Headteacher Meeting

On the Tuesday 10th March, I attended our termly headteacher’s meeting, here in Derbyshire. These meeting have a varied agenda and allow headteachers to network, as well as receive direct messages from our local authority and the DFE about education and schools. At this meeting, as always, I attend with other Head teachers from our local schools and afterwards we meet to discuss items on a local level. At this second gathering, we spoke about the current situation. We were all speculating about what the government’s move to a ‘Contain’ phase would look like. We predicted school closures around the Easter break, but were unsure what this would look like here in the UK. We were aware that schools in China and Italy had been closed for the near future, and wondered whether this would be our fate too. We spoke about how we would communicate with each other and shored up our ‘What’s app’ group to ensure all headteacher’s in our cluster were included. Little did we know that over the coming days and weeks this would become our life line, to others in the same boat as us, making the same or similar decisions school, with the little or no information we had.
The discussion at this meeting started me thinking about our response to this national / global ‘disaster’ and left me dazed and confused as to the way forward. That night I can’t say I slept much, worrying about what was to come in the days and weeks ahead.