We must keep schools open – so why is the government making life harder for teachers?

With hindsight, it now seems obvious that schools were going to have to close during the first coronavirus lockdown.

But when Gavin Williamson pulled himself up to the despatch box in March and announced that every nursery, primary, secondary and college would be indefinitely shuttered, it was one of the most remarkable statements by an education minister since the war.

At the time, there was almost universal support for the decision: we knew little about Covid-19 and it seemed likely that educational settings were potential transmission hotspots for the deadly virus. 

It was of course obvious that the move would have a negative impact on the education of young people, but on that subject, too, we were wholly unclear as to quite how damaging it would be.

We now know. The three months of school closure had profound consequences for education far deeper than pretty much anyone could have imagined.

One horrifying report from assessment organisation No More Marking last week suggested that some children showed up in September with their learning having regressed nearly two years in the five months since they had last been in a classroom. Another, from the Education Endowment Foundation, suggested that a full 10 years of progress in closing the attainment gap between the poorest students and their wealthier peers was completely reversed.

It should have come as no surprise that students from the most deprived homes were disproportionately affected: they had less access to online teaching, fewer quiet places in which to study, and their parents were, on average, less confident to engage with home education.

And that’s before we even consider the consequences of the shutdown for the children on the “cusp of care”. These are the young people who depend on their teachers on a day-to-day basis to keep a watchful eye out for them, many of whom would have suffered the horrifying consequences of this safety net suddenly being removed.

The case for keeping schools open in Lockdown 2.0 is evidently a strong one. The government, Labour and the headteacher unions are agreed, and it would take a catastrophic spike in cases for ministers to reverse this position.

However, the National Education Union is certainly not on board. The leadership of Britain’s biggest teacher union has not missed a beat in arguing that the health and safety of their members demands that school gates be locked as soon as possible.

This position is quite understandable, but the fact is that for the foreseeable future, for the sake of students across the country, teachers will instead be asked to keep on going.

In so doing, an enormous amount is being asked of them. Their resilience and the resilience of the wider education sector risks being tested, potentially to destruction. Us parents cocooned safely working at home would do well to show deep gratitude to our children’s teachers as we drop them off to continue their education uninterrupted.

It’s also time for the government to be honest and admit that it is also asking schools to stay open for the sake of what’s left of the economy. Of course primaries are much more than childcare settings, but the fact is that workforce productivity collapsed when parents were juggling full time jobs and full time childcare and the country literally can’t afford for that to happen again.

As such it really should not be too much to ask Williamson’s department to break its terrible habit of publishing complex Covid guidance for schools the evening before it is due to be implemented. This is the kind of rubbish we should not expect teachers to put up with as they battle to keep the learning show on the road.  

Similarly, ministers must be prepared to listen to headteachers when they ask for guidance to be redrafted, or accountability rules to be temporarily softened. They are under inordinate pressure.

Some eight months after Williamson’s historic Commons statement, we are asking heads and teachers to do more than many would have thought possible. But they are not indestructible – and the government, if it wants teachers to keep teaching and students to keep learning, would do well to remember it.

Ed Dorrell is a director at Public First and a former deputy editor of the Times Educational Supplement