Now the teachers are holding us to ransom

Does the bin in your child’s classroom have a lid? No? Then your child won’t be going back to school in September. Sorry. But if it makes you feel any better, even if the bins do have lids and the rubbish is double-bagged, your child probably won’t be going back, either.

You see, his or her school would have to adhere to a further 199 points from the National Education Union’s new “checklist” of Covid-secure measures. This 25-page ransom note demands to know whether “lunch breaks will be long enough to allow hand washing as well as eating and drinking” (the kind of question even my eight-year-old would deem beneath her in terms of avoidance tactics) and requests “additional support for the well-being of staff suffering from workload concerns” be laid on – but forgets to ask the most important question: “How can we ensure our kids get back to school?”

I say “forgets”: that assumes it’s something the unions concern themselves with at all. It assumes they share the bigger-picture belief, belatedly expressed by Boris Johnson on Sunday, that reopening schools next month is a “national priority”, and that keeping them closed “a moment longer than is absolutely necessary is socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible”.

Yet nowhere in the document, dubbed “a wrecker’s charter” by MPS, is there any sense of the “moral duty” the Prime Minister is calling for, with the unions apparently prioritising the necessity for a “relaxed uniform policy” for staff and a constant supply of “tissues at all times” over a child’s education.

Now it’s true that in a world in fear of microdroplets and a war in which the enemy is 120 nanometres small, things are going to get petty. We’re all going to sweat the small stuff (even if we try not to do that over strangers in M&S) because we know it can lead to the big stuff. And every teacher has the right to feel safe.

But the NEU’S checklist has the misfortune of being published at precisely the same time as two important new studies. The first, from Oxford University, confirms what we already knew: that interrupted schooling has deep and long-lasting detrimental effects on children. And the second – a landmark PHE coronavirus study that tested more than 20,000 pupils and 100 teachers – finds the risk of transmission in classrooms to be “minimal”.

Then there’s the leading expert, Prof Mark Woolhouse, head of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, who yesterday went so far as to say that not a single confirmed case of a pupil passing on coronavirus to their teacher exists anywhere in the world. All of which shows up the NEU’S checklist as the crude sabotage attempt that it is – and explains why an increasing number of teachers have been telling me they’re “tearing up their union cards”. It’s the “can’t-do” attitude, said one who has spent “35 years and my whole career trying to encourage my pupils to have a positive

approach. Yet here is the union, who is supposed to represent the profession I love, doing the total opposite.”

Another likens the unions to “a class of petulant 13-year-olds who refuse to engage”. While a headmistress recently emailed me to mourn “the negative response to change” in a state of emergency, “when it has been amazing to note the nimbleness of so many.”

No sector has been less nimble or more negative and sluggish in their response to change than the state education sector, with disadvantaged children overwhelmingly impacted by school closures. One survey revealed that an estimated 700,000 state school pupils have not been set a single piece of work by their teachers since the start of lockdown – which explains another question on the NEU’S checklist: “Has the school agreed not to link pay progression to pupil progress in 2020-21?”

It’s no coincidence that schools have been so badly hit. Culturally, we don’t prize learning or those who teach in the way other countries do. Instead, we seem content to languish at or near the bottom of every international literacy and numeracy table and happy to let this pandemic entrench the class divide that’s already responsible for some of our biggest societal problems – from drugs and knife crime, to unemployment – still further.

Is Gavin “Admit Defeat” Williamson the man to get us out of this mess? Not when the Government has empowered the unions with its lack of clear guidance from the outset. Not when the NEU is currently urging teaching staff to “escalate” their quarrel if their 200 demands are not met.

On Sunday, the co-president of the NEU, Amanda Martin, declared the union “on the right side of history”. A generation of children – who deserve positivity and nimbleness of thought, not pre-pandemic-style power games involving swing bins – might disagree.

Because what if, to turn an old proverb on its head, for the want of a bin, a school was lost? For the want of a school, an education was lost? For the want of an education, a generation was lost?

And all for the want of a bin.