Author: wrpvincent

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University

Creating a University & Careers Guidance Programme (Part 2)

Originally posted on July 24, 2016 @ 9:00 am

This is the second post in a series of four dealing with my experience in setting up a university and careers counseling department in a start-up school in the school year 2015-16. At the time I had little background in this area. The first post covers how I approached the resources I would need and this post looks at building relationships with external agencies and institutions, the next post deals with essential registrations that need to take place when setting up your department.

Putting the School on the map pt 1: Building Relationships

Aside from the getting materials into place and organising them which has been an ongoing activity throughout the year the next big task I felt that needed to be started was that of contacting and communicating with admissions representatives and student recruitment representatives. It was immediately obvious to me that the guidance office had an important role in putting our school on the map from a university admissions perspective. We needed to market oursleves to these institutions because universities who knew we were here would be more likely to visit us when they were in the area on European recruitment drives or attending conferences. Having more university visits, I also felt was essential for building parent confidence in us and demonstrating that the school was taking guidance of students seriously.

I began this process before the summer holidays in fact now that I think of it. I was first introduced via a colleague at work to an marketing executive for Laureate Education who own both Glion Institute of Higher Education and Les Roches. This person put me in touch with Glion and I arranged my first site visit to these campuses on the day before the 2015-16 academic year started.

From there I was quick to respond to any emails that I received from university professionals who were interested in visiting our campus. This was particularly challenging. I have already mentioned in this post about receiving hundreds of emails from outside agencies all demanding your time. Part of the job requires an ability to sift the worthwhile from the less worthy. The fifteen minute inbox technique that I was introduced to in on of our inset days has proved especially useful here. Initially I was open to most universities that contacted me. During the course of this first year, due purely to email, I had visits from:

At the time our school was going through and still is going through accreditation with the council of international schools (CIS). CIS run a Forum on Higher Education and last year this was held in Edinburgh; next years is in Barcelona. The International Baccalaureate also run a Higher Education Symposium and in addition there is the IACAC Annual Conference.

I wasn’t sure which of these would be most appropriate for a new college counselor and which would be the most effective in helping me support students. To help make the decision I sought other counselors views through a medium which has been incredibly helpful in getting questions answered: Facebook.

On FB there are three groups that I have found particularly useful. The first I joined and was put onto by my DP Coordinator is the IB Counselors, Coordinators and University Relations Group, the second is the UCAS Advisers Group and the third is the International Association for College Admission Counseling Group which you can only join as a member of IACAC.

Each of these groups has been extremely useful in getting answers to rookie questions and for clarifying information. There are loads of counselors and university representatives on these groups who are more than willing to share and support.

I first used these groups with questions about the advice that the DP coordinator and I were giving to the grade 10s last year as they finalised their DP options but the advice that I got regarding conferences was that the IB symposium was largely useless for someone in my position, especially as I already knew the IB having taught Biology DP for eight years. I was advised to aim for the CIS forum or the IACAC conference.

I eventually decided to go to the CIS forum as we believed that as a school it would be better suited to our needs.

I found the CIS forum incredibly useful both for the chance to talk about the processes of college counseling with experience colleagues and attend some very insightful workshops that covered the mechanics of applying for Engineering courses or applying to study in Canada, but also for the chance to network and meet university representatives. At this event I deliberately targeted American Universities as these are the institutions that I personally know the least about and are also the furthest away; until we have larger numbers of students I think it will be doubtful that I will be heading out to the US on a work trip. I did also spend some time talking with UK and Canadian Universities and learned about the CIS UK Universities European Tour. I was able to make contact with the organiser of this so that our school would be contacted in future when these Universities were visiting.

Many of the people I met were surprised that my education group had a school in Switzerland; they had come across our campuses in Dubai. Following on from this event I made useful contacts that were useful in getting our school on the map so to speak. A  number of conversation subsequent to this event led to me making connections with QMUL and RHUL, both of which I subsequently visited when in London for some UCAS training and one of which ended up coming out to visit us as part of our first “future-you” festival the careers event that I organised in the third term.

The CIS UK Universities tour unfortunately didn’t make it to Switzerland this year due to the events in Brussels in April that shut the airport down for a while.

