The ‘vertical wall’ learning curve we encountered during the Covid pandemic means we now know how to protect children and pre-empt misinformation, says Hannah Carter
I took the helm of my first headship exactly three weeks before the world stopped.
Back then, my biggest concerns were the nuances of the school improvement plan and getting the canteen queues down.
Then, Covid-19 arrived, and the headteacher job description was torn up.
For those of us in that specific cohort of leadership, the learning curve was not a slope but a vertical wall.
Overnight, we were not just educators. We were logistical commanders, public health deputies and masters of the pivot.
The memories of those early months are a blur of high-vis vests and adrenaline. We did not just teach, we built.
The challenges were granular and relentless.
Health and education intertwined
We transformed sports halls – once the site of exams and five-a-side football – into clinical testing hubs. I remember the surreal sight of invigilators trading pens for swabs and stopwatches for lateral flow timers.
We coordinated food hamper deliveries for families in isolation, turning the school car park into a distribution centre. We dragged a century-old education system into the cloud in a matter of days.
This wasn’t just about “using Zoom”. It was about ensuring a year 4 student in a high-rise flat with one shared tablet could still access a phonics lesson.
Out of that sheer and unadulterated chaos, something unexpected emerged. We developed a blueprint for managing medical incidents that simply did not exist before.
The intersectionality between health and education, once two distinct silos, became permanently intertwined.
The way we monitor wellbeing and physical safety is now woven into the very fabric of how we deliver a curriculum.
A sense of déjà vu
As news of rising meningitis cases began to circulate through our Kent corridors, I felt a strange sense of déjà vu.
To a headteacher who lived through the pandemic in their first years of leadership, this current scare is not alien. While it is deeply concerning, it is a landscape we have navigated before.
The “machinery” of school leadership has been permanently retrofitted for crises.
For example, during the pandemic, we learned that silence is the mother of panic.
Today, if a health alert is issued, we don’t wait for the morning briefing. We utilize the “pings” of our parent portals instantly, providing medical facts from the UK Health Security Agency before the WhatsApp rumours can take root.
The hand-sanitizer stations and “catch it, bin it, kill it” posters aren’t just relics of 2020. They are now standard operating procedures that mitigate the spread of everything from norovirus to group A strep.
We also now maintain live registers of our most clinically vulnerable students. We don’t have to scramble to find who needs protection. We already know who they are, where they sit, and which staff members need to be on high alert.
Yet the emotional weight remains the same. When a health crisis hits a school, it triggers the same core anxieties regarding attendance and engagement.
Operating in ‘grey area’
We find ourselves once again balancing the haunting shadow of lost learning against the immediate necessity of clinical safety.
We are a cohort of leaders who are uniquely skilled at operating in the ‘grey area’. We know how to brief a staff room on symptoms – looking for the classic non-blanching rash or neck stiffness – without sparking an exodus of terrified employees.
We know that behind every data point of a case is a child whose stability is at stake.
People often ask how we cope with the relentless pressure. The truth is that the pandemic tempered us. This intersection of clinical vigilance and educational delivery is our new home.
We do not just run schools anymore. We run community hubs where health, safety, and learning are inseparable.
While the meningitis concern is real and demands our utmost vigilance, we are not starting from scratch.
We have the blueprint, we have the experience, and we have the hard-won resolve of those who have already led through the unimaginable. We are no longer afraid of the fog, we simply know how to turn on the lights.
