At the end of a year of feverish speculation, this has been a week of feverish speculation.

Questions have included: will schools reopen as normal after Christmas? Will there be a phased return? Will public exams be cancelled once again?

Nobody really knows the answer to any of this, and yet the speculation goes on, feverishly.

I’m guessing that all of us hope for the best, knowing that bitter experience shows us how quickly things can unravel.

The big difference between now and this time last year is that we have the advantage of vaccines that should at the very least lessen the severity of the Omicron variant.

But we also know that this has always been a crisis about numbers - and that even a small percentage of a very big number of people getting very ill adds up to the NHS being overwhelmed.

We can’t let that happen. It means that people will be seriously ill or die in corridors, not only of Covid, but other illnesses too.

Sticking-plaster solutions

But equally, we cannot have a situation whereby the country - and our education system, with its young people at its heart - is in a perpetual state of crisis.

The reality is that these peaks and troughs of infections, and the emergence of variants, might be what normal life looks like.

Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi wrote to schools and colleges this week informing them, among other things, of plans to ask retired teachers to sign up for supply agencies in order to help address teacher shortages caused by Covid.

Now, many schools are already finding it difficult to hire supply teachers because of high demand.

And the result of having lots of teachers out of work with Covid, and not being able to fill those gaps, is straightforward. Schools will have to send home classes and year groups and, in extreme cases, will have to close for on-site teaching.

That has already been happening from time to time, and it is a fair bet that Omicron will make matters worse next term.

So, the government’s plan to ask retired teachers to step forward is well intentioned, even though it is pretty obvious that it is an initiative that will need to be very well supported, promoted and publicised, and that it is unlikely to work at a scale sufficient to solve the problem.

And, in truth, it seems unlikely that thousands of older people will be keen to spend time back in schools with few mitigations. So let’s see what the response to this call to arms is in practice.

No forward planning - again 

But the bigger point is that here we are at the end of the Christmas term, nearly two years down the line from when the crisis began, and this initiative has been rushed out shortly before schools break up for the holiday.

There’s absolutely no chance whatsoever of having anything meaningful in place for the beginning of January.

Another announcement at the same time was the extension of the Covid workforce fund to provide financial assistance for supply cover, which was due to end on 31 December but will now be open until the spring half term.

This is all well and good, but the Covid workforce fund has existed only for two short windows of time during the entirety of the crisis, and the eligibility criteria contain so many conditions that it is inaccessible to many schools and colleges.

Then there is ventilation.

Carbon dioxide monitors were rolled out this term - again, many months after the crisis began - and there is now the provision of air cleaning units to special educational needs and alterative provision settings, with all other schools and colleges advised that they can buy this equipment from an “online marketplace”.

It really is a pitiful response to an issue that was clear virtually from the outset. Good ventilation is an effective control measure against Covid transmission. Why on earth has it taken so long to put so little in place?

The pattern that can be seen from all of this is obvious. It is of a piecemeal and reactive response. It is characterised by bullish optimism on the part of government every time infections dip and then by full-on panic every time the figures climb again.

Which brings me back to the original point. We can’t go on like this.

A robust strategy 

Managing Covid has to be something that doesn’t involve living in a perpetual state of crisis.

I know that, like you, I’m exhausted and drained by the relentlessness of this. Like you, I’m just craving an end to all of this. And, frankly, what you and your colleagues across our schools and colleges have been doing, day in, day out, has been extraordinarily more challenging than anything I’ve been wheeled out to say or do.

And I want to pay tribute too to the civil servants and officials we work with - working flat-out, trying to weave coherence from chaos, too often let down by faltering political leadership.

It feels to me like the post-Christmas period would be a good time for the government to put in place what it really should have done at the outset and develop a sustainable strategy for education - something that is better resourced, longer term and far less piecemeal than what we’ve had.

Ministers talk a lot about the importance of education, of keeping schools open, of children being in the classroom. But there simply is not and never has been a really robust strategy.

None of us knows what the new year will bring. All this feverish speculation isn’t doing anyone any good, least of all our children and young people.

But, as Plato said, ”courage is knowing what not to fear”.

Which is why, amid ongoing anxiety and uncertainty, the new year will feel a good deal more manageable if there is a sense of the government having a coherent and transparent strategy, so that all the rhetoric about the importance of education is matched by a plan of action.

Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders