Building back better in 2022 – with a renewed focus on pastoral care, emotional health and wellbeing for all

At the time of writing, despite a warning from the head of the World Health Organisation that the coronavirus pandemic is ‘nowhere near over’ (BBC News, 2022), many countries are beginning to ease their Covid-19 restrictions, a sign perhaps of a cautiously optimistic beginning to 2022. While there remains much uncertainty about the future, it does seem opportune at the start of this new year to reflect on what has come before but also to look forward to brighter times ahead, and to consider what it means to ‘build back better’. It goes without saying that over the past two years we have all endured a once-in-a-generation crisis which has impacted on all aspects of our lives and exacerbated many existing inequalities in our society (Social Mobility Commission, 2021). A recent report by UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank (2021) notes that the global disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic constitutes ‘the worst education crisis on record’ (p. 4). Importantly, however, the report stresses that, as well as addressing learning losses, it must be a priority to support re-opened schools across the world to provide comprehensive services promoting wellbeing and psychosocial support (p. 7) and to address the ‘crisis within a crisis’ (p. 26) of child and youth mental health. Our recent special issue (Pastoral Care in Education, Volume 39, issue 3) on the theme of ‘A pedagogy of love and care in the time of Covid-19’ highlighted both the reality of personal suffering (e.g. Westendorff et al., 2021) but also the often invisible and uncelebrated ‘labour of love’ of teachers across the world (Poncela et al., 2021) as they sought to support children and young people at considerable emotional, social, material and political cost to themselves. As we look forward, let us not simply return to how things were before the pandemic, but instead let us, as pastoral educators, urge our leaders (at local and national level) to put children’s pastoral care, emotional health and wellbeing at the very centre of our educational and budgetary plans for the future. As we emerge from two years of massive upheaval we cannot forget or allow others to forget one of the biggest lessons from the pandemic: that schools need to address the wellbeing of their students and teachers rather than simply focusing on effective teaching and learning. PASTORAL CARE IN EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 40, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/02643944.2022.2036419