It’s funny how things that were once totally unfamiliar can, within a fairly short space of time, become totally familiar.

Take bubbles. In the old days - by which I mean 15 months ago - they were innocuous things that accompanied washing up or having a bath. Now they are part of a strange new world across our schools and colleges. 

So, too, the business of managing a contact-tracing system in which leaders and teachers have to identify all the close contacts of coronavirus cases and send them home to self-isolate.

Over the course of the past academic year, however, these once-strange systems have become not only second nature but also an important bulwark in society’s fight against the virus. Schools and colleges have played an extraordinary role in the nation’s public health response, and they have often done so with little support from the government or its agencies.

However, the question must surely now be asked about whether this system of bubbles and contact tracing is still needed when schools and colleges return for the next academic year, or whether it will do more harm than good. It is a question that the government and its public-health experts must answer urgently because schools and colleges need to know what plans to put in place for September and be able to communicate these to staff, parents and pupils.

Covid: Schools need to know if there will be bubbles and contact tracing next term

In a crisis that has always revolved around numbers, the problem with the contact-tracing system is apparent in statistics released by the Department for Education on Tuesday. These showed a big week-on-week increase in the number of pupils absent from school for Covid-related reasons.

Delving into the figures further, we find that 16,000 pupils were absent with a suspected case of Covid, and 9,000 with a confirmed case. However, some 172,000 young people were self-isolating not because they had Covid but because of potential contact with someone in their school who was infected. That’s one in 30 young people who weren’t in school last week.

What is very clear from these statistics is that every positive case has a massive knock-on effect, which leads to educational disruption many times greater than the infection itself. 

This is, of course, no surprise, because it is exactly what the contact-tracing process ensures will happen. But the issue is whether this level of disruption is acceptable in September, when every adult will have been offered the vaccine and the rest of society is likely to be returning to normal.

We surely cannot continue to tolerate such large numbers of children and young people - who may not have the virus and have already experienced nearly a year and a half of educational disruption - intermittently having to self-isolate while the vaccinated adult population of the country are largely able to go about their lives as normal again.

Time is slipping away - again

This does not necessarily mean that there should be no measures to track and control transmission of the virus, particularly as it is likely that there will be new variants of the virus from time to time, against which vaccines may be less effective. 

Some form of testing could be used as an alternative to self-isolation for close contacts of positive cases, as long as it can be shown to be reliable. And emergency measures could be kept as a contingency option in the event of outbreaks of any new variants of concern. 

There is also the possibility of offering vaccines to secondary-school students aged 12 to 15, and in general to 16- and 17-year olds. The educational grounds for doing so are strong, but it must be safe, and the benefits must outweigh any risks. 

That decision - which currently lies with the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation - needs to be made soon, so that we all know where we stand.

All of the above is complicated, and in the case of tests and vaccines there will need to be consideration about how these programmes would be delivered. Yet, here we are with the summer holidays hurtling towards us, and still no plan is in sight. 

Bitter experience has taught us that the government has a tendency to move at a glacial pace when it comes to making decisions and setting out plans about education, followed by a last-minute scramble to implement whatever is decided - with schools and colleges left to do most of the scrambling. 

It would be good to think that this won’t happen on this occasion, but time is slipping away.

In the meantime, it feels too much like the government has once again taken its eye off the ball as far as our children and young people are concerned. If education continues to be disrupted next term, the inadequacy of the existing recovery plan will fall even further short of what is needed, and the shape of GCSEs, A levels and other qualifications next summer will again be in a state of flux. 

As a society, we surely have to say that enough is enough. The disruption that has taken place over the past 15 months has to come to an end, and - barring disaster - it has to stop here. 

Children have endured much of the impact of the pandemic, largely in order to protect the adult population from the risk of severe symptoms, and they should not be expected to endure any more. 

Now it’s time for the younger generation to become a genuine - rather than a rhetorical - priority.

Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders