As many of us know, masks have now been made mandatory once more in shops and on buses and trains. Our prime minister, Boris Johnson, states people shall enjoy a better Christmas this year than last despite the range of restrictions being made to keep everyone safe against covid and the new omicron variant over the holidays. However, is this completely true? Due to the new variant and the continuous rise in covid cases in Kingston there are concerns about a potential 4th lockdown happening from many people especially students in GCSE and Alevel years. If this is to happen many will not be able to see their families and friends over the christmas break. This will affect many young people’s, including myself, education as it will cause a disruption in everyone's learning and final grades towards the end of the academic year. 

 

Lots of students believe that we should continue in school and be able to sit our exams in order to achieve the best of our abilities and get the grades we deserve. Multiple people think target grades and or predicted grades will not be able to reflect the correct grades they should receive. Some students want to be able to sit their exams due to their mocks having not highlighted their best achievable grades and feel they didn't do very well in them. On the other hand some would prefer not to do these exams because they feel as though their mock grades were up to their standards and it is best to keep people safe due to the covid-19 virus. 

 

Covid 19 has already affected education for multiple students across the UK and for 2 years GCSE exams haven't been able to take place in the proper manner and other younger GCSE years have missed out on learning face to face receiving a disadvantage. When asked how she feels about how previous lockdowns have affected our education already Rebecca Louise expressed this: ‘I think that covid has affected our GCSEs as being in multiple lockdowns has hindered the amount of content and how well we were able to understand the information. Even though, for some subjects, we are given some formulas or have reduced content, it has been quite difficult to cope with learning in general in a time like this.”

 

The question overall is, will covid once again further affect our education?