September is always an exciting time in English and Welsh Schools. There’s a buzz in the air. Teachers are rested and, hopefully, relaxed after a long summer break and the fragrance of hope hangs in the air. 

The September classroom is built on optimism and the alluring twinkle of potential waiting to be unleashed. The teacher often does not know the students and equally the students begin by showing their best behaviour to the new teacher, cautiously learning the expectations and boundaries of their class. Parents also begin the school year hopeful for the progress and happiness of their offspring. The days are long and often sunny, the cold, dark December days do not yet loom large on the horizon. In many ways, it is the most enchanting time of the year for those in school. The potency of possibility for all involved.

Yet, the past two years, the September start in schools has had a different feel. Gone are the days of Autumn Term 2019, the last full school year, when routines in school life ticked along as they had for decades. The Covid-19 pandemic has forever altered the psychological landscape of starting the school year. Last September, school reopened with a raft of new regulations on bubbles, hand washing, and track and trace responsibilities. Secondary school children were required to take lateral flow tests before entering their school following the lockdown that began in March 2020. Everyone was cautious. Coronavirus was still lurking around in the wider community, but there was a belief that mitigation measures would prevent or contain the spread: masks were required, isolation and bubble systems were designed to create a sense of security or, at a minimum, support. Many suspected, though perhaps did not know, that infections would sweep through schools. And indeed, they did – resulting in another national lockdown in January 2021. Another incomplete school year; another switch to online lessons.

This year the atmosphere is again different. The vaccine has been administered to over 40 million British adults, all social distancing regulations had been legally removed weeks earlier. Masks are not required, isolation rules have changed, and even international travel is beginning to return without testing and tracking and tracing obligations. So, this should feel like a normal school year perhaps? 

However, teachers, parents, and students may not feel as unfettered by concerns as the government guidelines suggest. Being a teacher on the frontline, I am acutely aware that everyone involved in school life is anxious and concerned. The first weeks of term have seen infections rise again, which are in double vaccinated adults, possibly transmitted by asymptomatic children. With no bubble bursting, it is almost impossible to accurately know where infections are starting from. Parents are not necessarily told about outbreaks and now nobody goes home. Gone are the moments when an appearance by the Head teacher ushered a raft of immediate phone calls and the herding of children into a separate room in the building. For all intents and purposes, schools can pretend Covid-19 is just another flu.

Many parents may be feeling anxious about sending children into school. Many school staff are anxious too. We are in the middle of a wait and see approach. School communities are at the forefront of testing the waters at a time when many workers remain at home and have not yet returned to working in offices in person. Nobody is certain what will happen in the next few months, especially as winter approaches – a time where colds and infections normally increase.

Nadim Zahawi, MP, recently stepped into this maelstrom as the newly appointed Secretary of State for Education. The school community are waiting to see what impact or changes he will oversee in his role. In his first major speech to educators at the NAHT annual conference, Zahawi indicated that he would put wellbeing and attendance at the centre of his policies and increase spending to ‘record’ levels. He also said, “Another key priority for me will be getting to the root of what is causing children to be persistently absent and then tackling it head on”.

That sounds like a very positive beginning. However, as recent figures show that Coronavirus infection is one of the leading causes of current absences, it is hard to know what this statement means. Will he reintroduce mitigation measures and the bubble system? Unlikely. Current measures seem to be firmly fixed. Will he give some timely guidance over next summer’s exams so that everyone can prepare in time? Not so far. With 204,000 students in England absent due to Covid in the last two weeks of September, it remains to be seen if this rhetoric will translate into meaningful action.

Teachers and students everywhere will soldier on as they always do, limping towards the July end of year. Come what may, next September schools will restart with their usual bound of optimism and hope. Only time will tell what challenges this academic year will bring. 

Covid-19 has formed and impacted a huge part of our daily lives, from the elderly to newborn babies. The wearing of face masks to slow the transmission of the virus has been one of the most apparent changes in our lives. There are unquestionable health benefits related to the use of facemasks, however the question arises, does the use of these face coverings by children in particular have the potential to impair their development?

In early childhood development, children go through sensitive periods where language and emotional development are rapidly developing. With the mandatory wearing of face masks by these children in kindergartens, day care centres and schools, parents in particular are concerned about their health. 

