“Bursting from the grave I gasp deep at the fresh air, a zombie roaming empty streets, finding myself piece by piece, just in time for them to bury me alive again.”

STRANGELY SHAPED BY FATHERS

Tomorrow, for the first time since March 17th, I return to school.

I’m not happy about it, but am resigned to the inevitable.

Nothing has changed since March 17th in terms of Covid 19 and the risk of infection. The virus has not got safer, and people are, if anything, more careless right now then they have been at any other time since lockdown started. Infection rates are rising again across the country.

Schools have spent weeks trying to come up with protocols and plans to make the classrooms as “Covid secure” as they can be, but have done so with their hands tied by ever-changing and ill-considered guidance from the government; a government who have got it wrong about Covid 19 in every aspect of their response so far and cost thousands of people their lives. The approach has been to bend over backwards to ensure school can continue as close to normal as possible - 30+ to a classroom, a full school in attendance, nothing online, etc... rather than to start with what is safe and build from there.  The false notion has been peddled successfully that children need to be physically in school or else they will lose their education instead of making a concerted effort to improve the remote alternatives and necessary infrastructure to ensure they don’t. Likewise, the idea the lack of school is a trauma which will damage so many people’s mental health has become a self-fulfilling prophecy instead of being framed as something necessary and not the end of the world. These myths have been propagated to oil the real machinery: getting parents back to work; continuing the state’s neglect of child welfare by restoring the unofficial outsourcing of much of it to the schools who allow government to turn a blind eye.

I always knew I’d be forced to return in September, but hoped either a miracle cure or vaccine would arrive in time to make the return safe, or things would get so bad again that the idea of returning would be self-evidently ridiculous and therefore cancelled. Neither has happened, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that, even if the latter one did, politically this government would never admit to it and would steam roll ahead with the school reopening anyway.

So, resigned to the injustice of being forced back to an unsafe workplace tomorrow like so many already have been, and being forced to participate in making the whole country far less safe, I just want to make a few things clear.

1. If I or anyone I know suffers or dies because of this, it is the fault of our government and economic system. Our potential death or suffering was known about, preventable and ignored.

2. The worries about remote teaching come from teachers and our unions fearing successful online provision will render our profession obsolete. It is in our interests to maintain the idea that every school needs every teacher, regardless of whether that remains true anymore. Meanwhile the structural inequalities which make access to remote learning so unfair are part of a far wider problem and larger social change is needed to tackle it. Bringing everyone back to school doesn’t solve the systemic issues which meant so many could not access teaching online, it merely sweeps the problem back under the rug while those disadvantaged kids can be warehoused in schools all day so their parents can continue to be exploited.

3. The government are striving to get things “back to normal” as quickly as possible because the pandemic gave us an opportunity to envision an alternative way of living, and showed us how quickly the entire structure could be transformed if the political will is there. They want us to forget that so they took away our space to think and reflect and pushed us back out to replicate damaging patterns before the new ideas took hold.

I’m always depressed the last day of the summer holidays. But this year I am more depressed than ever. I am not merely returning to work tomorrow, I and all other teachers across the country are returning to be pawns in a political stunt that will put much of the country at great risk under the propagandist illusion of a moral imperative to get children back in school.

It’s bullshit and you know it. Another nightmare we’re sleepwalking into willingly, like Brexit, like Trump, like the first wave of Covid back in March.

When the fuck are we going to wake up?