I’d like to have written a comforting, rallying cry of an end-of-year editorial, really I would. But as this is 2018, I can’t.

With Brexit and Trump in the foreground and all the insanity that entails, it would be easy to miss the fact that one of the defining political moments for schools since Michael Gove became education secretary has been playing out in the background.

The issue in question is whether the government is going to award teachers a long-overdue pay rise this September, and who is going to pay for it. Will it be as generous as has been rumoured (an inflation-busting 3.5 per cent) and will the Treasury, the Department for Education or the schools themselves have to cough up the cash to fund it?

As I type, we still don’t know what the outcome will be. But today marks the end of term for most schools and what is clear is that the decision was left far too late for school business managers and heads to budget for it.

Who will pay for a teacher pay rise?

We are still facing the very real possibility of the cost being passed on to heads with already shrinking budgets: we are looking down the barrel of widespread industrial action and the likelihood that thousands of heads will present the government with deficit budgets. This would be a national car crash so large it might not even be overshadowed by other events. The relationship between schools and government would be spoiled for a generation.

But whether or not ministers find the money and whether or not they manage to pass this news on to heads before they flock to the Dordogne is sort of beside the point.

OK, it’s not beside the point, but it is telling. It is telling of how far down central government’s list of priorities schools have fallen. This pay rise and whether or not it will be funded is a hugely important issue for school leaders and their staff, and yet we haven’t even been able get ministers across government to focus on it enough to make a timely decision.

Compare this not with Brexit but with the NHS. The health service is in the process of landing a once-in-a-generation financial settlement. Billions of pounds are being poured into the bottomless money pit that is modern healthcare. This came about not only because of a major political campaign by former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, but also significant goodwill in Downing Street.

Contrast this with how schools have been left hanging until the last possible moment to be told whether chancellor Philip Hammond or education secretary Damian Hinds have scraped together enough money to give teachers a pay rise that they’ve been waiting years for.

Making schools wait for the decision in the way they have betrays a certain disregard for the profession - the same attitude that allows the government to insist that schools are better funded than ever before and that the recruitment and retention crisis isn’t really a crisis.

Yes, healthcare is important. Yes, Brexit is a political distraction on a monumental scale. But surely schools, teachers and the millions of children they educate should not be a treated as a political afterthought.

There are many committed people in senior positions in the DfE, and Hinds has reportedly fought hard to secure the cash, but the education sector without question deserves more respect from Hammond and May.

Anyway, now you’ve read this, please go and enjoy your holiday. All of this can wait, at least for a week or two*.

Ed Dorrell is head of content at Tes. He tweets @Ed_Dorrell

* The Tes magazine and news website will continue to publish throughout the summer, keeping a watchful eye on the government’s shenanigans, so you can rest easy