Representations of schooling and childhood during the COVID-19 pandemic in England

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, questions abounded about how best to support children during the ‘new normal’ where homes, often instead of schools, were identified as the usual sites of learning. Educational research has explored the impact of COVID-19 on schools, education and learning, and childhood studies research has shown the impact on children's rights and paid attention to how constructs of childhood have shaped government responses. In this paper, we bring these fields together through exploring constructions of childhood alongside those of schooling. We systematically analyse the representations of schooling and childhood in 72 BBC news articles published on 1 June—the day that primary schools started to reopen in England. Our findings show that the dominant ‘frames’ of reporting centred around risk and fear. COVID-19 risks exist to health and safety, to children's education and to childhood more generally. The news media portrayed schooling as synonymous with learning, children as passive and childhood as a time of both happiness and ‘loss’. We argue that these normative discourses exploit children as symbols of hope, conceal alternative ways of thinking about learning and are restrictive and unreflective of children's agency and real-life experiences. In the aftermath of the pandemic, academics and policymakers need to continue to debate and explore the nature of learning and children's perspectives on school in order to critically examine the current system of schooling.