied while she was working, Kirsty gave her an iPad to play with. One day, her daughter took a photograph of her bent over the laptop, working. ‘That’s you, Mummy,’ her daughter said.

‘That was quite a scary moment,’ Kirsty says. ‘I realised that’s who I was to her: this person that was constantly working at a computer. I knew then I had to stop.’

Over the course of researching this blog series, I’ve received emails from lots of educators and spoken to a few of them in video calls. In some ways, the circumstances in which they were teaching seem shocking. And yet, the COVID-19 pandemic has been shocking, generally. The lack of preparation, the magnitude of the change in such a short space of time, the complete lack of compassion from some managers, leaders, communities, and businesses. It’s been a pivotal moment for many. For many educators, it was the end of their teaching careers.

‘I left teaching because of stress,’ says Nicola, a UK-based educator. Nicola had concerns over the way children’s wellbeing was considered at the school she worked in. There was also a worry over the pressure they received during the pandemic.

‘Despite there being a lovely INSET day on the first day of the school year, for focusing on the children’s welfare, we were given a rigid timetable that allowed no time for PSHE or other foundation subjects,’ Nicola says. ‘When the teachers raised that it’s difficult for children to cope with two hours of maths and two hours of English every day, we were told that we needed to make it work. The senior leadership team piled on the pressure by making multiple changes to the way we teach and plan — sometimes these were contradictory.’

Corrinne lives in Australia. She was pregnant at the beginning of the pandemic and teaching in a school.

‘It was not a calm environment,’ she says. ‘The administrative staff left the responsibility of ‘putting on a brave face’ solely to us. Teachers had to deliver effective face to face lessons while also spending many hours setting up online learning. I spent 8 hours a day at school and then at least 4 hours working at night, while juggling a young family and a pregnancy. We had no PPE, no masks, no sanitiser, no hand soap, no additional cleaning, and no social distancing — we were told students and teachers were ‘exempt’ from these rules.’

Not health workers, not nurses, not medics, yet still dealing with the realities of a rapidly-spreading disease that no one understood. Educators, some of whom were themselves vulnerable, were working in potentially dangerous conditions during the day and continuing to work long hours late into the evening. It takes strength that’s to be admired, but that strength can falter over time. Constant pressure takes a toll.

Joanne lives and teaches in Plettenberg Bay, South Africa. She says educators are generally a lot more stressed these days.

‘Now, people are less resilient,’ she says. ‘During the pandemic, everyone was so busy, but now it’s returned to a normal level, people can’t cope. I think people can’t handle things that, back in 2019, they would have been able to manage. Now, people just feel overwhelmed. I think people’s fuses are shorter.’

And so, a profession that was already difficult, already demanding, has become even more so. So much so that many people have left it and, fuelled by what they endured, now work hard to create tools that will help others. Alisa is currently working on creating resources for Canadian teachers that will help them manage their mental health. Jess says she tries to spread the word about Twinkl’s wellbeing resources as far and wide as she can. All the experiences these educators have had — positive, negative, somewhere in between — are channelled into the materials they create for Twinkl.

Twinkl isn’t just worksheets and PowerPoints, though these things are very useful. It’s a moving, churning community. With people based all over the world, with expertise in different areas, the business is able to connect people and solve problems that, without communication and structure, its teams might not have been aware of.

‘It’s comforting to hear people’s stories, even if they’re sad,’ says Sarah, from her home in Western Australia. ‘It makes you realise you’re less alone.’