Lessons from lockdown: Releasing future possibilities for teacher professionalism

Here and now Over the past 12 months, words like 'lockdown', 'pandemic' and 'coronavirus' have entered daily usage and we are now all too familiar with exponential curves tracing out the misery of lives and livelihoods endangered and tragically lost. It's a similar story in most other countries around the world. It sometimes feels as though the strands of our pre-Covid lives are unravelling. Yet strangely, in the midst of these dark days there's also a sense of something releasing as we watch some of our familiar certainties and taken-for-granted assumptions working loose. Here's an example. At the centre of the fierce debate about whether or not England's schools should close due to the pandemic we witnessed three familiar edifices - policy, professional practice and research - jostling for power. It looked certain that policymakers would prevail and schools would remain open. Yet, finally, it was the virus which took the upper hand with its new, more transmissible variant, leavin