The bumpy road to a normal school year

UAE schools require students to wear masks in most cases. Courtesy: The Indian High Group of Schools

Many of the children who went back to school in the UAE yesterday hardly remember life before the Covid-19 pandemic. The youngest pupils have come to know only a socially distanced school life that toggles between physical and virtual classrooms; the steady reintroduction of in-person teaching in the UAE and other countries is an effort at “back to normal” for parents and the school system, but a new normal for them.

Getting there is critical, given how many formative experiences young children have missed out on, but it is not without huge challenges. Two years on from the start of the pandemic, education in most countries remains a stop-start affair. Monday’s return to classes in the UAE was meant to be a fresh start in many ways – the start of a new year, a new term and a new Monday-to-Friday teaching schedule in most of the country’s schools. But as The National reported, more than 30 private schools in Dubai alone were forced to switch to distance learning for the next week, after several members of the schools’ communities had either tested positive for Covid-19 or come into close contact with someone who had. If the 2020-2021 school year was one of a great shift to remote learning, this year’s will be one of constant adapting and readapting to society’s unpredictable post-Covid-19 recovery.

Luckily few are better practiced at the art of adaptation than parents. When several staff members at Dubai College, one of the UAE’s oldest independent schools, tested positive this week, parents with professional teaching qualifications volunteered to cover their shifts. It is an extraordinary example of the kind of sacrifices and efforts being made by parents all over the country to maintain their children’s education and well-being throughout constant shifts in school and work schedules over the course of the pandemic.

Few are better practiced at the art of adaptation than parents

In Abu Dhabi, private schools announced a switch to distance learning for at least the first two weeks of the new term, with the hope of a return to classrooms when the current wave of the pandemic subsides. School administrators and education authorities in the emirate have put in place new safeguards to ensure students’ health when they return.

For instance, the Al Hosn app, the mobile phone application used to record UAE residents’ vaccinations, PCR tests and green passes, now provides parents with information on the vaccination rates of the student body at their children’s school. A colour-coded grading system, based on the vaccination levels, regulates to what extent schools can switch back to in-person education and what activities will be allowed when they do. For instance, schools with fewer than 65 per cent of students vaccinated may only hold grade-level events (e.g. events for all fifth-graders), whereas those with more than 85 per cent vaccinated can hold school-wide events, like assemblies.

Getting education back to a place where children can live normal childhoods without putting themselves or their parents and teachers at risk is, clearly, fraught with challenges. Raising children – pandemic or no pandemic – tends to be that way. But success is the result of the community – parents, teachers, school administrators and government officials – pulling together in children’s best interests. Judging by the way school communities have pulled together in the UAE in recent months, prospects for the country’s students appear promising.