Professor Kang Lee of the applied psychology and human development department at the University of Toronto has studied the development of facial recognition skills in children. He highlights three potential issues that might occur due to facemasks in the interaction of children with their classmates or teachers. 

Firstly, he mentioned that kids below the age of 12 may have difficulty recognising people, as they tend to focus on individual features of the person. Secondly, Lee pointed out potential problems with emotional recognition and social interaction. He stated “a lot of our emotional information, we display through movement of our facial musculature” and with masks, that musculature and thus the information will be obscured. The last issue Lee brought up was speech recognition. He said even though speech communication is thought of to be taking place through phonetics and sound, a large portion of the information can actually be communicated visually. Therefore, the wearing of masks has the potential to impair speech recognition in children, as they will be unable to notice the visual clues present in a conversation. 

Dr. David Lewkowicz, a senior scientist at the Haskins Laboratories and the Yale Child Study Center, has studied lip-reading in babies. He states that around the age of six to eight months, as babies start babbling, they tend to focus on the “person’s mouth” instead of on the eyes. They try to “master their own native speech, getting not only auditory cues but visual.” 

Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Child Emotion Lab has also stated that in fact being able to use others’ verbal or facial cues to figure out how someone is feeling or pick up on safe or dangerous aspects of environments and people around them is a crucial task for young kids. Masks therefore have the potential to impair children’s ability to pick up on such cues. 

However, although masks can pose potential developmental problems, many scientists have found that the gravity of such interferences, while present, are not significant – especially in the long term and do not outweigh the risk of potential death from Covid-19. 

A study was carried out by Ruba during the pandemic where she and her co-author showed more than 80 children (aged seven to 13) photographs of faces that were either unobstructed, covered by a surgical mask or wearing sunglasses. The three faces displayed emotions of sadness, anger or fear. Ruba then asked the children to assign one of six emotions to each face. The results showed that the children were correct in their responses about uncovered faces 66% of the time. With faces covered by masks, the children had trouble but were able to correctly identify sadness about 28% of the time, anger 27% and fear 18%. These percentages were higher than the odds (approximately 17%) of correctly guessing one emotion out of the total six labels. 

Considering these findings, as well as children’s innate ability to adapt to dynamic situations and surroundings, some scientists do not suspect any long-term impacts of masks on children’s development.

Dr Hugh Bases, a clinical associate professor of paediatrics at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone Health is one of the experts not too concerned with the effects of mask-wearing. He states “we will quickly recover” from whatever impact mask wearing has had. 

Similarly, Amy Learmonth, a professor of psychology at William Paterson University in New Jersey said balancing the risk of someone dying from coronavirus with potentially slow social and language development in children “just doesn’t seem worth it to me … when all the evidence we have indicates that they will catch up and they will be OK”.

Dr. Lewkovicz states while “masks are not a great thing for communication in young kids”, the time children spend at home with people who are not masked will give them a chance to practice picking up the visual cues. He advises parents as well as teachers to try and “encourage their kids to communicate more through gestures,” for example via interactive games, if they are worried for their child’s development. 

 “We should give more credit to our own children,” Eva Chen, a developmental psychologist and an associate professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, says. She adds “that being covered for a few hours every day isn’t going to make them less able to recognise social expressions.”

As such, it can be concluded that masks may have some potential developmental impacts on growing children; however, the effects can be easily recovered from and are currently not a major point of concern for various experts. 

As many students prepare for the upcoming school year, there are concerns over how children can transition smoothly back into physical school learning.

Students have undergone many adversities due to the pandemic. Missed graduations, parties and school events have left students longing for a return to normality. Online learning is not suitable for everyone since countless students learn better physically in an environment surrounded by fellow peers and teachers. Finding ways to cope with this change, has raised awareness on mental health issues and the needs of students. 20% of college students say that their mental health has worsened due to the pandemic. With the new school season approaching, feelings of anxiety have risen as schools desperately try to figure out a way to help return students settle into school life. 

