Children have paid the price for adults during this crisis

‘Nobody knows anything” the screenwriter William Goldman once said of Hollywood; there are very few days now when I don’t think this as I turn on the morning news to hear the latest on the plague. Is your journey really necessary? No matter – go on holiday anyway! We’ve closed down the Nightingale – and re-locked-down Leicester!

Life has become like a dirty great game of Snakes and Ladders, with pangolins replacing serpents, and palaces of vanity and entertainment perched enticingly on the top rungs. One prize which no one seems fussed about is that which is the most vital to this country’s future – the education of the next generation.

I didn’t like school and I don’t like children, so I’m not approaching this from any sentimental best-days-ofyour-life angle. But we shouldn’t be in a position where the Education Secretary and the teachers are still at loggerheads over the proposed reopening of schools in September.

This time last year, teachers were demanding public shaming in the stocks for parents who took their children out of school during term time for a quick trip to the Costas – as apparently even a short absence would irretrievably ruin their life chances. Now, they seem to believe that suspending education indefinitely is wise. I’ve never gone along with the side-eye about how lovely it must be to have a job which gives you a paid holiday for most of the summer, but you do wonder when the teaching unions think it would be OK for schooling to resume. This year? Next year? When there’s a vaccine? The twelfth of never?

I’m not underestimating the extra effort it will take adding a new hygiene drill to the basic business of drumming unwanted facts into the heads of a generation who were only recently more likely to apply to Love Island than to Oxbridge. But Love Island is closed down indefinitely now and there’s everything to play for. Staggered starts and deep cleaning are small beer compared to the impulse of altruism and ambition on behalf of others that surely leads people to become teachers in the first place. (And, yes, they do have those lovely long summer holidays to recover in.)

The Tory MP Jonathan Gullis was until recently a teacher himself; he knew what he was talking about when he told the teachers’ union leader Mary Bousted: “A campaign is being run to breathe fear into parents… that these schools are death traps.” I can’t help thinking that this school’s-out-forever mardiness – their very own Project Fear – amongst the teaching unions may well be the latest dummy-spit in what I coined The Big Sulk ( La Grande Boude) on behalf of a liberal establishment still bitter about Brexit; I just don’t believe they’d be acting this way under a Labour government.

Last month, 1,500 members of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health signed a letter stating that the current interruption to schooling risks “scarring the life chances of a generation” as schools are “the difference between surviving and thriving”. The biggest immediate worry is for those pupils stuck at home in families where parents struggle at the best of times with drug addiction, alcoholism and/or poverty; for such children, school is their safe place and the reluctance of the teachers to return must seem like the final nail in the coffin of their hope. But the bigger picture is also an ugly one, with predictions that even the meagre amount of social mobility achieved in this country will be wiped out by the difference in home education given to affluent and poor children.

The loathsome march of nepotism which has closed off even the few avenues of escape which used to be available to bright, working-class children will continue. Bono’s – Mr Social Justice himself – daughter Eve Hewson can currently be seen in the new BBC drama The Luminaries; in a statement of both breathtaking entitlement and honesty she told the

Radio Times, with reference to the difficulty in starting out in the overcrowded acting profession: “That’s never been a problem for me, and I think that’s because of my family. That’s not the way the system should work, of course, but if the door is open, walk through the door.”

The doors of the schools must open soon if not only the children of privilege are to have any kind of lives.