However CIS did run a college night in Geneva in September which I attended. From all these events I built some excellent connections that our school will take forward and I was directly able to arrange visits from:

Positive relationships with Universities will help to drive more visits to our school, make universities become aware of our school and help us work with universities for the best outcomes for our students, ideally so that they will trust as a school to listen to our recommendations.

When universities visit us I like to show them the school, give them a chance to observe some teaching as well as meet with our students. This side of the role really does take time and effort but it will certainly be worth it in the long run in terms of the outcomes for our students and also to allow parents to have confidence in our ability to advocate for their children.

Building these types of relationships led to me being invited on two counselor fly-ins this year. One of which (to ESADE) I have already blogged about. Another opportunity came up that I wasn’t able to participate in and this was with the Karl Benz school of Engineering.

In the next post I will write about the agencies that your school needs to be registered with including UCAS, The Admissions Testing Service, CollegeBoard, CommonApp and others including the process of supporting students who are applying for Athletic Scholarships in the US.

Categories
University

Creating a University & Careers Guidance Programme (Part 4)

Originally posted on July 31, 2016 @ 9:00 am

In this final post in my series reflecting on my first years experience of setting up a University & Careers guidance program I write about working with colleagues, students and their parents.

Giving advice 

Advising students is the central role of any guidance counselor, and for me actually represents the biggest challenge of the job. My background is as a science teacher having been a Head of Biology at my previous school and working with students in the ways required of a guidance counselor, while not entirely new to me certainly present a challenge for my style. I suppose that stepping into this role has been a major catalyst in growing my thinking about education in general. There have been some other factors, like the push from the IB for the integration of ATLS into teaching that have got me reflecting recently on the dynamic of learner-teacher and how this should be manifested in my own practice. I intend to write more on this soon, I just hope that it is possible for the leopard to change its spots.

Stepping into the shoes of guidance counseling I had to become very aware of my own preconceptions and prejudicies that I have carried with me from my own experience, and put these too one side. Guidance isn’t about telling students what you think is best for them in terms of your own limited understanding of where they are at and what options you think are better than others. It is much more about conversation, gaining trust and advocating for the student in what can be a very difficult time for them. They are adults and yet not quite, and whilst dealing with a lot Biological adjustments they can be going through some of the most pressured situations academically, socially and at home.

Looking back it seems as though the skills that I was introduced to and began to learn through Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and meditation such as paying attention in the moment and bringing awareness to sensations, feelings and thoughts could not have come at a better time. They prepared me to be aware of the “baggage” in terms of my own ideas/prejudice that I was initially bringing to the role, as well as my tendancy to feel like the more that I talked at a student the better at counseling them I was.

Over this year I have come to see the role as more about questioning, about striving to build that authentic relationship with a student to help them to begin to articulate their own motivations, thoughts, worries and perceptions. Doing this will help them to bring more awareness to their own search for the right next step for themselves.

I still have a long way to go to fully develop the questioning and listening skills required to do this job well but I have made a start and I am aware that this is an area for improvement for me not just in counseling but in my teaching practice in general, as I strive to give kids the tools be become aware life-long learners in their own lives.

The actual practice of counseling comes on a cycle and this year because we had no grade 12 I was able to spend a lot of time working closely with our grade 11s in the first term, a luxury that I will not have next year as my teaching load increases and grade 12 comes through for the first time.

The hardest part was having the knowledge of different universities and courses, with which to advise my students and help them prepare their research and build their lists. None of my students are applying to just one country, and my knowledge was fairly limited to the UK and fairly prejudicial concerning what I knew about that system. This was a major driver for me to lobby the management at school about the need to get a system in place to help students and parents do their research. At this first stage the net needs to be cast quite wide, results can always be removed but they can be hard to find! This is why I opted for BridgeU, they offered a very competitive price for their services but they were also truly global unlike some of the other systems available and their offering comes with a calendar of when to work on the various projects with students, meaning that planning the delivery of particular interventions and meetings with students was simplified. I have posted about BridgeU here and here.

Working with your community

This year I certainly learn’t a lot about internal and external communication within a school environment this year and a lot about parents, partly because I became one myself, a process that had enabled me to empathise much more with parents but also because I have been working so much more closely with them.

