“Hop along now. No dilly-dallying in the corridors, Jennings… You’ve only got half an hour for lunch and your form still haven’t all had their vaccines yet.”

“Sorry, Sir. I think someone in 9B tripped over and it put out the whole jog-past-and-we’ll-jab-you system in the sports hall.”

Do I detect a somewhat unfamiliar sense of urgency? Might one feel just a little bit peeved at the massive “hurry up” that the government was issued with yesterday, when for months and months the issue of vaccines for teachers has been met with all the haste of a Covid public inquiry on tranquillisers?

If, among the chaos of teacher-assessed grades, I had had time to take breaths at all, then hearing Sir David King - chair of the Independent Sage group of scientists - insist that a programme to vaccinate children over 12 years old should “run forward quickly” would have prompted quite a sharp intake of one.

As reported in Tes, he told Sky News that the Pfizer vaccine had been given the green light to be used on secondary school children.

Covid and schools: Rejecting the call to vaccinate teachers early

Following on from him, Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, made her opinions quite clear on Good Morning Britain: “If we want schools to continue without disruption in the autumn and lift restrictions so children can have a normal experience, we need to vaccinate them, and if we wait and watch for the evidence it will be too late in the next few weeks.”

The next few weeks! If you weren’t drowning in hand-san, you might remember that in December and January more than half a million people signed a petition asking the government to add teachers as a priority group for vaccination. Why? Perhaps because social distancing was impossible in schools, personal protective equipment was utterly impractical, and getting schools back open safely was a key plank in getting the country moving again? 

With so many people signing, the government was obliged to debate the question in Parliament, which it did on 11 January. And sensible MPs stood and spoke and made the case. 

“I cannot think of another group of people who have so much day-to-day contact with other humans,” one said. “Absolutely I do agree,” another insisted, “if reopening schools is the government’s priority, then surely it’s good sense and good politics to vaccinate our educators.”

But no. Despite calls from the children’s commissioner and the Conservatives’ own chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, the motion was rejected. “Ensuring the safety of children, the education and childcare workforce and families is our overriding priority,” the government blathered in its written response to the debate.

And yet, by adding that “the government is working hard to ensure that everyone who is prioritised based on clinical risk receives a Covid-19 vaccine as soon as reasonably possible”, it consigned teachers to the same queue as everyone else. A queue that, disgracefully, also included supermarket staff, delivery drivers and other key workers exposed to lots of human contact.

School staff slapped down by the government

Why? Perhaps it was because there was still an impression that, as a major Bloomberg splash put it almost exactly a year ago, “Schoolchildren don’t appear to transmit...coronavirus.” Quite how every single one of my form tested positive for it within a week in December then, I’ve no idea.

How different things appear now. Professor Sridhar couldn’t have been more clear yesterday: “Given that we know children can transmit, where we are going to see problems going forward is not going to be in care homes, it’s not going to be in hospitals, it’s going to be in schools.”

Oh. So while teachers were instructed to get back to work and wait their turn for vaccines, apparently now it’s imperative that students are vaccinated quick-sharp? Here’s hoping that the GMB sofa has more clout than the GMB union, which has campaigned tirelessly for safer schools but - like the teaching unions with it - has been told to sit down and keep quiet. 

If it has, then hopefully the government will pay attention to Sridhar’s unequivocal message: “This is where you’re going to see large groups of unvaccinated kids together, and we are going to have outbreaks.” 

To which I’d add just one thing: we are going to continue to have outbreaks. Because we’ve been having them all along.

“Just do it,” Sridhar implores. “Roll it out in the summer, get those kids covered.”

And if by “covered” she means vaccinated, Sir David King also means “keep their faces masked”. Not only does he think we need to hurry up and get students jabbed, but also that telling schools that secondary-age students no longer need to wear masks “isn’t a wise thing to do and I do hope the government will rethink this in the light of the current figures”.

I am fortunate to have had both jabs myself. Plenty of my close colleagues have not. Of course, it is absolutely right that we try to get everyone protected from this terrible virus as quickly as possible, and this includes students. 

But, once again, staff in schools find themselves slapped down by a government that seems to have acid reflux whenever a suggestion is made that it might be worth protecting them, trusting them or just plain valuing a bit of their work.

Sadly, that seems par for the course from a prime minister who was notorious in his own school days for ignoring teachers. Ultimately, though, his examination will come and, as much as he would like to inflate his own performance over this period, he is going to find that serious failings and blindspots will have to be accounted for. 

Kester Brewin has taught mathematics across a wide variety of schools for the past 20 years. He tweets as @kesterbrewin