It’s the last morning of the Lent term, March 2020 and I’m sitting with the boarders at breakfast. With the pandemic about to hit Scotland, we jokingly say to the form 8s that this may be their last ever Cargilfield breakfast. I honestly did not believe this would be true but a year on we still haven’t seen them or had a chance to say goodbye.

The summer term arrived, the weather was lovely and the grounds were all ready but no children came into school. Staff meeting was done on something called Microsoft teams, something we would all become so familiar with over the next year. The realisation that we would not see children or staff in the building was sad and not what a school should be like. Most of the time the only staff here were myself, the housemaster and the headmaster and his family. This is because we all live here, even all the gap students had gone home. Most of them we never saw again as they were all from abroad. I did have a job to do during this time, I was working with the key worker children who came into school everyday. For them this was not an easy thing to do. All their friends were in the comfort of their own homes, but they were at school, on school computers, eating packed lunches and having to get up early to get into school for 8.30! 

August arrived and I like most people were hoping that school would be normal again, whatever normal now is! However it wasn’t. We had to keep children in bubbles, two of the boys dorms became classrooms, no school uniform just games kit, no changing rooms (can’t say I’m missing going in there!) sinks around the school were springing up everywhere and the reminder to keep washing our hands, but at least the children were back in school and for a time we had all the boarders back too. Even the boarding house was a very different place, with showers at 5pm, games kit being washed every night and the girls even had the TV in the dorm to watch Bake Off. I never thought I would allow that! 

I also never thought that after the Christmas holidays the children would be back to online learning. It was a sad sight to see the school quiet again with the prospect of another term with no children in the school. The saying it’s the people that make a place not the building is so true and has never been more apparent than in the last year.

Thankfully, the children returned for the last week of term, and how lovely it was to see them all. Let’s hope we never have to do online learning again and summer term can be a bit more like the norm.