First of all, I don’t expect most people to be interested, this is just for me to write down my thoughts and reflecting on the past 2 years of sixth form education in the UK with it abruptly changing due to the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic.

So, there I was starting my 2 year BTEC IT Extended Diploma course in September 2019. Everything was fairly new, a new way of doing and submitting work and a classroom full of people that I’ve never met before apart from 2 faces from high school. Anyways, I was settling into the flow of work with my 4 teachers and was doing quite well for myself with distinctions in my work and then around December 2019, I’ve read about a mysterious virus from Wuhan on the r/HongKong subreddit. I didn’t put too much thought into it though I did believe that this would become SARS 2.0 which was concerning but since it hasn’t arrived on the shores of the UK at this point, I didn’t give it much thought apart from keeping my eye on developments as they came in from Asia.

January 2020 was when I was being concerned about what’s going on in predominantly Asia due to the Lunar New Year coming up then and the governments then didn’t restrict travelling which allowed the largest annual movement of people which helped to spread the virus faster than usual. During this time, life continued as usual with the thought of the virus hanging above with memes and jokes spreading around this time.

March 2020 was when things started the change, my college announced that we would go onto online learning a bit earlier than the rest of the country on the 19th of March 2020 and hopefully be back on the 20th of April 2020. Needless to say, that return date never happened and it wouldn’t be until September 2020 when we got back onto campus. Then on the 26th of March 2020, we entered lockdown. At this point, I was already on online classes so not much changed for me though it did mean getting packages slowed to a crawl, especially with Royal Mail. 1st class mail would take a week to arrive and ironically 2nd class mail would arrive first in my experience during this time.

Online lessons at this point mostly consisted of emailing the teacher that we’re still alive and well and maybe sign onto an internally hosted video call platform called the Big Blue Button. Soon after, we were told that assessed learning has effectively stopped meaning that there wasn’t really a point to doing work so everyone slowly just abandoned work until September apart from some support work that we were given to help us in year 13.

September 2020 rolls around and after a bit, the college campus opened up for us part-time with new one way routes (some of which made no sense), slightly modified rooms (though we were still packed in like sardines), an increased use of Microsoft Teams and hand sanitiser that smelled funny (one of my teachers thought it smelled like boiled cabbage). Things were different now and since I did hardly any work for many months, it was difficult to get back to the same level of productivity as before but I worked on it and because of some foresight, I made a program to help me to keep on track with work as well as separated work and play spaces to get things back on track and then at the start of the new year, another lockdown which knocked me back to square one in terms of my productivity and once again, I had to work to get my productivity rates back up though I don’t think it has been back since the New Years lockdown.

March 2021 rolls around and once again the college campus reopens partly though now with more restrictions and even longer lessons for some reason. My typical 1.5 hour lessons were extended to 3 hours which didn’t help with my productivity whatsoever. More changes occurred onsite too, we could no longer eat in the cafeteria or common room and we were confined to our classrooms. This continued until the end of my time there.

Around May 2021, we were told about TAGS which meant teacher assessed grades which were meant to avoid the calamity of last year’s grading system where students were graded by the algorithm and that didn’t end very well which caused a backlash from students and schools against the government and they later reversed it so that the grades were teacher assessed and this is where we are as of writing this.

Looking back, it has been a bumpy ride and I have no idea about the long-lasting impact of this pandemic on us in the future, with travelling still mostly halted, I will probably end up spending the new few months on my PC and playing games and sometimes updating this blog and waiting for the start of the next period of my life and I just hope it won’t be as much of a rollercoaster as this period has been but it probably will be.