I am a Key Stage 1 leader and teacher at Shere Infant School & Nursery in Surrey. Throughout the lockdown period, like many teachers, my role quickly evolved beyond that of ‘teacher’, and the relationships that were originally formed at the classroom door, and over the table at parent consultations quite suddenly became much, much deeper.

Conversations about home learning would inevitably turn to the virus and how it was impacting upon the children. Anxieties were clear and profound, and parents who were doing their very best to protect their children from the adult themes that seemed to consume the media were the first to admit that the impact on their children was near impossible to avoid.

School and Nursery should be a safe place, for some children it is the only safe place. The idea of the children in my care feeling anxious and scared about their eventual but inevitable return really affected me.

I am very fortunate to work in a very forward-thinking school, with a head who inspires creativity and nurtures children’s holistic wellbeing over a desire to pump out the right statistics (with the net result of course being that we pump out very good statistics!). Our approach to tackling the new guidelines was, from the start, focussed on how we look after the children’s mental health and wellbeing, and the book was  born out of that focus.

My goal was to help our children to understand the very adult themes of social distancing and how this would impact upon their time at school in a friendly, unthreatening way, without undermining the importance of the measures that would be in place.