Categories
University

@ESADE #Counselorday2016

Originally posted on April 17, 2016 @ 9:00 am

On a rainy Friday morning in Barcelona a group of University Guidance Counsel(l)ors are shepherded onto a executive style bus. We are heading out of Barcelona to Esade’s campus in Santa Cugat, 25km outside of Barcelona. Our hosts are welcoming and warm in juxtaposition to the uncharacteristically cold weather.

Esade are a private but not-for-profit foundation business school in Barcelona that is consistently ranked as one of the best in Europe. For me, as a new guidance couselor, this is the first campus visit/fly-in that I have been invited to and particpated in and it is a very welcome chance for me to chew more ears about my particular predicament that I face at work, as well as network and get under the skin of a non-british university.

As a Brit, educated in British public schools and university I recognise that my appreciation for other Higher Education systems and establishments is somewhat limited. I began this work mindful of my internal Brit-prejudice, and so coming to Esade is a welcome tonic to this.

Esade operate two campuses – their law degree is taught at the Barcelona campus and is taught in Spanish. Their English taught BBA is based in Sant Cugat but they have plans to make all their programs taught in English over the years.

The drive takes about 40 minutes but we are caught up in traffic. I am assured that students can travel into Barcelona by train in under 30 minutes, so students can live in Barcelona and commute into class, but many opt to stay on campus at the purpose built residences.

The campus is charming and understated. The architecture is modern and functional but quite pleasing to look at none the less, and there is a feeling of togetherness on the campus.

The BBA looks like a very interesting option, that appears to be academically rigorous. We are stressed the need for Maths. IB students need to have studied SL Maths at least and A Level students need to have study A2 Math as a minimum for entry. There is an mandatory internship and international exchange program that students have to undertake in the 4th year of their study, that Esade helps its students to access. Teaching is carried out by experienced professionals who still work in business themselves. 270 faculty members are professionals as well.

The students that we speak to and hear from our convincing and impressive. Clearly they have been hand picked from the marketing department but they respond to difficult and testy questions from counselor with calm and laughter. I am particualrly impressed by one student who, when describing his experience in China for his exchange program and internship, is able to deftly demonstrate one of the benefits of this kind of education. His understanding of intercultural subtleties and a tangible demonstration of international-mindedness through his description of life in China as a French national studying in English at a Spanish University, all of which the people he meets have never heard of is applaudable. It is the type of student I hope to create.

The advantages of having an internship as part of your degree aside, Esade has an impressive rate of recruitment from Business. Some business, it seems only recruit from Esade and one other University in Spain. Students are recruited directly into Business and from the marketing it appears that Esade students are respected and sought after.

https://youtu.be/JAJm0gvwCFs

Esade has a global scope with a large number of nationalities making up the student body, plus roughly 150 exchange students at anyone time. This academic exchange in compulsory, as well as the academic internship; students have to go out and make a real connection with the business world. There is also an optional Summer University Development Service where students can undertake voluntary service in Latin America for a summer.

Esade BBA Course Structure

Picture1

One of the additional strings to the Esade bow is the focus on language learning. Students are required to study Spanish even though the course is taught in English, as well as a second language from French or German. They receive official recognition of their proficiency in these languages as part of their certificate. Thus students become equipped with language skills that open the door to working in businesses in the Francophone and German speaking world and either french or german. As an institution they aim  to guarantee the language abilities to the graduate market.

Team work

During the course there is a specific focus on developing practical business skills. Team work is explicitly taught for example.

A final aspect that I thought was really cool and that I had overlooked initially was Esade’s Associations. These are sort of like clubs and societies but with a business twist. Students have to apply to join them, and they have entrance interviews. Each association has a marketing and HR department! and they are often linked to entrepreneurial ideas. One student stated that her DP CAS program taught her all the skills she needed to succeed in the wider life of the school.

Admissions requirements for BBA

Mathematics is essential. Students need to have taken maths during every year of high school and then Maths A level or SL and up for DP students.

There is no need for IELTS test if final two years of school are 100% classes in English. IELTS from 7.

Selection committee meets in January. Decision based on predicted grades. 1 out of 3 applications are rejected. Conditional admissions on passing the school leaving exams.

Deposit only refundable if they are not admitted.

Scholarships and Financial Aid

Average scholarship 9,500 – 58% of Esade students receive it. Not a loan, this is a grant. last year 1.7m euros in the budget.

Awards for academic excellence – 100% and awards for academic merit  – 2,500 euro – first year only.

Talent scholarships – need based 50-70 or 90 of tuition. Good academic record. all 4 years.

Housing scholarships covers 50% of the cost of the residence.

Categories
University

Working with BridgeU

Originally posted on July 17, 2016 @ 9:00 am

Update July 31st 2016: since publishing this blog post earlier in July I received an email from Lucy Stonehill the founder of BridgeU which contained the following correction and update:

Dear Will,

First of all, thank you for the detailed and extremely helpful feedback via your blog post..

We’ve seen that there are certain features that you suggested which we actually already have, but you haven’t seen (obviously that’s our fault for not making them easy to find!) but i wanted to bring them to light in any event: 

  • A search function for specific courses or universities exists (in the shortlist page)
  • The ability to ‘un-discard’ courses or universities and to view them in a discard list

However, I also wanted to raise some of the great points you mentioned that are top priority for us to work on over the summer, such as:

  • Recommending courses on a SL/ HL basis (to remove the possibility of showing courses where the student doesn’t meet the minimum requirements).
  • Enabling you as the counselor to set internal deadlines for your school while ensuring external deadlines are tracked and kept.
  • More detailed annotations on previous successful essays.

Earlier this year I blogged about my discussions with BridgeU and my decision to purchase their platform for use in our school, initially as a trial with our grade 11s (who are currently our oldest grade and just starting their applications to university). It was my intention to keep a running blog of my experience with BridgeU throughout last term, but unfortunately I was not able to meet that commitment, so I am intending in this post to provide an update of my experience with using BridgeU from last term.

Many of the counseling colleagues that I have met with in the last couple of months have been quite interested to hear what our experience of using BridgeU as a school has been, particularly that of the students. I write these reflections with these conversations in mind.

Logistics this term

We launched BridgeU with our cohort on 19th May and a representative of BridgeU ran a session for our 12 students first thing in the morning. Time was unfortunately a little more compressed for this event than I would have liked however the majority of the information was able to conveyed to the students in approximately 40 minutes.

During this session students, signed on to their accounts on the platform that had been set up for them previously. They were shown an overview of the different sections of the platform: University Matching; Strategy Advisor; University Scrapbook and Writing Builder and then began to complete their section entitled Profile Builder.

After this I  set up tasks for the students on BridgeU, met with my students individually at least once for 30 minutes over the next few weeks to discuss their profiles and matches and then in the final week ran a university applications workshop which we started by having students finish the tasks that I had set them over the previous weeks on BridgeU before looking at UCAS and the CommonApp in more depth.

The Platform

The insides of the platform are fairly straight forward and easy to understand. As an advisor I set up tasks for my students to complete. Each of these tasks corresponds to specific parts of the application cycle. The first being University Matching. Before completing this task students need to have completed the profile builder which is the area of the platform where students enter their details around country of interest, type of university, courses of interest and predicted grades.

Once the profile is completed, students can then see the university matches generated by the platforms algorithm and begin to “shortlist” or “discard” universities and courses. Under university matching, courses are presented to students in three categories: Reach, Match and Safety. In each group students will initially be presented with three choices in each of these categories. To see more choices for a particular category they have to opt to either “shortlist” or “discard” a course. Once they have clicked either of these options the course will disappear and a new option will be presented. In this way the students sift through all of the options available to them, discarding the ones they don’t like and shortlisting the ones that they remotely like in all of the three categories.

Once the matching phase is completed, students will be able to click through to their shortlist, the area on the platform where all the courses they shortlisted are stored. It is from here that students can begin to narrow down their shortlist to the courses that they intend to apply to be clicking the apply button that shows up on every course. This will add that particular course to the applications section of the platform.

Students can also complete the strategy advisor. This can be started at the same time as the profile builder section and essentially this task asks students to list their experiences against a set of prompts like “describe how your course may fit into your long term plans” or “describe any experiences where you have been in a position of responsibility” or “describe any special or unusual academic achievements you have had”. Students move through the prompts and write reflections against these. Then they categorise those experiences against “strategy factors” like “diligence”. “formative experience of the subject”, “critical thinking”, “Leadership”, “Resilience” etc. Finally they can peruse a “strategy report” which tells them how strong they are in each of the “strategy factors”. This task aims to help students begin thinking about their personal statements and college essays and the types of experiences that they have had that would support these the writing of these application elements.