With the Delta variant continuing to sweep its way across the globe, and restrictions loosening, it raises the question of how schools will ensure the maximum safety of students, as they transition from an online environment into in-person learning. In Canada, many universities have made changes to the way they handle the pandemic. The University of Ottawa has announced that to be on campus, faculty, staff and pupils must be fully vaccinated to limit the spread of the virus and its variants. Following this decision, other universities such as the University of Guelph and Queen’s University have followed in their footsteps. In addition to this, proof of vaccination and rapid testing sites have been added on campuses. More human interaction amongst peers on campus is encouraged this year. With the right precautions in place, students and employees can return to classrooms. 

How will children attending secondary school be protected against the virus if those under the age of 12 are not eligible for the vaccine? As more and more research on the side- effects of the vaccine emerges, more data is arriving from Pfizer and Moderna. In Canada, Pfizer hopes to submit data from the trials by the end of the year. Currently testing in phases two and three, Pfizer is testing the safety, sufficiency, and resistance for those who are aged 5-11, and in children aged six months to five years. However, restrictions have become more lenient as more of the world’s population continues to get vaccinated. Research shows that if people do not get vaccinated, more variants will arise. With relaxed rules on social distancing and masks, parents are worried about sending their children back to school. Even though students will return to schools in the fall, Covid precautions will still be followed. In Scotland, staff and students will continue to wear face masks and maintain three feet from each other while on school property. While implementing regular hand washing, sanitizing and usage of face masks, children who are not vaccinated because they are not eligible, will have to continue to safely learn from a distance. With flexible rules, the UK government encourages the usage of face masks even if it is not required by law. However, if cases continue to rise and you are in crowded indoor places, masks are highly recommended. 
While the rules will differ from country to country, Canadian educational boards have a system in place to ensure the well-being of students and staff. However, the biggest challenge that remains is to limit the spread of the virus as more mutations occur in different countries. For example, in Florida, 440 students already need to quarantine due to the virus, just two days after school began. Even though students have the option to opt-out of in-person learning in Canadian universities as some schools have made masks mandatory, cases have sprung up regardless of the health precautions taken. Therefore, this proves that it is necessary to constantly protect yourself and others from the virus by getting vaccinated and continuing to practice proper hygiene and social distancing. If done so, hopefully, students will not have to shift constantly from in-person to online learning.

There’s nothing else quite like it. The anticipation, the nerves, the inability to sleep. Watching the clock, as time seems to slow down to a snail’s pace and no amount of effort can distract you from the looming arrival of results. And that’s just the parents. England let out a sigh of relief on Tuesday, as A-Level and BTEC results were released after anxious months of waiting.

To begin with, it should be acknowledged that this cohort of students have faced challenges unlike any other in England. They have had two years of disrupted, disjointed courses and that any of them could manage to scrape together the wherewithal to complete the two years, is a great testament to their resilience and tenacity. Those of us who are parents or school staff will know only too well the physical and mental strength these students have needed. In the face of a global pandemic, bursting bubbles and online lessons for months on end, these students have done themselves proud. Similarly, teachers have had to commit long and grueling hours to completing Teacher Assessed Grades (TAGs), which were introduced with limited notice and ambiguous guidelines. These teachers deserve our thanks. Whatever the results, the effort of both staff and students in getting to the end of this academic route should be acknowledged. Congratulations.

Yet, the results do reveal a lot about the state of education in England today. Behind the headlines of record pass levels – 44.8% of all grades were A* or A – lies another layer of analysis which should not be ignored.

First, there was a huge disparity between Independent and State school results. 70.9% of all Independent School results were A* or A compared to 39% at comprehensive schools. That’s not far from double the difference in outcomes for students. Many commentators may use this data to draw attention to the unfairness of having private fee-paying schools in the education system. Yet, in reality this argument draws focus away from the government and draws it towards the wealthy. Rather than bemoaning the privilege of the economically advantaged, we should instead ask why the government allows the continual underfunding of its own schools. Why are they prepared to freeze teacher pay, and remove additional funding from the most economically disadvantaged children in the middle of a health crisis? Even worse than the errors in guidance which were changed silently hoping no-one would notice, was the little promoted decision not to bother with promised mental health training for education staff to support primary children at a time when mental ill-health is on the rise.

These A-Level and BTEC results don’t expose the inequality of opportunity; they expose how little investment state schools receive, and how little this government is prepared to invest in the future of this nation’s children. 

