What can I do? Teachers, students and families in relationship during COVID-19 lockdown in Scotland

Engaging with the ethics of care as developed by Nel Noddings, this paper unpacks the perceptions of three primary teachers working in Scotland during COVID-19 lockdown. Noddings constructs her ethics of care as relational. This focus on the ‘relation’ is central to the paper and the three themes that emerged from analysing the in-depth interviews conducted with the teachers show different facets of the relations teachers were engaged in during the lockdown. The first theme looks at the teachers’ work during COVID-19 lockdown as embedded within a larger Scottish discourse that has care as central to its formation. The second theme discussed the idea of reciprocity – care ethics focuses on acknowledgment of the relation between the carer and the cared for. The third theme focuses on parents as being intermediary between the teachers and students.