The fourth wave & wilful blindness
This image fascinated me ...
I saw it in a recent LinkedIn post by the brilliant Richard Claydon, questioning the rush - in the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) world, at least - by organisational leaders to get back to "business-as-usual" without paying attention to the wellbeing needs of staff or the fact that our relationship with work changed during the pandemic.
Originally tweeted in March 2020 by Dr Victor Tseng, the image sought to highlight how previous pandemics had played out in four distinct - and distinctly different - waves of harm, and to warn authorities to be prepared for the impact of each one.
For Claydon, the fourth wave is now well underway, with psychic trauma, mental illness, economic injury and burnout challenging not just the health services that are still overburdened with the first, second and third waves, but also adversely impacting all other types of organisation. A specialist in leadership development, he concerned that leaders are reacting by focusing on productivity and their bottom lines, and overlooking the fact that workers are "emotionally and cognitively exhausted after years of trauma and need some slow down time". This is compounding the issue and driving ever higher levels of employee turnover and disruption.
As I read this, I couldn't help thinking about schools; and not the teachers but the kids.
I'd just been following a thread on Twitter about a school in the north of England that had painted pink lines on the playground and in corridors to define where children should stand or walk, and pink dots to demarcate "duty points" which "staff must occupy if empty". Now of course it's not uncommon for schools - or other organisations - to paint lines on the ground to direct traffic, as it were, but what's interesting to me is why this school would post about it. In fact, it's one of many examples of what seems to have become a trend on social media for some educators in UK schools to post quite detailed accounts of how they create 'order' and 'calm' through compliance-focused practices in response to what's generally seen as a 'surge' in challenging behaviour by children.
Other examples are a bit more extreme, including the case outlined in this thread from an investigative journalist highlighting how a school's approaches to controlling behaviour are such that parents have raised concerns about “evidence of harm to mental, and occasionally physical, health as a direct result of the culture being enforced in the school." They claim that it has resulted in “depression, anxiety, behavioural tics and suicidal ideation in students that are directly related to severe punishments for minor misdemeanours,” plus “urinary tract infections and students soiling themselves due to heavy restrictions around toilet access”.
What's interesting to me is how these accounts and the practices described are encouraged and celebrated on Twitter by a range of people including the government's 'behaviour tsar', who also defends them against anyone who questions the logic or ethics - or even the educational value - of these compliance-focused and punitive approaches.
It's interesting because it seems quite a risk. If he and those he champions are wrong - if their apparent certainty is misplaced - the consequences are staggering.
What if the behavioural changes we're seeing in young people in schools are in fact driven by the fourth wave rather than just naughtiness or unruliness? What if these children are responding in perfectly natural psychological ways to their own experiences of the pandemic; of having seen the adults they trust become scared and withdrawn, of experiencing extreme uncertainty and fear, of hearing about death rates and food shortages and invisible dangers all the time on the news, of being locked-down and not able to see friends or extended family, of being told to fear school and peers and then return and re-engage, and of then being expected to sit down and catch up as if nothing happened, without any acknowledgement of their own efforts or sacrifice, and without any closure.
It seems to me to be at least a possibility, which would - in a sector that claims to be ‘evidence-informed’ - give pause for thought. But what we see instead are some schools and government-paid advisers turning a blind eye to this and promoting ever harder interventions and sanctions. They must know at some emotional (if not professional) level that their certainty is misplaced, and that the approaches they promote may be potentially harmful to the young people in their care. At the very least, they’re missing the opportunity to explore more humane and psychologically-informed ways to help children learn and to kick-start a sustainable long-term recovery.