Chapter 5: Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The major disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic as outlined in chapter 4 has been a wide-ranging focus for educational researchers, attempting to understand the processes involved, and the experiences of those who were charged with ensuring that formal education continued to operate in an unstable and constantly changing context. In this chapter, we focus on the experiences of educational professionals in the maintained sector in England. Therefore, we are not looking at early years or further/higher education. This is to ensure that the review is manageable in size and allows us to engage critically with some of the major issues which arise from the impacts of the pandemic in the maintained school sector. Those elements of the sector which are not covered had different sets of guidance and different contexts when compared to the maintained school sector.