Work with any disadvantaged child in any community left behind by our economy and our state, and you will be faced at some point with the ends of education’s morality. By and large, most of us aren’t prepared to deal with the ethical dilemmas we will face as teachers. Our ability to meet these challenges is simply assumed, and failure is simply evidence of a failure of character, a lack of resilience. This grave dereliction of duty on the part of our teacher education and training system costs teachers their mental health and their careers, and all because of the wilfully blind privilege of decision-makers.

And so, this week Downing Street announced that teachers will be trained to spot mental health issues in their students. “Trained.” We won’t be trained. We will receive new materials and guidance so that Theresa May’s advisers can convince her she’s rescued some sort of legacy from her failed premiership. Trained, my arse. Meanwhile, mental health and disability specialists with years of training have seen their work restructured out of existence by local councils responding to cuts.

Not only will this intervention have little or no effect in mitigating the harm government policies are doing to children, but I also can’t help but think it will lead to more teacher absence, too. It’s not just the added pressure on us and our students, but when we peruse this guidance document, we’re bound to realise we should have visited our GP years ago.

The very way education policy is done has become bankrupt around us, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. First, we blamed teachers. Then, we blamed headteachers. Now, we are endorsing headteachers who blame children. As of 2019, starting with the Department for Education’s Recruitment and Retention strategy, we are blaming parents.

And what are we blaming teachers, headteachers, children and parents for? Lack of educational improvement? That would merely be nonsense. No, what we’re doing is far worse and far more dangerous. We are blaming them for poverty.

Social mobility: ‘Who you are born to’

“No child’s prospects should be limited by the circumstances of their birth or who they were born to.” So said education secretary Damian Hinds this week during what was billed as a major speech on social mobility. His analysis and his prescription for schools sail dangerously close to using education as a tool for indoctrination. For a secretary of state who waxes lyrical about Michael Gove - the man who weaponised fear of a lefty liberal Blob to justify his reforms - this is as deeply ironic as it is wholly predictable.

Damian will soon be gone, but education under the Conservatives will continue, like so much of our contemporary history, as the unfolding of a dystopian prophecy nobody believed possible. His speech called upon policymakers to tackle “the last taboo” - intervention in people’s homes. Just five years ago, this would have been anathema to a Conservative. Which goes to show: the things we fear the most are often projections of ourselves.

Hinds can push his “five foundations” of character education with all the zeal of an evangelist, but Patryk down in Southend isn’t dangerously misbehaving because he’s lacking experience of creativity, performance, sport, volunteering or work. Or rather, he might well be, but giving him more of these things won’t fix the problem because he is being taught at home to hate school by a parent who hates society. And, of course, he does. You would too if society had done the same to you.

As a teacher, if you have come across this situation, then you have been faced with one extreme limit of educational ethics. Widespread as it may be, I suspect most teachers don’t experience coming to the point in a conversation with a child where they have to stop, because you can’t, in good conscience, teach a child to resent their parent. You stand back, and you begin to resent society, too.

At the other end of this ethical problem is Patrick, in Kent, with a surfeit of these “character-building” experiences, whose parents support him in his misbehaviour because he’ll never need the qualifications conferred by school, such are his privileges. It is richly telling that when policymakers stray from pitching policy to the middle of the bell curve, their focus is always on the Patryks of this world, and never on the Patricks.

The last taboo

Much of this week’s speech by Hinds, including its key phrase, “the last taboo”, was rehearsed at the Resolution Foundation in July last year. The phrase itself, it seems, is not even Hinds’s own, but nicked from New Labour’s Alan Milburn, former chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

Attendant to his legacy and future career, Hinds made a pitch for the attention of the few centrists left in his party. But the last taboo isn’t what he, the Tories’ or Labour’s centrists think it is. It is the death of centrism itself and its myth of social mobility, shredded by the effects of its economics and its public management: rampant inequality and distrust. As per Yeats: “The centre cannot hold.”

So, Mr Hinds can say: “Someone’s personal resilience and emotional wellbeing can be as important as their exam results,” paving the way for character judgments of those whose resilience and emotional wellbeing are always under attack, and blind to the fact that environments shape our identities.

And Mr Hinds can say: “What parents do, is actually far more important than who the parents are,” paving the way for interventionism in people’s homes, and blind to the fact that our identities shape our actions.

Here’s what I see. I see Patryk’s dad getting another kicking, privilege wreaking havoc, and the finger of blame pointing at victims.

And here’s what I don’t see. I don’t see Patrick’s dad getting any attention, ethical leadership from the top or the hand of solidarity extended to our allies in education, parents.

But how could we come to ask for these things, when we are learning professional ethics on the job?

JL Dutaut is co-editor of Flip the System UK: a teachers’ manifesto (Routledge). He is currently on a career break from teaching to research school accountability systems around the world. He hasn’t found one he likes yet, and he doesn’t think you would either