The strategy report can be printed and it appears to be good jumping off point to get students thinking about how they use their time in and out of school to help themselves stand out from the crowd.

When students have completed the University Matching, selected the courses and universities that they wish to apply to as well as the Strategy Advisor, they will begin to see information populated into the applications area of the platform. Here they can see deadlines for applications for some of the courses they have selected, use the “writing builder” to begin the personal statements and essays, and manage their recommendations if necessary as well as find out information about any particular tests that they may need.

My students and I have not quite got on to using this area yet, but they should be using the writing builder this summer to make a start on writing the first draft of their personal statements etc. Having browsed through this area, I can see that there are a lot of exemplar annotated personal statements and college essays, although I am not sure of the source of these and so cannot comment on their reliability or the reliability of the annotations and feedback on them. Students can also get advice on selecting teachers to be recommendation writers, as well as information about testing – ACT vs SAT and UK based tests.

Pros

BridgeU is clearly very new. This gives the team a dynamism, responsiveness and flexibility that can be lacking in other, more established platforms. They have given me the impression that they want to work with counselors and develop from the feedback that they are given to produce a tool that will benefit all their stakeholders: schools, counselors and students alike.

Working with the BridgeU team this term I can say that they have been truly responsive and careful to respond to all my questions and emails and in a space of about 6 weeks I emailed them several times. There responses were always helpful and they didn’t shy away from difficult questions. For several weeks I was emailing asking about when the Netherlands would go live as some of my students want to apply to universities there. Each time I was fully updated on what was happening and why it wasn’t yet live on the system.

The platform is global. When I first signed, the UK, US and Canada were represented and now the Netherlands and Hong Kong are on there. I am sure that over the next 12 months we will see more countries added. This for me as a counselor in an international school where students each come with a vary different international background and who is also teaching 18 hours a week represents the biggest selling point for the platform. In one place I have a single area where my students can research and find out about university options in a variety of countries. It will make my task of advising them that much easier, especially when in one place I can sit down with a student and look through the options that are being presented across several countries. I am able to learn a lot and my students are also able to.

The platform is logical. From the students and counselors end the tasks are laid out and grouped in a manner that makes sense. The progression of tasks and the links from one area to the next are on the whole intuitive and smart.

The platform provides an inherent structure. As a new guidance counselor who is also setting up the counseling department in a new school, the timeline provided by BridgeU and structure of the platform give me a scaffold by which I can structure the counseling interventions for our grade 10, 11 and 12 students. This is also a real time saver for me and I already have a lot of ideas about restructuring my termly interventions schedule with my kids.

In addition its pricing as was explained to me is very competitive. We are only charged for the students that are in grade 11 but we can use it with students in grade 10, 11 and 12. The minimum number of students however is 20 and the price changes as student numbers increase above 20.

Cons

BridgeU is clearly new and is still under development and this brings some issues. Some of the resources that are available seem to lack robustness. For example the annotations provided on the exemplar personal statements seem to me to be a little superficial.

Some of my students and colleagues in other schools that I have spoken to have raised questions regarding the University matching algorithm. One of my students was able to find courses on UCAS that she wanted to apply for but were not coming up under BridgeU initially. I found this was because the “culture” match of the universities was low according to how this student had entered in the profile builder and yet this student had self identified these universities from UCAS and was adamant that she wanted to apply to the, even after I pointed out that these universities wouldn’t match the type of experience she had selected for in the profile builder. Improvement: Perhaps BridgeU would be able to add a search function so that students can search for specific courses and universities they already know that they wish to apply to.

Another student was also shown courses that she didn’t meet the minimum requirements to apply for. My students study the IBDP and this student was taking Maths Studies SL and was shown courses that needed Maths SL or HL and wouldn’t accepts Maths studies. If this is the case then this represents a fairly serious flaw in the programs algorithm.

Once students have discarded courses there is no way for them to go back to these universities and courses. In the event that a student may change their mind or if they decide to take a gap year and reapply then they have no way to get these courses back. Improvement: Perhaps BridgeU could provide a discard list in the same way that there is a shortlist.

