Castle Rushen High School headteacher Keith Winstanley praised staff and pupils for adapting remarkably well during the pandemic.

He was speaking at the school’s annual awards ceremony.

Mr Winstanley began his speech by noting that such a ’mass gathering’ of people would not have been possible in ’any other British Isles jurisdiction’, before going on to talk about the disruption caused by Covid-19, saying: ’Along with traffic chaos on Douglas Prom and Steam Packet technical issues, the circle of school life is something we can, to a certain extent, take for granted.

’However, 2019/20 decided to shake things up a little.

’All of a sudden education was in a time of unforeseen complexity.

’School leaders, teachers and students had to quickly adapt to new ways of working and learning, with very little planning, time or training.’

’Never before have had I spent so much time trying to work out the safest way for students to learn as it looked increasingly likely that we would have to cope with a return to school under the social distancing rules.’

He said operating under social distancing would have been difficult for such an old school, where virtually none of the corridors is two metres wide.

Mr Winstanley said he felt that Manx schools did not get the public recognition they deserved for remaining open to teach the children of key workers and the most vulnerable - despite being in full lockdown.

For all other students, he highlighted that ’universal remote learning’ was provided for ’the vast majority’, with teachers phoning students who they were most concerned about and even providing socially distanced visits to those who needed work printed out or just needed ’a friendly face to visit them’,

He also thanked the parents of students for dealing with the ’steep learning curve’ of home-schooling and similar steep learning curves and ’doing their utmost to keep their children in some kind of learning routine during the lockdown’.

Despite the pandemic’s disruption of cancelled physical exams and the need instead for centre-assessed grades (CAGs), he reported that a larger than normal group of 80 students would be going on to study A-levels at sixth form - and that 73.8% of final-year students secured places at 20 different universities.

In other achievements, Mr Winstanley congratulated the student team of Jonty Bregazzi, Ben Smith, Leighton Ginty, Orry Gooberman and Emma Millward - who won the island Junior Achievement competition, having designed a product which allowed retailers to track customer and potential customer footfall via mobile phones.

He also spoke of changes to the school’s curriculum, such as the adoption of Scottish Qualification Authority (SQA) qualifications, which were previously only available in Scotland.

Year seven students (aged 11-12) this year also adopted the new ’Quest’ curriculum, which involves 10 special lessons a week where students are asked ’diverse’ questions such as ’What is the impact of disease?’, ’Why do governments fear rebellion?’, and ’What is the best form of power?’.

He ended by discussing the construction work on the new southern high school, which is set to replace Castle Rushen’s current 60-year-old school building, which is ’increasingly showing its age’.

He described the new development as the ’first post-Covid school in Britain’, and added: ’Let’s do it right, and let’s get it completed and operational according to the initial timeline’.

The guest speaker for the evening was former Castle Rushen student and teacher Tom Kelly.