For teachers and pupils, it’s been a fraught year, full of anxiety about health and wellbeing, with a crippling workload exacerbated by last-minute changes. 

And now it’s culminated in the most controversial change of all, after 19 July.

Seeing all mitigations removed and infections rising exponentially, with a slower but definite rise in hospitalisations and deaths, it’s hardly surprising that there should be such strong opposition. 

It’s therefore crucial for the education secretary to provide clarity, and to inspire confidence and trust. Unfortunately, relations with the teaching profession have been impaired at each stage, and they reached a new low last week, as bubbles became increasingly unpopular. Equally, headteachers were amazed to learn that they had been overzealous in their implementation of the guidance. 

So it was gratifying to hear education secretary Gavin Williamson’s presentation to Parliament begin in emollient mode, acknowledging that “we all owe a great debt of gratitude to pupils, parents and teachers, who gave up so much”, and that the pandemic has made us all “as a nation…prize the role of schools, colleges and universities more than ever before”. 

There was even a fleeting reference to “the incredible work of our inspirational teachers and wider educational staff”. 

Covid in schools: education secretary’s ‘tenuous grasp of the situation’

The conciliatory tone didn’t last. As he faced questions about the finer detail of the proposals, the timescale of the changes and the delivery of the all-important guidance into schools, Mr Williamson’s grasp of the situation became more tenuous.

His strategy of repeating the parts of the question that suit him and glossing over or ignoring the parts that he doesn’t like is threadbare. So it was to be expected that he would insert the usual references to the “knowledge-rich curriculum” and the  tremendous success of the vaccine roll-out when under pressure yesterday. 

We might question whether a minister should be playing the debate game in this situation. He should have been prepared for a barrage of questions from Kate Green, the shadow education secretary. She’d had a preview of the proposals, so was bound to quiz him on the finer details around implementation of the new guidance. He needed more specific detail and greater knowledge of international comparisons at his fingertips to give authority to the new guidance. 

Instead, he ignored the perfectly sensible questions about whether schools would receive financial support to improve ventilation. As LibDem MP Munira Wilson pointed out, Germany and New York City already monitor levels of carbon dioxide in classrooms, and have systems installed that do more than just circulate existing air in the room. 

She also mentioned how she had “visited Richmond upon Thames School in my constituency, which has spent £15,000 alone on improving ventilation. Many schools simply cannot do that as they are already struggling to balance the books.” 

Mr Williamson was unable to provide Ms Green with details of any studies that showed that masks didn’t play a significant role in reducing infection rates, or to fully justify the apparent contradiction between masks being mandatory in March, when infection rates were lower, but abandoned in May, when infections were already rising. 

Even Israel, with its highly successful vaccine programme, has had to reimpose requirements to wear masks indoors as infection rates climb.

Instead, Mr Williamson fell back on the old Brexit tactic of berating the Honourable Lady with the accusation that she was so firmly wedded to the EU vaccine programme that she had missed the fact that 80 million jabs had already been delivered, thanks to government action. 

It’s an argument that’s wearing thin now that other countries are rapidly catching up with vaccine delivery, and have far lower infection and mortality rates.

‘Only interested in petty point-scoring’

To those parents and children who, through no fault of their own, cannot have the vaccine and are therefore vulnerable to infection, his tangential response seems way off beam. The politics of this pandemic are far more urgent than settling old scores with Europe. What people need is more compassion, especially when they are left so cruelly exposed.

People will not forget that it was the education secretary who ordered schools to remain open in the last couple of days of the Christmas term, even as hospitals in Greenwich and other London boroughs were overwhelmed and the death rate increased.

He may have been smarting from the action taken by the unions to protect the health of their members and pupils, and the subsequent humiliating third lockdown. 

So perhaps he saw an opportunity for a bit of payback: “It is with some sadness that I say that the National Education Union started off by saying it did not want teachers to teach pupils in person, and then said it did not want teachers to teach students online. It starts to make me question whether the National Education Union really believes in education at all.”

This is a distortion not just of the Greenwich incident but of all the problems of getting teaching online, delayed by up to nine months by the failure to get laptops to those who needed them. 

His peroration (“We will wait and see, and hopefully it will be more cooperative and hard-working in the next academic year”) was a total misrepresentation of the whole profession. At the start of the Covid emergency, all stakeholders, including the unions, were prepared to sink their differences and work with the government to keep the whole education community going. 

That a government minister should be more interested in petty point-scoring at this critical phase of the pandemic is a lapse of political judgement. When the public most needed Mr Williamson to be the authoritative figure imparting a strategy that we can all live with, he failed to provide convincing answers because the detail and the strategy were not within his grasp. 

And he has failed to make the next stage of the government’s strategy credible to the general public.

Yvonne Williams has spent nearly 34 years in the classroom and 22 years as a head of English. She has contributed chapters on workload and wellbeing to Mentoring English Teachers in the Secondary School, edited by Debbie Hickman (Routledge)