Ever the masters of a solution in need of a problem, the Department for Education has made a new announcement - not an apology for the embarrassing free school meals fiasco, nor a statement of thanks for the efforts that schools have gone to recently. Instead, it was the presentation of a fund to support schools to set up remote learning systems through Microsoft or Google.

It’s not quite clear to me why the taxpayer should be investing in this at all. Surely, if there are any organisations that should be paying out to get schools using Microsoft and Google services, it should be… well, Microsoft. Or Google.

In my own school, there are plenty of issues I’d like the department to resolve. A good kick-up-the-backside of the free school meals voucher scheme would be more than welcome. Access to internet connections and usable devices for a substantial proportion of pupils would be another. And it’s not just the most disadvantaged that we need be most concerned about.

It’s far from uncommon now to find a home without a physical keyboard of any sort. Even in families with reliable incomes and good connectivity, there are plenty who rely on tablet or mobile phone devices for their internet activities. In a good deal more, the most likely source of internet access is the computer games console. Neither of these lend themselves to submitting home learning through an online platform.

Coronavirus: The limitations of remote learning

This is not new, either. It’s more than a decade ago that virtual learning environments became the next big thing. Everyone had to have a VLE, massive funding was invested in it - and to what end? Had it been a success, we wouldn’t be needing to pay schools to join the big companies now.

The problems then haven’t changed: too many staff don’t feel confident using them; pupils’ ability to access them is inconsistent at best; the effort in keeping them running is often greater than the benefits of the return.

It’s the latter that’s my greatest concern. No doubt some schools will now feel compelled to invest time into setting up an online platform that they’re ill-prepared to use. Teachers will have to be trained - presumably remotely - to try to use it. Families will be sent hard-to-follow guidance on signing up, leading to endless difficulties in communication between schools and families. And to what end?

We do make use of a platform of sorts in our school, but take-up is limited at best, because often our pupils are sharing devices at home with siblings, not to mention parents working at home. And having a platform doesn’t make setting remote tasks automatically easier or more beneficial; often the reverse can be true.

So much of what we can set remotely is not about high-quality teaching and learning experiences, but about finding tasks that children can do. If teaching were as easy as a short video input and a task to complete, we’d have stuck with VLEs years ago and abandoned schools.

We risk falling into old traps: focusing on tasks instead of learning; focusing on teacher marking rather than gathering feedback from the class. All the elements that make classroom teaching most effective are hardest to replicate through a video and a submission form.

I love our platform because it lets children engage with one another and with staff while they’re otherwise separated from one another at home. But let’s not pretend that any amount of money thrown at remote learning can help it to replace an excellent teacher in a classroom, any better than a video link and worksheet download on the website might. It’s not where we should be putting our efforts.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at East Preston Junior School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979