The end of the ride draws near. Just one more twist of the cage of death, one more lurch of the Waltzer, and perhaps an unexpected deluge of cold water, and then candy floss will be yours.
I have never been a great fan of fairground rides (that disturbing hybrid description was your clue), and certainly didn’t join the teaching profession in search of them. The relentlessness, the impossibility of escape and the wearying uncertainty is too much like a nightmare to feel like fun. And since that’s what I do for a living, why would I want to do it at the weekends, too?
As the school year comes to a fortnight’s pause before (in secondaries) exam results and appeals consume the rest of August, there is some comfort and familiarity in the counterintuitive weirdness of government decisions and their timing.
I yearn for freedoms as much as anyone; I long for an end to bubbles, masks and isolations with every fibre. I want children in school, teachers in front of them, and learning, life, love and laughter rebounding anew from the walls. I want the energy and creativity that brings the unique joy of schools to be rekindled.
I want the five-fold increase in the safeguarding caseload to go, the gaps in progress and wellbeing to stop growing, the grief and grind to stop. So, if you can reach the button that stops the ride and releases the catch on the cage of death, please, please press it. But maybe not in such a way that it catapults riders out of the cage from 60ft up.
Covid unlocking: data pointing one way and advice going the other
We’ve been here before, with the data pointing one way and the advice going the other. In February 2020, when we closed too late; in October, when a firebreak extension to half-term to avert the second wave was rejected; in December, when schools were threatened if they proposed moving to the remote learning that promptly became compulsory in January for the third wave.
Full transparency: I am a headteacher, not an epidemiologist (so, to a recent parental accusation that I am following rules rather than doing my own research into the efficacy of masks, I plead guilty). I am not a politician either, and I know the decisions are difficult and finely balanced.
But, if protections are removed as rates of infection soar - and especially if it’s done with a flourish of political machismo that makes it harder to reintroduce them - it undermines confidence everywhere.
We do indeed live in a world where risk is inevitable - and we do need to adapt to living with Covid, the actual risks of which are probably low and getting lower. But probably, not definitely, and mutations could still surprise us. So to remove even the possibility of protective measures over the summer and into a new school year feels like a gamble. We all hope it will work out but we risk feeding into the arcade fruit machine precisely the joy, the health and the happiness that we are trying to claw back.
Given all of that, and the data predicting a significant spike through August and September, the line that “if we don’t open up now, when will we ever?” is disingenuous. It implies a binary choice between all protections and none at all - either full-on test and trace and whole-bubble isolations, masks and staggered lunchtimes or nothing at all to acknowledge rising rates of infection.
Of course, the vaccination programme hugely reduces the risk of serious illness (and as we hail the scientific brilliance of that, let’s thank a science teacher). Of course, therefore, we don’t need to continue doing exactly what we’ve been doing.
It’s time for the government to act like grown-ups
We probably haven’t needed to do it for some time but, if I might respectfully say so, prime minister, those are the rules you asked us to obey regardless of our own professional judgement and common sense.
Implying that we have been overzealous almost looked as though you were distracting attention from governmental indecision by blaming the teaching profession for isolations.
Either way, it creates a very odd context, in which schools continue to send scores of children into isolation while the political rhetoric is about freedom and normality.
As I write, I am helping to supervise another 50 waiting to be picked up after the 10th confirmed case in a fortnight, and they are as annoyed and despondent as we are.
The starkness of that binary choice casts the cautiously optimistic as paranoid killjoys determined to hold back liberty in the name of fear.
I hope it’s not another front in a culture war because, as in all wars, it is the vulnerable who generally lose the most. Children and teachers who have battled against illness, physical and mental; who may have found the return to school as hard or harder than the denial of school, and who now want to be able to pace their return to normality, no longer have that option.
In the war against the pandemic, the UK already sports a mixed array of medals - for our high death rate and our economic hit, as well as for our vaccination rate. Rather than pinning another to the national chest for “least-protected country”, we could find a different approach; a phased return.
The best moments of the government’s handling of the pandemic have been when ministers have levelled with the nation, acknowledging the gravity of the situation and the likelihood of sacrifices ahead. Even as prospects dramatically improve, that is what we still need and what would inspire confidence now.
Levelling with schools and students means getting off the fairground ride, overcoming the dizziness and being the grown-up. Admit that there will probably be more challenges, more absence, more anxiety ahead in September, and that it may be wise to plan against that possibility.
We can take the honesty, and we’ve got quite good at managing multiple possible scenarios. It wouldn’t be admitting failure, only admitting that there are swings and roundabouts.
Patrick Moriarty is headteacher of the Jewish Community Secondary School, in the London Borough of Barnet
