A Somerset Lad

End of year assessments are strange beasts in these abnormal times.

Teachers are expected to assess the ability of students for the year to come, including indicating whether they are on track to achieve their GCSE target grade, a target set on the basis of their SATS score in Year 6.  To  object to the notion of targets is to invite the response that the targets are an accurate predictor of GCSE results. Maybe so, but that is because they seem self-fulfilling prophecies, students work at the level to which they have been assigned.

Schools pay great attention to the targets because it is upon such arbitrary figures that they are assessed. The Progress 8 score derived from the results will be published online, reported in the media, and help shape public perception of the school. To point to qualities like courtesy, hard work and honesty is to invite the dismissal that such things cannot be measured so cannot count towards government statistics.

The year that is past has been difficult, most difficult for those whose home environment is not conducive to study and those whose access to the Internet is less than ideal. How does one devise an assessment adequate to the purpose of reviewing a year filled with holes for most and gaping chasms for some?

Sitting at the front of a science laboratory to supervise an assessment of a lower attainment set, there is a feeling of a chill sensed more than forty years ago.

An analogue clock is inadequate to the task of telling them how much time they have. An online digital timer is projected onto the screen: it is the only format of time that many of them will know.

The science papers are stapled into a booklet, there is a stern formality in the printing and presentation of the questions. Such a format is necessary to help the students prepare to prepare for the reality of the GCSE examinations they face in ten months’ time.

There is an unaccustomed silence in the room. Shouts from the PE teacher supervising athletics training are audible. From a laboratory next door, the lesson on light can be easily followed by anyone not focused upon the paper in front of them.

It is a strange way of preparing fifteen year olds for life. Perhaps formal academic examinations are appropriate for higher attainment students, but for those who would never wish for a university education, they seem an odd way of doing things,

There was a woman walking along the footpath beside the A38 today. It was a warm afternoon, some sunshine between the clouds. A summer’s day out in the fresh air, what could be more healthy?

Clearly, even taking a walk through the country on a fine day is now regarded as dangerous, for the woman was wearing a Covid visor.

In school, measures remain in place. Except for movement between lessons, year groups remain in their own areas of the school. The windows are expected to be open all day, no matter the weather. Students are expected to line up outside when they arrive, even if it is raining, and are expected to be outside at break and lunchtimes. Catering arrangements are strictly regulated.  One way systems operate in the corridors. At the end of lessons, desks are expected to be wiped down with virucidal spray.

While the students may be segregated within the school gates, outside they of course mix freely. In some cases they have to mix, they come from the same household. There is no prospect of distancing among students in the classroom, how could there be when there may be thirty of them in a room? The corridors are filled before classes come into a room. It means that staff staying even one metre away from the assembled students becomes difficult.

From September until Christmas, apart from equipping the classrooms with hand sanitizers and spray and paper towels to wipe the desks, there were no other precautions deemed necessary. Yet there is no evidence of teachers being cut down in swathes. Even when face coverings became mandatory, I chose not to wear one in the classroom. I am asthmatic and found wearing a mask difficult.

When going to other contexts, it always seemed odd to encounter people behind Perspex screens and wearing visors. I wear no mask and I teach sixteen teaching sets – more than four hundred students. I pass many more in the corridors. I have countless conversations.

Perhaps teachers have been regarded as more immune to infection than those behind the screens in shops and banks and offices. Perhaps years of exposure to infections is thought to have built up an immunity to illness among those who stand at the front of the classroom.

Or perhaps teachers are evidence that Covid is not a threat to the majority of the population. If a sixty year old asthmatic with hypertension and occasional angina is not in danger, then not many people are.

Among all the stories of vaccines in the news, it was easy to miss the story on Friday that there could be a “superhero” vaccine developed.  According to Professor Euan Ashley:

This has the potential to greatly reduce the burden of diseases with a genetic component such as Alzheimer’s disease, liver disease, coronary heart disease and associated conditions such as strokes, and vascular dementia.

The vaccine would work through modifying a gene:

Instead of changing a cell signal like a regular medication does the treatment would change a gene letter. The advantage, just like a vaccine, is that you would only need one injection and so wouldn’t have to take it every day like a regular medicine.