In the applications section only some university application deadlines show up. I have a student who will be applying to Cambridge but the UCAS deadline of 15th October doesn’t show up on the calendar. In addition as a school counselor I need time to write the references for these students and so as a school we publish internal deadlines that are two weeks before the UCAS or other university deadlines. There is potential confusion for students if they are getting one deadline from me and another from the platform. Improvement: Perhaps BridgeU could provide a way for counselors to input internal school deadlines.

The testing management area seems a little limited to my eyes at this stage. Again the testing dates for UK based university tests do not seem to appear in the calendar.

Finally one of the first issues I discovered with BridgeU is their philosophy regarding predicted grades. Currently predicted grades are inputed by the students themselves and the platforms algorithm then uses these to churn out its recommendations. Counselors and teachers are not able to input predicted grades, although I can view students profiles individually and make any edits I deem necessary although this will become time consuming for counselors with large case loads. The problem for me is that while students do need to think about what their scores are likely to be, it is the school that publishes these grades, and it is the teachers professional judgement that these grades are based on. Schools need to develop a reputation with universities that the predicted grades that they produce are reliable as this develops trust from universities and therefore supports the applications of all future students. From this perspective BridgeU need to streamline the process by which teachers of students can input their predicted grades into the system.

Conclusions

BridgeU is clearly new and is still under development. I have come to think of it as in “Beta”. Many of the cons mentioned above are things that would be very easy to critise and cite as a reason for not using the product. However this is not a complete and finished product and this is something that counselors need to understand. For this reason It can’t be compared directly with established platforms like Naviance, that have a fixed product that is established in the arena of college counseling technology.

What BridgeU already have in place is logical, thought out and while still fairly simple, has the students and their school staff in mind. It is clear that the development team have thought about the different stages of the application cycle and have tried to build a product that supports students at different stages with the different tasks that they offer. What is exciting about BridgeU is that it is new and under development and this offers us, as counselors, the chance to work with them, to make suggestions and to help create a product that is truly global in perspective.

While writing this post I tweeted that I would be writing it and BridgeU immediately got in touch to send me this email:

Dear Will, 

I hope you are very well! As promised please find below the list of what we are currently working on:

Customised tasks – Allowing counsellors to assign students customised tasks, for activities and projects not covered in BridgeU.

Granular Tasks – Allowing customers to specify specific requirements within BridgeU projects – e.g. complete profile builder, submit first draft of personal statement, complete common app essay.

Tagging and filtering of students – Tag and filter students by labels such as Oxbridge, Russell Group, Medicine  and set specific tasks for groups of students

Refine subject tree – allow for simpler subject searching, ensuring students can find specific courses they are interested in

More data – further course specific data, within UK subject preferences

Parchment – Document sending to U.S and Canadian Universities

And as you already know, the new destinations for later this year:

Australia & Singapore 

Likely but not guaranteed:  Germany / Korea / other european destination   

BridgeU has already got me thinking about what I will change in my counseling program for next year, which will be my second as a guidance counselor and the second of the department I am building. I will certainly be running a morning workshop for the new grade 11s in September where I will introduce the concepts of university research and help them to begin thinking about how they can best utilise their CAS program to enhance their University applications, with a focus on the strategy advisor.

I will follow this up with a second workshop in term 2 as a checkpoint before the introduction to UCAS and the CommonApp workshop at the end of term 3. In this second workshop I will aim for the students to finish their university matching and strategy advisor before beginning a first draft of their UCAS personal statement and college essays in time for early May.

In the the final workshop I will take the students through the UCAS application and get students to focus on any test prep that they may need.

Categories
Books Personal

A reflection on climate strikes

Global Student Climate Strikes 2019

While reading Naomi Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal and her description of the global student climate protests I was reminded of the reaction on Twitter of some of the educators and people I follow, which was quite disapproving of the strikes, like the post below:

Naomi Klein articulates very well why students wanted to strike: climate change presents such a pressing and dangerous situation, one that is very likely to be world altering, and that presents the very real possibility that for school age children there may not be a world with jobs and the life we know it in the future. If you know your future is is f****d, what is the point in studying for it? Klein, quoting Thunberg writes:

“Why should we be studying for a future that soon may be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? … What is the point of learning facts….when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society?”

