10 · MONE Y
P O S T- C O V I D
Learning opportunities Claire Rose — Education Consultant
from a socially safe distance. That’s where it all started,” she muses. Although familiar with photo editing software, she taught herself new techniques by watching online tutorials and consulting experts as needed. The new technique allowed her to create innovative portfolios for her clients transporting them to the woods, the sea and a disco party. Now that measures have eased; she is photographing her clients in outdoor areas but still applying her creative editing techniques. What started out as an inconvenience proved to be a push to creativity for Francesca: “A view from the top is a really different and cool angle for portraits and I will definitely be implementing them in any of my future shoots where the possibility arises.”
WHAT STARTED OUT AS AN INCONVENIENCE PROVED TO BE A PUSH TO CREATIVITY...
ISSUE 60
tutoring via video chat and managed to continue her university guidance virtually. “I’m lucky regarding technology because I had experience working in a digital school so it didn’t really involve any new training,” she notes. Claire also wanted to help parents who were at home, and helping their children learn during the lockdown, so she temporarily ran daily ‘live’ tasks on social media – incorporating different ages and national curriculum subjects. Over the summer, she now has several online summer workshops booked.
Claire Rose runs an Education Consultancy, based in Cambridge but with clients worldwide, and offers a range of educational services and products. Before lockdown, Claire had face-to-face meetings, she regularly commuted around the UK and tutored in various locations. She would have been exceptionally busy in April and May with revision workshops before exams and she also had some bookings for in-school workshops too, including in Europe. When exams were cancelled, she not only lost all her tutees overnight, but it also meant her large workshop days were now a no-go. Yet, she did see an increase in enquiries about other aspects of education from both parents and schools: how online learning systems could be created, what to do now exams were cancelled, how the assessment process (to replace exams) would work. Realising there were new needs as well as needs that required attention in a different way in her field, she set about exploring how best to approach them. Claire had a few online consultations, with head teachers and local and national assessment centres, to develop a virtual process for assessing external/private candidates. She also mentored some students who wanted to continue with
Moving forward, she is planning a free fiveday challenge for students applying to attend university in the coming year. Usually, she would offer one-to-one guidance on this but wanted to “support all the students whose academic lives have been completely turned upside down”. For those students who do not get the grades they need in August and therefore must sit for exams in the autumn term, Claire is planning to run intense onemonth revision workshops, again virtually. She hopes that, in the future, mainstream education will manage to “catch up” with the progress that has been made in home learning and EduTech/digital education. Prior to the Covid-19 crisis, she had already seen an increase in enquiries from families looking for a more flexible approach to their children’s education, and believes that “the response to Covid-19 has increased awareness of the many educational opportunities already available for learners who do not fit the mainstream ‘mould’.” Longer-term, she is now planning to continue to embrace this trend that has been further accelerated by the crisis, encouraging families to think more carefully about flexible learning, and to encourage people to use the technology that has existed for many years but, until recently, has been neglected in favour of traditional (i.e. in-person) methods. In more concrete terms, Claire hopes to develop an education centre of excellence that not only focuses on and promotes academic opportunities but uses the lessons learned about education from the Covid-19 crisis in a positive way for the benefit of future generations.