The prospect of adjusting genes recalled a ten day clergy course in 2007 at Saint George’s House in Windsor Castle. It was a course that brought an encounter with an eminent biologist who later became a Nobel laureate. The Chatham House rules operative at the conference forbade the naming of a person; one could quote, but not attribute.

The biologist lectured for an hour on human genetics and cloning. At times very technical, the lecture progressed to a point where it became disturbing. In the group sessions afterwards, those present were given five scenarios to consider. The first in the list of five was the use of IVF treatment to assist a couple to have a baby. The list then included progressively more complex interventions. The fifth scenario was that a couple had lost a child in a motor crash and there was the possibility of using genetic material from the dead child to clone it and thus recreate the child who had been lost.

Most present would probably have been of a fairly conservative and traditional frame of mind, however, a majority did approve of the use of IVF treatment. Support for intervention then declined scenario by scenario until there was barely any support for the idea of cloning a child.

The gathering reconvened for a plenary session and the biologist asked the clerical gathering for responses. He listened and declared, “you are as conservative as ever. You haven’t moved in years”.

Asked which interventions he would support, he responded, “All of them”.

What were his criteria for intervention?

“To relieve suffering”.

How did he describe “suffering?”

“Whatever the people affected believe suffering to be.”

The seasoned military padre beside me shifted uneasily on his seat and spoke up, “I have red hair. I was teased terribly as a child for having red hair. Do you think it would be appropriate to use genetic engineering if parents said they did not want a child with red hair?”

The scientist half shrugged and held his right hand open towards the questioner. “What do you think?”

When pressed, he responded in simple terms, “What can be done, will be done”.

It was a stark, blunt statement of the reality of the world in which the prospective Nobel laureate lived. The clergy there might have wished it otherwise, ethicists might wish it otherwise; most scientists might wish it otherwise; but if someone pre-eminent in their field suggests that what can be done will be done, then legal frameworks and perceptions of what is “rational” seem unlikely to inhibit such developments.

If what can be done will be done and if science can really develop a “superhero” vaccine, what might be the possibilities for evil as well as good might emerge?

A ceremony to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of evacuation had been reported on the television news the previous day. The report prompted her recollections of that distant summer, a time written on the pages of history books but fresh and real to her.

Her husband Jim had served with the Royal Army Medical Corps, rising to the rank of captain. He had been a member of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force that had gone to France at the beginning of the Second World War.

When hostilities began on 10th May 1940, the British forces were immediately driven back to the English channel. Jim had been with his unit at Dunkirk, but the invading army had closed in and they had been forced to move south  to avoid capture. His widow recalled:

“They went to Dieppe. A ship was meant to rescue them. It was commanded by the queen’s cousin. What do you call him? Mountbatten. Yes. He tried to get into Dieppe, but he hadn’t a chance. He had to sail on – he went to Malta.

“Anyway, Jim and his men went to Saint Nazaire, but he didn’t make it onto the troopship doing the evacuation, which was a good thing, because it was sunk. There was nothing they could do. They went out into the countryside. He spent the summer making hay with French farmers. Eventually, they got him onto a coalboat going out of Saint Nazaire – there were so many German submarines in the channel that the boat had to sail halfway to America before turning back and heading for England”.

Today in Liverpool there will be a service to remember the sinking of that troopship, HMT Lancastria. The worst maritime disaster in British history, it is estimated that between 4,000 and 6,000 people died when it was sunk, so overcrowded were its decks.

The uncertainty about how many were aboard the Lancastria contrasts with the exactness that exists about many aspects of Second World War history. Perhaps the impressionistic accounts are more in keeping with the flux and confusion of the times.

Even the story of Captain Jim seems to have elements that will forever be unverifiable. How many of his unit were with him through the weeks that followed the loss of the Lancastria? France surrendered eight days after the sinking, how quickly was there a resistance network to shelter British servicemen trapped by the Nazi occupation? Where would the master of a coalboat have claimed to have been sailing when sailing from Saint Nazaire? Would the British have allowed such a boat to return to France? How many things can never be known?