Klein (2020) On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal pg11

Teachers like Birbalsingh are focussed on their fight to create solid educational outcomes that they are sometimes not aware of the larger picture. Indeed, we could expect Toby Young, a climate change skeptic to take the view that students shouldn’t be protesting, after all from his position there is no justification for the strikes because climate change isn’t real. However, students striking to try to protect their futures, is just as important and urgent as studying at school to protect those futures. It is a shame that society has let them down to the point where they need to sacrifice their education in order to protest.

Greg Ashman writes along similar lines to Birbalsingh’s views in this post, although at greater length. And while what he writes echoes some of what Klein writes about in her book – the need for climate action to be driven by mass mobilization across societal groups for example – Ashman gets it wrong when he writes:

In this light, British school kids skipping school on a Friday to make vague demands that the government declare a ‘climate emergency’ does not really cut it. It is not like miners or nurses going on strike. It’s not really a ‘strike’ at all because nobody is inconvenienced and nobody loses any money. The only potential losers from a withdrawal of student labour are the students themselves, although this will depend greatly on the quality of the education that they have left behind.

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2019/02/17/skipping-school-to-save-the-world/ accessed 16/11/2020

Yes, the strike is not like a miners strike. Miners damaged their own income at the time of striking. They did this to try to protect their livelihoods. But I disagree with Ashman’s analysis. Students are trying to protect their future livelihoods, when none of the adults around them, who supposedly care about their futures seems to be doing anything about it. Ashman also misses the point that the climate strike is also a strike against free market capitalism (not capitalism itself – just the free market kind). If all students around the world went on strike they would be damaging that system as whole if they do not get educated because there would be a much more limited market to participate in in future. Remember that it is this free market system that is prime driver of climate change.

UK Remembrance Day Strike 2020

In the UK there is a yearly ritual of paying respects to those members of the Armed Forces that have perished in conflict most notably in WWI and WWII.

This year commentators were outraged by an extinction rebellion climate change protest at the Cenotaph. Despite the fact that one of the protestors was an ex-service man, media outlets claimed that this was an “insult” to the fallen.

Firstly, it strikes (no pun intended) me as ironic. While the day is a space for private reflection – members of the armed forces remember colleagues who have lost their lives in recent conflicts, the public uses this day, supposedly, to remember the fallen precisely because they fought for freedom and the rights it entails – like the right to protest.

Remembrance day serves as an opportunity to reflect on freedom, justice, and, so the story goes, by doing so we remember the importance of peace. My father would argue that remembrance day keeps us from fighting in Europe because we remember what a sheer waste of life it was.

Conviently it doesn’t stop us from bombing countries far away from here. We are happy to do that for oil.

Today we seem to have become obsessed with the ritual of remembrance day. But what are we actually remembering?

To me, staging a protest on the day of remembrance seems to actually be a way of actively honoring that sacrifice – you are actively exercising your right that was protected by the sacrifice of others. If you take issue with protests, are you really honoring what the dead died for?

When the protestors are claiming that “climate change means war” they are not making a metaphorical statement. They are highlighting the very real concerns that climate change will drive conflict.

You may argue that it wasn’t appropriate at the event, but what you are really saying is that what is important here is not the principle we are supposed to remember but instead the shallow, banal nationalism, that such events can be seen to support – the glorification of war and the feeding of the narrative that Britain is Great because she is more X, Y and Z than other nations.

As Naomi Klein writes:

“Honoring the dead begins with telling the truth”

Klein (2020) On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal pg255

Climate change will cause more war.

Climate change will cause more suffering.

We are already seeing it in Syria where drought caused the migration of farmers from the rural areas into the cities and sparked the unrest that led to the war and the migrations that have been so bothersome to many in the UK.

Climate change will affect geopolitics and could lead to more international tensions and conflicts.

I can think of no better way to honor the dead than trying to make society aware of its own hypocrisy. We are happy to remember the sacrifice that our heroes make but unwilling to face up to the problems our international actions cause both today and yesterday.

Categories
Coordination Personal Resources

NPQSL project: IBDP Curriculum Coherence

In January 2019, after starting a new job in China in September 2018, I began my NPQSL through UCL IOE’s Beijing Cluster. I guess I am a glutton for punishment. Not only had we uprooted the family and moved from Switzerland to China with our two daughters, to a new continent, city, house and jobs, I just had to undertake a large CPD project!

