There’s a danger, when people talk in general about schools, of smoothing out the very different experiences that they provide around the country.

“School” may have common priorities wherever it happens, but the day-to-day experience of those few weekday hours can be very different depending on where you are.

We were given a sharp reminder of that last week when recording our latest podcast, with Ruth Stout, headteacher at Fair Isle Primary School. The school is on the island made famous by knitwear, birdlife, the shipping forecast and, more recently, having inspired the Shetland series of crime novels that later became a BBC TV series.

Many have long had a fascination with its location: Fair Isle is described on its website as “the most geographically remote inhabited island in the United Kingdom”. It takes about 25 minutes by plane to get to Shetland’s capital, Lerwick, but by boat and road the journey is nearer three and a half hours.

Sitting alone in the North Atlantic, halfway between Orkney and Shetland, Fair Isle may sound like an isolating place, but Stout says that’s not the case; she talks up the joy of living in a vibrant community (of around 50) with a common sense of purpose: everyone invested in making their tiny school (anything between 17 and the current three pupils in Stout’s time) the most enriching place it can be.

Covid has hit some schools harder than others

But for all the happy tales about the freedom that pupils have, of the days when you drop everything to rush out to see whales or a rescued owl, education on Fair Isle presents some big challenges.

Notably, transition - the move from primary to secondary that disrupts so many children the world over - is something the school has to work extremely hard at. After P7, pupils will typically become boarders in Lerwick, where they attend Anderson High School with around 900 others and only come home every three weeks, assuming the weather allows them to do so.

Stout, who is retiring soon, says her successor will be taking on a fantastic job - but cautions that it is not for everyone.

Scotland is, of course, a country that also has secondary schools with more than 2,000 students - a different sort of a community altogether, even if teachers’ core business
of bettering young lives remains the same.

And these past 18 months or so have introduced a new variable: Covid has hit some far harder than others. While the coronavirus ripped through many schools in 2020-21, others were fortunate to get through the year relatively unscathed. It has been well documented, of course, that Covid presented huge difficulties for senior secondary students preparing for important qualifications.

The hope had been that, while no one thought Covid had gone away, at least things would be on a more even keel in 2021-22, given the relaxed safety measures at the start of the school year and a Scottish government announcement that - while cautiously noting that alternative approaches may be required - national exams would go ahead in 2022.

Now, at the time of writing, there is increasing talk of remote learning, snap lockdowns and the problem of long Covid in young people. The impact that has on schools around the country will not be uniform - once again, some will feel the effects more profoundly than others.

School is never a homogeneous experience - it takes place in all sorts of different settings - but when young people leave their school, they should all be equally as enthused by learning and ready to take their place in the adult world, whatever their school’s postcode.

The pandemic, sadly, makes that harder than ever. In the upcoming Covid inquiry,
a key focus should be this: what was done - or wasn’t done - to ensure that not one pupil was unfairly disadvantaged by the seismic events of these past two years?

@Henry_Hepburn