A second trend from this year’s results is that girls did better overall in all subjects (apart from Modern Foreign Languages and performing/expressive arts) than boys. The conclusion drawn by the Education Policy Institute is that as boys tend to do well from high-stakes final exams, girls were advantaged by Teacher Assesses Grades which could draw on a range of evidence. This begs the question: is the current system fairly accounting for all abilities or is it catering to a specific skill set? Are girls disadvantaged by the current exam system? If so, what will be done to change this? In previous years, coursework has been scrapped due to suspected teacher bias in marking and teaching. Yet, this year’s cohort will have been subject to the same suspicions but are making their way to further education nonetheless. Are exam-only, no module, no coursework exams the best way to assess our students? Is this the moment when alternatives could be considered? 

Lastly, existing gaps based on ethnicity have widened. A government report found that ‘the longstanding gaps indicating lower outcomes of Black African, Black Caribbean, mixed white and Black Caribbean, and mixed other candidates relative to prior-attainment-matched white British candidates have widened by between 1.88 and 2.04 percentage points’ This is further evidence that the current system is not meeting the needs of all pupils, that some groups continue to perform at levels lower than their peers. Clearly whatever steps have been taken to address this issue have not had an impact on grades. Perhaps for this group, exam only grades remove teacher bias in the marking system but it is clear that there should be some discussion around addressing this inequality.

So, congratulations to all students and educators – and the families who supported them through online lessons listened with half an ear, missed deadlines, burst bubbles, lateral flow tests and all the uncertainty of a disrupted two academic years. May your future shine brightly and may you never have to learn or teach in such circumstances again.

Why do we punish people? Some argue that justice is met only when the punishment fits the crime — an “eye for an eye,” a death for a death. Among the many theories supporting the death penalty, the notion of retribution is perhaps the most common one. A retributivist would say that punishment is justified by the simple moral fact that culpable wrongdoers deserve it. A retributivist believes that justice is served by punishing the guilty and thus, the desert of an offender not only gives the state the right to punish him but also the duty to do so. Supporters of the death penalty also claim that it deters criminals from committing certain felonies — this is the utilitarian perspective. However, research points to a different observation. Some studies have concluded that executions actually increase homicides while others say that executions do not affect murder rates at all. In reality, the death penalty is not a more effective deterrent nor does its existence prevent criminals from acting.

Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for a crime. The sentence ordering that someone is punished with the death penalty is called a death sentence, and the act of carrying out such a sentence is known as an execution. A prisoner awaiting their execution is condemned and is “on death row.” Every day, people around the world are executed and sentenced to death by the state as punishment for a variety of crimes — some of which are arbitrary. Aside from Belarus and Russia, all European countries have abolished the death penalty. In 1998, Canada abolished the death penalty. 27 states in the US still authorise capital punishment. 

In the US in 2020, 17 people were executed, and 18 death sentences were imposed. As of 30^th June 2021, five prisoners have been executed in the US by the US federal government and one state this year. There are 2,591 people on death row in the United States as of 16^th December 2020. Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court, states have executed 1,532 people (as of March 2021). Since 1973, there have been 185 death row exonerations (as of March 2021). 

Public opinion on the death penalty varies considerably by country and by the crime in question. In Norway – one of the countries that a majority of the population is against execution – only about 25% are in favor of the death penalty. A 2020 Gallup poll shows that 55% of Americans support the death penalty for an individual convicted of murder, down from 65% in 2006, and 68% in 2001 — a clear indication of a gradual decline in public approval of capital punishment. 

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a non-profit organisation based in Washington, DC that focuses on disseminating studies and reports related to the death penalty, more than 75% of the murder victims in cases resulting in an execution were white, even though nationally only 50% of murder victims generally are white. In Louisiana, the odds of a death sentence were 97% higher for those whose victim was white than for those whose victim was black. In 96% of states where there have been reviews of race and the death penalty, there was a pattern of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendant discrimination, or both.

Many leading organisations that oppose and fight to abolish the death penalty – including Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) –  hold the view that capital punishment: “inherently violates the constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment and the guarantees of due process of law and of equal protection under the law.” Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC’s Senior Director of Research and Special Projects and the lead author of the recent report “Enduring Injustice: the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty,” has said that: 

“The death penalty has been used to enforce racial hierarchies throughout United States history, beginning with the colonial period and continuing to this day. Its discriminatory presence as the apex punishment in the American legal system legitimizes all other harsh and discriminatory punishments. That is why the death penalty must be part of any discussion of police reform, prosecutorial accountability, reversing mass incarceration, and the criminal legal system as a whole.” 

Although there is no way to tell whether a defendant was innocent, wrongful convictions statistically must occur as no system is ever infallible. A National Academy of Sciences study released in 2014 found that approximately four percent of death row inmates are innocent. By that math, in 2014, as many as 30 of the 737 prisoners awaiting execution in California were wrongly convicted. Is it ever justifiable to execute even one innocent person? The price of capital punishment goes far beyond taxes and a dollar amount, with wrongful executions still a huge risk factor, especially considering the disproportionate rate at which minorities and people of color are sentenced to death. Nevertheless, “studies have consistently found that a system of criminal law in which the death penalty is available as a punishment is far more expensive than a system in which the most severe punishment is life without parole or a long prison term.” 

The average cost of defending a trial in a federal capital punishment case is $620,932, about eight times that of a federal murder case in which the death penalty is not sought. A study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Budgetary Repercussions of Capital Convictions,” by Katherine Baicker, found that: “those defendants whose representation was the least expensive, and thus who received the least amount of attorney and expert time, had an increased probability of receiving a death sentence.” Moreover, capital cases burden county budgets with large and unexpected costs. “Counties manage these high costs by decreasing funding for highways and police and by increasing taxes. The report estimates that between 1982-1997 the extra cost of capital trials was $1.6 billion.”

Is there truly a difference between retribution and revenge? Does revenge justify capital punishment? No, it does not, nor should it. Indeed, no system is always fair, but years of evidence and statistical findings have shown that capital punishment is an inherently flawed institution. With black and brown men disproportionately sentenced to death for the same crime their white counterparts are given lower sentences for, with the fact that, in the US alone, 130 people sentenced to death have been found innocent since 1973, it is quite difficult to argue otherwise. During its final week in office, the Trump administration carried out its 13th execution, an unprecedented event that concluded just five days before the inauguration of President Joe Biden, who opposes the federal death penalty. In 2020, President Biden had announced that he no longer supported capital punishment and pledged to push for legislation to eliminate it at the federal level and incentivise states to do the same. As per his promise, President Biden’s Justice Department has ordered a moratorium, a pause in federal executions, on carrying out federal death sentences after the surge in executions under the Trump administration. Like most grassroots movements that have changed the trajectory of government policies and social norms, the future of the death penalty is heavily dependent upon public opinion and the shifted perspective of educated individuals on the subject is an obvious signal of a potential reform on capital punishment.

Recently, there was a discovery made of light being ejected from behind a supermassive black hole which is 800 million light-years away from Earth. This huge discovery was made by scientists from Stanford University and proved the theory of general relativity by Albert Einstein to be factual.

These light waves that have been discovered are called “echoes” and were detected in the form of X-rays. The theory of general relativity states that the gravitational pull of black holes is so strong that it not only traps the light waves, it can twist magnetic fields and bend light waves right around them. All this meant that you could see light waves behind a black hole as well, according to Einstein. A Stanford University, astrophysicist, Dan Wilkins stated that “we shouldn’t be able to see anything that’s behind the black hole. The reason we can see that is because the black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself”.  Another professor at Stanford University, Roger Blandford said that “50 years ago, when astrophysicists starting speculating about how the magnetic field might behave close to a black hole, they had no idea that one day we might have the techniques to observe this directly and see Einstein’s general theory of relativity in action”.

For simplicity’s sake, black holes were initially believed to be empty spaces but this was soon debunked after researchers conducted more research. Now we know that a black hole is basically a space or a very small area that is packed with a great amount of matter, which can bend light waves around it. This recent discovery about black holes emitting light from behind was made with the use of a special high power X-ray telescope at the centre of a spiral galaxy, Zwicky 1. Furthermore, this discovery will help understand more about coronas which is an aspect of a black hole that has the “brightest continuous sources of light in the universe”.

Moreover, after the discovery of black holes emitting light from behind it, there has also been another discovery. Telescopes have captured a set of rings around one black hole which is actively pulling material away from a companion star. Therefore, there is still, a lot to be learned about our solar system but these discoveries alone could help us advance our knowledge about black holes greatly.