My job was a new role for me, and, while I felt very prepared for it, the challenges of adjusting professionally and personally to a whole new culture were significant. Reflecting now, going through my project and thinking about everything I achieved last academic year, despite such challenges, I am proud and that somewhat alleviates the shame I have been feeling this week over being made redundant.

Anyway, as I was scouting around for ideas for my NPQSL project, I could not find or connect with another IBDP Coordinator who had done the training, which is a UK qualification but open to (some) international schools too. Therefore I have decided to share a version of it on my TES shop for free (like all my resources that are slowly being populated to the site).

You can find my NPQSL project and appendices through the link below and you will also find my assessors feedback to go with it. I scored 20/28 which is the passing mark. Not the best score I have ever achieved, but I am pleased to have made it through despite all the other things going on in my work and personal life at the time.

I hope that it can help someone else when they are struggling with their own project.

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/ibdp-npqsl-project-and-feedback-completed-feb-2020-12306245

Categories
Personal

A COVID-19 adventure

On February 3rd 2020, our school closed almost without warning. My family had left home on January 24th in order to take a weeks holiday by the coast in Vietnam with my parents in law who had been visiting us since just before my birthday.

On the last day before the holiday I had attended a meeting where we were told that there was an 80% chance that the campus would not open. By that time there were 5 cases of the virus in our city and the news of the outbreak in Wuhan had been on people’s minds all week.

The day we flew, all of us were already paranoid so that we didn’t leave the house for the day and wore masks all the way to the airport and on the flight to Vietnam.

As the holiday week progressed, we were told that the school would be closed for two weeks but staff needed to be back in school order to deliver online learning. This later evolved to an acceptance that no one would be allowed on campus – a rule brought in by the municipal government.

During the weeks holiday in the last week of January, the situation in China appeared to get worse and worse. We were glued to the BBC news app and watched as the UK FCO closed the local consulates and upgraded their travel advice all the way to do not travel unless it is essential.

Towards the end of that  holiday my wife and I were already worried about going back. With the change in the advice from the UK FCO, the clearly escalating situation, and the stories we were hearing from friends about food being cleared out of the supermarkets, we didn’t feel comfortable heading back but were worried about the stance our school was taking in initially insisting we come back.

Eventually the decision was taken out of our hands as our return flight to China was cancelled as the Vietnamese government took the decision to suspend all flights to and from China.

And so began our first 7 weeks of teaching and parenting away from home and away from school. During that initial 7 weeks we moved from Vietnam to Thailand because our Vietnamese visa was due to expire soon after our holiday and we knew we had 30 days visa free in Thailand as British nationals. Surely 30 days would be enough?

After 30 days we found we were still not going back and so we moved back to Vietnam after some issues surrounding visas which meant an aborted early morning trip to the airport in Chiang Mai.

I am sure that anyone reading this who lives in a house where both parents are working full time and have two children under 5 and has any experience of isolation/social distancing under the current COVID-19 pandemic will instantly understand the pressures that this situation presented. How do you both work full time from home and also look after small children that need constant supervision?

The added difficulty for our family in those first few weeks was that we didn’t know when we would be asked to come back for school reopening. It seems silly to write now, but at the time we thought we would be back to school in a few weeks at most. We didn’t want to be too far from our schools timezone so that we could stay in sync with the school timetable; if we went back to the UK we would conceivably have to teach at night and parent in the day. We also didn’t want to return to our school city because of the FCO advice and the stories we were hearing about the lockdown procedures being implemented in the city.

This left us planning week by week where we going to live as well as having to full time parent and work. Some weeks worked better than others, my wife and I finding a routine for ourselves and the children, even eating in the same local eateries for lunch and dinner. But that very much depended on the amenities that you found yourself with after making a decision to live somewhere based on booking.com info!

This continued until early March. All the while the disease appeared to be limited to China, we weren’t expecting a global pandemic based on what we were reading and our school began making plans to get teachers who were stranded outside of China back.

It is amazing how quickly the situation evolved in early March and it’s also incredible how different the picture looks with hindsight. In order to remind myself of the situation I was in I wrote much of this post on the plane back to the UK on March 25th.

In early March, we were informed that the school was planning to reopen and that staff who were not in their home country should aim to come back by the end of March. In order to see how the re-entry process went, the school Principal, who had also been out of China, was to return first and if that was successful the Site Based Leadership Team were to return followed by other “third country staff”.

After a successful return to China where the Principal picked up a direct flight to Chongqing from Bangkok with Lion Air my wife and I booked passage on the same route along with some other colleagues who were also stranded in “third countries”. At the time, in the middle of March, we were living in Hoi An in Vietnam and felt that we could easily get back to Bangkok from there to pick up this direct flight. Our Principal was also able to be picked up at the airport by school HR and taken straight to their apartment to begin their 14 day home quarantine.

Soon after however, it was clear that other staff were having some issues over their flights and it turned out their flights on the same route had been cancelled. Ours were still scheduled as initially Lion Air cancelled flights only to 31st March on that Monday (we had booked on the Sunday night) but by the Friday of that week (20th March) they had expanded that to 30th April.

So the Principal’s experience quickly became obsolete and the plan of having a guinea pig to see how re-entry procedures to China went became obsolete. The Principals return turned out to be the smoothest and easiest of all those who returned because the situation changed so rapidly in the last two weeks of March, when it became clear that the COVID-19 epidemic had expanded into a pandemic.

After our Lion Air flights were cancelled, the only options from Bangkok were via Chengdu or via Guangzhou. There were no flights to China from Vietnam since our original return flights from our holiday on 2nd Feb got cancelled.

When you are living it, a week can be a long time but when you think back on it it can seem very short. Memories become compressed and it’s easy to forget the feelings of anxiety that you live with in slow time when everyday you worry that the situation may change.

That week after we booked our China flights on the Sunday on the same route as the Principal, it seemed quite natural to be able to fly on 27th March so we could have our second week of quarantine in the Easter holiday.

My wife and I had already learned how difficult it was to plan and teach our own classes, deliver our eldest daughters online learning and parent both of the children well all at the same time, so when discussing our return home to China we knew that the only way we could manage a home 14 day quarantine without the distractions of any outside space was to plan the quarantine period in the holidays. We had expressed this desire as soon as we were asked to come back because we had already been having the conversations.

Now in light of our current actions I am sure that some will interpret our reluctance to fly earlier as us not wanting to go back at all. This is not the case but we felt at the time that we had to make the best decision for our two children.

It’s hard to get your feet in someone’s shoes. A colleague expressed concern by telling me why they thought our plan to quarantine at home during the Easter holidays was a bad idea because they felt we wouldn’t get a break. It was hard for them to understand why quarantining in the holidays was going to be the best break we could get! It meant that our children would benefit from not having two parents constantly torn by the demands of their needs the needs of the school. It meant that we would only have one week of work where we were trapped in the house with no outside space and no where to really separate work and play.

Being responsible continually for other people and placing their needs above your own, continually is a very hard thing to understand until you have had to do it.

Two days after booking our initial return flights from Bangkok to China we found the same airline had cancelled our colleagues flights on the same route. This was Tuesday 17th March, only a week after we were told the school plan to get everyone back and four days after the Principal had successfully made it back on the same route.

On Wednesday 18th March we were told by our landlady in Hoi An, that airlines were cancelling flights out of Vietnam. She was concerned about us being able to leave the country. Remember that there were no direct flights from Vietnam to China? Well now there seemed that there was going to be no flights anywhere else.

Faced with the looming realisation that we might get stuck in Vietnam we found our anxiety rising. Particularly as we already had an exit flight back to China from Bangkok. That evening that we got the news from our landlady, we booked an air Asia flight for the coming Saturday from Da Nang to Bangkok.

The next morning we woke up to find that flight cancelled. This was Thursday morning 19th March.

More airlines closing. More panic. We found tickets for a flight leaving to Bangkok a day earlier – leaving on Friday 20th March. It was more dear but we had passed counting coins at this stage. This was also the day that our Chinese nanny, after waiting for weeks for us to come back, resigned so she could find other work.

There’s a pandemic. You are separated from your home nation and from the nation you are resident in. Governments are making last minute announcements. Airlines are cancelling flights. It is hard to stay on top of the information. You live with anxiety constantly about the changes, about what is going to happen. This is on top of already emotionally, mentally and financially challenging “home-work” circumstances that we had lived with for 7 weeks already.

The next morning, Friday 20th March, we woke up to the news from the FCO that Thailand was bringing in new immigration requirements. Our flight was that day and we had no way of meeting the new requirements. We went to the airport with bated breath. Unsure if we would be able to check in. unsure if we would have the correct paperwork. Unsure if we could immigrate into Thailand.

Thankfully checking in went smoothly , although that entire check in procedure and exit from Vietnam was one of the tensest moments of my life. At the airport every flight, bar ours, was cancelled.

When we arrived in Thailand we received news that our Lion Air flight on 2nd April had also been cancelled. After panicing to get out of Vietnam back to Thailand to be able to get our flight back to China we no longer had a flight back to China.

We couldn’t wait around any longer hoping things would work out. We could see that the sand was shifting around us. The travel picture was changing. Immigration requirements were changing. Information you had on one day was obsolete the next.

If we booked a flight there was no guarantee that it would go. Plus because of the increasing expense of flights, we needed to trade off economical flights with leaving as soon as possible, before the situation changed further.

A delay of 24 hours would push prices up further. A delay of 24 hours would leave us more exposed to the risk of sudden changes in flight schedules and immigration policies.

We seriously felt at risk of being trapped in Thailand with our two small children during a global pandemic.

This was a real risk that we couldn’t afford after 8 weeks already of living out of bags while parenting and working.  We had initially packed for a one week holiday. We needed to get home and we needed support with the children so we could focus on work.

We also had no clarity on what the quarantine procedures would entail for us. Our Principal has been able to go straight home and quarantine at home, which would be manageable if we could do it in the Easter holidays but as we saw over that weekend, that rapidly changed. With no direct flights back to our city, there was an increasing chance that teachers would be held in quarantine in hotels in other cities that they flew into. it wasn’t clear who would be responsible for these costs.

We booked refundable flights back to the UK and waited. Over that weekend we began to see the challenges of no direct routes. Flights were available via Guangzhou, Nanning and Chengdu. These were clearly different and by the time recommendations came to not go via Chengdu people had already booked flights on them. Some colleagues ended up being quarantined in a hotel there. We also heard that families were to be separated for the two weeks with the children being quarantined with their mother. By Friday 27th March it was clear that home quarantine was not an option.

It was not the time to wait. We had to make decisions based on the best data we had available. In the future you may look back and think you did the “right” thing, or you may look back and think you didn’t. In the here and now there is just no way of knowing. Often when you look back your perception of the events is changed so it’s important to be clear with yourself in the present moment what your reasons are.

On the plane home on Wednesday 25th March I wrote:

Sitting on this plane I still feel anxious. I am relieved too. Relieved to be getting my kids back into the UK where their grandparents want to see them. Back to the UK where I have been amazed at the deep support network and its ability to collectively find a solution. But I am anxious. For me the anxiety has now changed. No longer anxious about getting trapped. I’m anxious about what my employer will say. I’m anxious that I’ll be jobless and that I’ll lose my bonus. I’m anxious that my actions will damage my career. I’m even anxious that I can’t now access the internet, so accustomed I have become to reading the BBC news hourly, sending and receiving messages like never before. Constantly connected in my hours of panic, I’m now unused to being disconnected.

The day after we returned the UK the Chinese government announced that it was closing its borders to all foreigners except diplomats, a sensible thing to do when individuals and companies were disregarding the governmental advice to limit travel to essential travel only.

On Thursday 26th March the Thai authorities brought in stronger lockdown procedures including road blocks and checkpoints. There was a possibility of further flight cancellations and stronger shut down measures. Those who waited may be forced into being stranded for a long time. If we hadn’t booked our flights back to the UK and rebooked to China we would have been stuck in Thailand and facing the national lockdown there. I am sure we would have managed but it wouldn’t have been great for our two little ones.

Unfortunately, I think that often teachers and school leaders become so focussed on learning, that losing learning time can be the worst thing in the world. Forward planning becomes narrow and very short term, long term planning almost obsolete, or very rare. Maybe it’s worry about accountability to parents. Maybe an inability to think, plan and articulate long term scenarios. Maybe it’s a lack of training.

In this scenario, I wonder if more would have been achieved long term if more time had been taken to adequately train staff in the short term and plan for the long term instead of assuming it would all be over in a few weeks.

Perhaps we should have had a short, medium and long term plan.

It’s easy to say that in hindsight though.