Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will change British schools forever too

Given a crisis, teachers will first move to prioritise the whole school community

What will our stretched school system do? (Getty/iStock)

The Ukraine crisis represents the biggest forced movement of people in Europe since the Second World War. Upwards of 3 million poor souls have become refugees. Some estimate that half are children.

Nobody knows how many young people are about to arrive on British shores, but it will almost certainly be in the hundreds of thousands. How will our primary and secondary schools deal with it?

It is easy to forget that schools are good places. They are moral places that exist to undertake a profoundly moral mission. So too, in large part, are those who work there. Some teachers and support staff will tell you it’s “just a job”, but if you burrow deep enough you nearly always find someone who is doing it because they care about kids.

The pay and conditions aren’t horrendous, but they’re not doing it for the money. They’re certainly not in it for the short working day either. It might sound like hyperbole, but almost all schools are deeply moral institutions. And we don’t have many of those left.

As for the kids, well, they’re kids. Even most of the teenagers. Behaviour standards vary, and some might come across as tough, but if you’ve spoken to as many pupils in as many schools as I have, the most striking thing is the lack of cynicism. There are social problems in many schools of course, but there is also hope and optimism in spades.

You just need to watch this tearjerker of a video from an Italian school as they welcomed the first of their new Ukrainian classmates to be reminded of this important fact.

The education secretary Nadhim Zahawi has announced funding for at least 100,000 students and plans to translate a bank of pre-recorded lessons into Russian and Ukrainian. There will be new guidance for teachers too.

One big problem Zahawi has, however – and it’s not of his making – is that the education system is nearly perpetually run at capacity. It’s designed, correctly, to maximise taxpayer funding. A chief executive of a group of schools (a multi-academy trust) told me the other day how welcoming he expected his schools to be. “The only problem,” he added, “is that we simply don’t have room for any more students.”

And that’s before we really consider the huge new demands on “English as an additional language” teaching and the support many students will need post-trauma.

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All of which begs the question: what will our stretched school system do? First and foremost, heads and teachers will make do and mend. Where they are allowed to, school staff will squeeze more students in. They will also try and squeeze even more out of already stretched resources.

More than that, they will do wonderful things with their new students once they’ve been found a desk. They will look after them and nurture them. They will also support and guide their parents. In some schools, this will be a huge challenge, but they will rise to it.

If the pandemic taught us anything about Britain’s teachers, it’s that given a crisis, their first move is to prioritise the whole school community. Especially the most vulnerable. It will be in that spirit that they greet our country’s new guests.

It has now been written too many times to count that Russia’s unconscionable decision to invade Ukraine has changed Europe forever. There’s a good chance that that will be true of Britain’s schools too.

The Independent has a proud history of campaigning for the rights of the most vulnerable, and we first ran our Refugees Welcome campaign during the war in Syria in 2015. Now, as we renew our campaign and launch this petition in the wake of the unfolding Ukrainian crisis, we are calling on the government to go further and faster to ensure help is delivered. To find out more about our Refugees Welcome campaign, click here. To sign the petition click here. If you would like to donate then please click here for our GoFundMe page