Working with parents in this role is tricky one because, putting it bluntly, they pay the fees. This is a thought that I have struggled with this year.In a fee-paying school that runs as a business i.e. to make sales and profit, what are you selling? Who are the clients? the parents or the students?

If your child needs life saving treatment and you out them in a private hospital, you pay the hospital to pay the doctors to work in the interests of saving your child’s life. The hospital is run as a business to make a profit and it is selling its services. The doctors work for the child in the sense that they are saving this individuals life, not for the parent. You would have to be an idiot or mentally ill to think that as a parent, you had the skills and training to save your child’s life in this instance.

Things are much the same in a school like ours but sometimes parents do think that they have the skills and expertise and in my experience much more ready to challenge yours. There are many reasons for this, the communal respect that the teaching profession holds not being a minor reason but I am mindful of the Dunning-Kruger affect which states “The less people know the more the think they know”. This is a measurable effect and has been demonstrated in a few studies.

This is all well and good in work that is obviously highly skilled and one that requires a lot of expertise and training. But can be the same be said of guidance counseling or teaching? Well my experience this year would tell me that yes it can. Obviously to teach well requires years of experience for most people; I’ve been doing it for eight years and I am still along way from mastering it. For counseling the same is true. To understand how to mentor and question to serve students as a guide, as well as become an expert at the changing admissions landscape for several countries not just the UK or the US requires years and years of expertise. Unfortunately some parents that I have come across don’t seem to realise this. Speculation on the reasons why could fill another blog post. The fact is these are skilled professions and educating parents  suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect can present a real challenge to the work of the counselor.

When I first start this work, I was unsure of how to handle this dynamic and was a trifle fearful of upsetting the parents as the fee payers. I guess part of this can be solved by having trust that your senior management will back you and trust you to know your job.

When I first started this role my Head told me that he didn’t rate the counselor in a previous school. They said that the counselor was telling students what they could achieve but telling them not to apply to the “name” schools. In this one year I have come to question this attitude from that Head, perhaps they too were suffering from Dunning-Kruger, but also because I firmly believe that nobody should be telling the kids what they can and can’t do. If I have learned one thing advising isn’t about telling, its about guiding and advocating for students. Even as a dad to a one year old daughter I don’t want to be telling her she has to do something when she is older, I don’t want to have preconcieved ideas about that. Instead I hope to be able to guide her to follow her interests and model the hard work that she will need to put in to achieve whatever she wants. Financially I am already planning to allow her to have the opportunities that she wants to pursue.

I am beginning to have more trust in myself and my convictions but I also recognise that part of this process is about also trying to mentor the parents as well as the students to help them through this confusing and difficult terrain.

One aspect that needs further workis communication with parents. I was astounded by a conversation I had with a parent this year who, after one of the university presentations commented on how it was a shame that not more of the parents were there, going on to say that she had spoken to another parent that morning who had no idea that this event was taking place.

To put this in context, I had sent a letter out to parents, posted a message on ManageBac, put it on the ManageBac calendar, put an announcement in homeroom and put it in the school newsletter.

The parent continued to tell me that none of the parents use ManageBac, the schools curriculum and communication platform, before suggesting that I set up a What’sApp group instead to let the parents know. I was polite and maintained composure but inside I was really riled by this conversation.

I wonder whether we need some communication routines to be developed within the school? And whether our parents need to be educated a little more about taking responsibility for reading the information schools send out? Another parent told me how she was annoyed when teachers didn’t immediately respond to her emails.

Again this is a topic for another blog post I suppose but I am still wondering about where the buck stops? Obviously as a school we need to get more intelligent about the way we communicate with parents and communicating the expectations that we have of parents to keep up to date with school news but on the other hand teachers and staff working with pupils shouldn’t be expected constantly find new ways to communicate with parents and reinvent the wheel. For one thing it just wastes time, time that is better spent in other ways like reflecting on practice, working with students, planning etc. The list goes on.

Any solutions? Answers on a post card please.

Careers Day

Categories
Books Personal

A reflection on climate strikes

climate people street weather
Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com

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.