Many, especially small businesses and easy-to-sacrifice freelancers, will be asking themselves how on earth they are going to get through the next few months. No income coming in, rent and other outgoings to pay, the value of any investments decimated. How long are we going to be locked down for? Anything less than three months will seem like a win at this stage.

It might not feel like the right time and place to be offering silver linings to these economic thunder clouds, but I get the feeling that this crisis is going to lead to huge — and welcome — changes in the way we do things. When Covid-19 has passed, the world may well be a very different place. 

Remote working — already on the rise pre-coronavirus — is going to surge. So will remote healthcare, and believe it or not such a thing already exists in the form of apps such as Babylon. Similarly, as schools shut down, we are going to see a rise in remote education and home schooling. 

My hunch is that in all three cases people are going to discover that they’re actually pretty good, and by the time the crisis has passed, remote work, healthcare and education will be a much more established part of our lives. This disease is going to change the way we operate.

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Get off social media and help!

By Mary Harrington

I’m an advocate of all remoting, if such a word exists. I’ve been a freelancer and worked from home all my life. I like the freedom and the flexibility. I don’t like commuting or office politics. I’m relatively new to the remote healthcare game but I now conduct as much of my family’s healthcare as possible this way; I had a consultation with a GP just the other day on the NHS via Babylon.

As for education, I discovered for myself by accident last year that there are other ways to educate a child other than traditional schools. I should add here, though, that while my story might help those with kids at home, there are many circumstances that are quite different from my story of last year, chief among them the financial threat to many of our livelihoods. But I still think it’s worth recounting our experience of remote studying.

My son, Samuel, was always pretty good at maths. He chose maths as one of his A-levels and his school duly put him in the top set. But within a few months this A* student was regularly scoring Es and Us. 

I had grave doubts about the competence of the school maths department, so I decided to get a second opinion. I found a website for tutors called tutorhunt.com, and picked a cheap one in my area with good feedback. A smartly dressed 19-year-old turned up at our house the following day, a lad in his first year at King’s, studying maths, and funding his studies by tutoring. “Yeah. He picks it up quickly,” the teenager said casually, after a couple of lessons. “He’ll get an A.”

But in his end-of-year exams Samuel got a D. To continue with the course, he would have to get a C, the maths department said, but he could re-sit in August. I watched how hard Samuel then worked over that summer — to get an E and be told he had to drop maths.

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Coronavirus has locked my congregation out

By Giles Fraser

“Don’t make me go back to that school, Dad,” Samuel said. 

I agreed with him. But there were just three days before the beginning of term and I didn’t know how to go about finding another school at such short notice.

So I logged back on to tutorhunt.com, and found him three tutors: one for each subject. And withdrew him from school. The tutors were all students and sometimes he met them at university (which was quite exciting for him), sometimes they came to our house. And he had countless lessons via Skype, Zoom and Google Hangouts. Much as many kids are doing now. 

Samuel became more organised, more motivated, more interested in his subjects. He put in more time on his homework. His essays improved, his presentation improved, even his handwriting improved. The fact that he had agitated to leave the school meant he felt a greater sense of responsibility to make it work. We had flexibility and I, too, became much more involved in his education. In almost every way, the experience was so much better than school. 

And in each subject he got at least a grade better than he would have achieved at school.  It’s hard to describe how I felt when Bristol accepted his place. It wasn’t just that he had got in, but the way it had happened.

Many parents are suddenly finding themselves in a similar situation — though not through choice. At first it will seem like there is no respite. But gradually things will settle down, and I bet many families actually bond as a result of the experience. I was a single parent with two kids living with me, working freelance from home while organising an education. It is a lot of work, but it is do-able.

The loss of the social aspect of school is a problem. In our case, Samuel already had a network of friends either from school or from around where we live, so he was fine. But in the lock-down situation we appear to be going into, even friendships, it seems, are going to have to be conducted remotely. 

But I would try to draw positives even from that. I have three or four extremely close friends, made online, to whom I speak regularly, but I’ve never actually met them. One is in New Zealand, another in Australia. We might not even like each other if we met in person.

In a way we are lucky this virus is hitting now at a time when we have, in the internet, the most fantastic learning and communication device ever invented. On the one hand it has enabled us to get informed about Covid-19 much quicker than at any time in history, and thus better prepare and mitigate. On the other it offers the solution to many of our predicaments — whether work, health or school related.

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

Online universities were already starting to make their physical counterparts look expensive and anachronistic. Many schools in their current form, whether state or private, look like an extremely expensive and in some cases inefficient way of providing education. There are expensive buildings to maintain, high staff and regulatory costs, and burdensome bureaucracy. The education budget is around £90bn with roughly 10 million students in primary or secondary education. It’s a lot of money.

The internet, on the other hand, is mostly free. There is a seemingly endless supply of educational videos (they are already, I gather, the most watched category of video on YouTube). Embrace the internet and the many technological solutions it offers. 

As the circumstances of coronavirus force people to adapt their lives, we are going to see a huge rise in remote work, healthcare and education. It was always going to happen, Covid-19 will accelerate the adoption. It’s a good thing because the result will be better work, better healthcare and better education.

Dominic Frisby’s Daylight Robbery – How Tax Shaped The Past And Will Change The Future is published by Portfolio Penguin.

It didn’t last. By the end of that first month, the situation was quite different. We hadn’t stuck to the timetable, we hadn’t looked at half the resources, and the weekly assembly had quietly faded away. But my daughter was happily learning and my wife and I, two schoolteachers embarking on a new educational adventure, were beginning to find our feet.

And now all parents are facing that same challenge — but with little less time to get ready. So let me offer some advice.

1 Be realistic

You may be planning a boot camp, but your children are probably expecting a beach party. You want to set up school in your home but they may think the summer holidays have begun early. So a good idea is to take away all distractions, electronic and otherwise; you should fix a timetable that is clear but not so crammed full of activities that you have no wriggle room; and be realistic. Children thrive on structure even though they often kick against it, so create a timetable with them rather than for them and build in breaks for both them and you.

2 Listen to school — a bit

Your child’s school will doubtless send work home that needs to be done, which will help you make the adjustment to home tutoring, but there are potential pitfalls here, the most obvious of which is that much of this will be online — so your child may develop an umbilical bond with the computer. Spending time online is inevitable these days; but it is not a fundamental human right. Even though it might come as a surprise for your child to learn this, take the opportunity to branch out beyond the computer.

3 Get outside

Many children are now, quite rightly, concerned about saving the planet but how many of them can identify the trees, birds and animals in their own back garden? The highlight of our week was my daughter seeing a frog laying its eggs in our tiny pond and the reason she noticed is because we have been keeping a nature journal. Looking in a pond and seeing – really seeing – nature at work can be the first step on a greater ecological journey. And, before I get too carried away, I should also acknowledge that getting outside has the added advantage of keeping both you and your children sane.

4 Read!

The simplest and most effective way of improving academic performance is to read more, so now could be a good time to try new authors, new books (non-fiction as well as fiction), and new ways of enjoying the best that has been thought and written. Read books to your children. Read books yourself and discuss them with your children. Buy or download audiobooks and take the stress out of reading. So many children are put off literature simply because decoding is difficult, which means that what should be a pleasure becomes a chore. Listening to a good book can restore children’s faith in fiction.

5 Structure, structure, structure…

Of course they can also lose themselves in computer games, social media and mindless surfing for hours on end, which is why structuring your days is so important. Allowing your child to sleep in until midday — especially if you have to be working yourself — may give you some much needed head space but it’s not conducive to long term academic success or short-term family relationships.

6 Find the joy

The greatest wisdom I discovered when starting home education was the reminder that everything we do with our children is education. We are educating them when we cook, clean and chat, not just when we look over their homework. They learn from how we are as well as from what we do and say.

Getting children to settle down to work can be stressful but there are ways of finding joy in education at home. A turning point in our home education journey came when we realised that we didn’t need to spend all our time formally teaching our children; we could learn with them and often learn from them. I have a History degree from Oxford but my young children now routinely teach me historical facts that they have picked up somewhere along the line.

When you are at home with your children, opportunities to learn with them occur throughout the day. While walking the dog, we try to identify local trees. Listening to the news often sends us scurrying to an Atlas. And sometimes we throw ourselves into a project just for the sheer fun of it. I am trying to solve Kit Williams’ Masquerade with one of my daughters at the moment, for example. The treasure may have been found decades ago but the puzzle is still fascinating (as long as we resist the temptation to Google the answer). You don’t need to be an expert in A Level Physics or Key Stage 3 History to tutor your children at home. You can figure things out together, making use of whatever materials school has provided, and then you can go beyond those materials, rediscovering the joy of learning for its own sake.

7 Don’t forget life-skills

Educating our children at home forces us to reappraise many aspects of our lives. It also broadens our view of education. So my last piece of advice is prompted by a confession from one of my Sixth Form students who told me the other day that he doesn’t know how to iron a shirt. Maybe the time has come when we can teach our children to iron, cook and hoover. Maybe the time has come for us to help them develop crucial life skills. And that includes helping them revive the ancient art of conversation, if only so they can cheer up isolated relatives on the phone.

Home tutoring may currently feel like yet another burden we have to cope with but, as home educators around the world can testify, it is, in fact, a wonderful joy and privilege. We live in difficult times but, with difficulties, come new opportunities. When it comes to education, there’s no place like home.