One half of our school is at the other end of town from the other, going back to a time when one site was the grammar school and the other the secondary modern. 

Over the past 50 years of its being a single comprehensive school, several solutions have been proposed to try to ease the pressure on staff rushing between the two. 

One of the more fanciful visions was the idea of an elevated train or cable car, with cabins of teachers and TAs passing smoothly above the high street after each lesson. Parents and ex-students in town would then have the chance to cheer or jeer as we made our communal way from one place to the other. 

It would, of course, be a complete waste of money. 

A terrible waste of £100 billion

While the case for building the £100 billion high-speed railway HS2 may not have reached quite that level of absurdity, it is high-speed heading that way. A decision was quietly made recently to go ahead with it regardless, despite one of the more positive lessons from the past six months being that travelling for work is becoming much less necessary. Alternative ways of working and meeting are seeming not just feasible but often preferable. 

It’s not that I have any personal interest in stopping HS2 in its tracks. My only concern that it is a terrible waste of £100 billion. The case for HS2 was pretty wobbly from the outset, and wobbly is now turning into complete white elephant. 

At best, the HS2 rail track will start to undergo conversion into a national cycle path within 10 years of its opening. This will follow a few years of largely empty carriages surging sadly up and down the country, after an equally pointless decade of ripping up the landscape to build it. As former railway chief Sir Michael Holden said on the BBC Today programme recently, “I don’t think we’ll ever return to the levels of demand for commuting travel leading up to February.” 

There are many alternative and worthy uses for that money. But if the government really wants an investment that can genuinely accelerate and improve the capacity of the nation, then why not spend at least a sizeable chunk of it on a genuine high-speed, high-capacity education system? 

The hope that schools are heading somewhere better

Rather than education facing the prospect of another decade of demoralisation, cuts and us all making do, that £100 billion could fund a proper long-term investment in teaching, equipment, facilities and 21st-century courses, while also ensuring all children at home can have full access to online teaching and learning. 

This not about more pay, by the way; it is about giving everyone the hope that schools are heading somewhere brighter and better, for the benefit of all. Forget HS2. Education is the public project that would provide the economic lifeline across the country, the one that would connect up the country and offer everyone a genuine return.

Let’s not leave the ongoing protests about HS2 just to those whose homes and environments are going to be trashed by it. Let’s all join the protest and try to get that money spent instead on helping to avoid the further trashing of schools - and other public services, for that matter. 

Given the colossal debt we’re collectively incurring this year, there is plainly not going to be another £100 billion project for years to come. This is our only hope. 

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire