There is a viral video that regularly pops up on social media in which a fight breaks out in a kebab shop and, amid the chaos, a man sits calmly eating his chips, as if nothing is happening. Punches are thrown, wrestling moves are rolled out, and still the man sits unperturbed, munching away. He is intent, it would seem, on carrying on as normal, no matter how disturbing the scene in front of him becomes.

This video beautifully illustrates the absurd situation in which education in this country finds itself.

The fight, of course, is the reality of the challenges facing schools. A phase leader I spoke to this week put it bluntly: in her 25 years in the profession, she has never known things to be this difficult. Half of the teaching staff in her school were absent with Covid. It was near-impossible to find a supply teacher. Almost all the services that feed into schools had disappeared. Children were far behind academically, socially, emotionally and physically. Everyone was desperately trying to protect each other from infection.

Schools under Covid pressure

And the pre-pandemic problems of impossible workload, a broken SEND and social care system, and budgets nowhere near adequate for the challenges schools are facing (see our cover feature for more on that point) had not gone away: they are worse.

So yes, it’s a fight: a fight just to get through the day.

And amid this chaos, there are numerous educational equivalents of the man eating his chips, pretending nothing is happening.

Schools battling on through the Covid pandemic
Ofsted is chief among them. This week, it insisted it would be “carrying on as usual”, despite no one in the places it is inspecting having that luxury. It is baffling to think that a “usual” inspection can be carried out in a comparable, accurate way in the current context. We reported last week that a third of those heads who pointed this out and asked for a deferral had that request turned down. It seems nonsensical.

But Ofsted is not alone.

For example, the Department for Education may be beginning to improve its communications under Nadhim Zahawi, but it has still, on occasion, looked out of touch - take all the noise in the past two weeks about attendance and nativities, for example.

On the former, yes, there is a persistent absence problem that, at some point, needs to be tackled. However, a handful of attendance experts not only has zero chance of fixing that problem, but the idea indicates a failure to understand the complexity of the reasons underpinning persistent absence. What’s more, making this push as schools battle rising levels of Covid-related absence is not just a failure to read the room, it is a failure to even step into it.

As for nativities, suggesting schools should run them if at all possible at exactly the same time we were being told that a new and highly infectious variant of Covid had reached our shores was just incomprehensible.

Granted, just as the viral video chip eater adjusts his position slightly at one point to avoid the fight, many of those I have chastised above have offered a glimpse of recognition of what is happening in front of them. But while all of them say that they acknowledge the pressure schools are under, what they then say and do proves otherwise.

I confess, I don’t know how schools can do more to get the reality of their situation out there and understood. But what I do know is that the outside world has to be made aware of what is going on before the damage to the teaching profession is too great.

@jon_severs

This article originally appeared in the 3 December 2021 issue under the headline “The chips are down, and schools need that reality to be recognised”