“Have you prayed the Angelus today?” Silence followed, save the noise of shuffling feet. “I’ll try again, Year 9. Have you prayed the Angelus today?” More shuffling, with added mumbling. Then, only just discernibly: “No, Miss.” “Right! On your feet.” Loud scraping of chairs and pushing of tables. “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.” Thirty teenage voices: smiling, sulking, shouting, grunting: “And she conceived by the Holy Spirit!”
And so it went on, while I pondered the twists and turns that had brought me to this overcrowded classroom in an enormous secondary school in North Oxfordshire. I had not meant to spend the academic year 2020-2021 doing a formal teacher-training qualification; nevertheless, it seemed a good way to ride out the uncertainty of the international situation, and also of spending it with more in-person human interaction than the preceding six months.
Setting out on this new journey was not without its challenges. It was not quite the depths of the coronavirus pandemic because the schools were once again open, but there seemed to be a mountain of forms to fill in, many of inscrutable intent and purpose. If I had hated the online teaching of the previous two terms, then being on the other side of the camera was infinitely worse. It is not easy to form lasting relationships in a WhatsApp group.
I knew that much of the year would hinge on an all-important school placement, at a time when life was still very far from normal and every attempt being made to minimise the numbers of pupils who would need to isolate should one of their peers test positive. The constant testing – for everyone, twice a week – became an irksome rhythm.
Meanwhile, free movement and interaction had gone to the wall to try to mitigate the worst effects of an outbreak; the arrangements were not ideal, but they were the best that could be done. A one-way system around the buildings, strict segregation of year groups, masks, bacterial handwash, and freezing classrooms in the winter with doors and windows propped wide open to allow the circulation of air.
However frustrating, it was better than the alternative. At the end of one Year 10 lesson, the head looked in and asked to make an announcement. A child in another form had tested positive, she told them, which meant that their whole bubble had been compromised and would need to isolate for the next ten days. Several of the boys crossed their arms and stared angrily at the floor; three girls rushed to comfort a fourth, who had burst into tears.
For all the old-fashioned tropes, you see, school is where children grow in stature; it is where they are meant to be, at least most of the time, and plenty of them know it. For all the safeguarding training and liaison work, one never quite knows exactly what is going on at home. There are plenty of children for whom schools provide stability and purpose that they lack elsewhere; the final fruits of their closure during lockdown will surely be bitter. The teachers at the school in which I found myself understood that perfectly; the restrictions in place were necessary evils in the hope of better days to come. Faith-focused and prayer-driven, the place wore its Catholicism like an old jumper, led by the endlessly optimistic head of RE who endured with courage and dignity the pain and treatment of the cancer that killed her a year later. She let me teach St John’s Gospel to her sixth-formers: a high honour indeed.
It must have been Providence, for I thrived in that environment in a way that I might not have elsewhere, thanks to the love and care of those who were responsible for my progress. Give thanks, then, for Blessed George Napier School in Banbury, where no one was ever allowed to forget that each child was made in the image and likeness of God, nor beyond the reach of his transfiguring power. Pray, too, for the repose of the soul of Rachel Smith.
Catholic education, while keeping an eye on developments in pedagogy, begins with theology; in its turn theology revolves around the Incarnation, and the Incarnation focuses on a child. The syllabuses approved by the bishops are robust, and provide a solid and cohesive framework within which students can engage with the questions that are inevitably presented by a world that calls to them with beguiling alternatives.
There are some things that cannot be learned by study alone. Cor ad cor loquitur, as Newman’s motto has it – “heart speaks to heart” – lifted from St Francis de Sales. Even a single teacher has the potential to change a young life for ever, and it’s all incarnational in the end. With that in mind, perhaps the best question that any teacher in a Catholic school can ask of their pupils or of themselves is the one with which this story began.
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