I wouldn’t ask a teacher how work has been this Christmas. They probably can’t tell you if they wanted to; they probably don’t even know themselves. How has work been? It becomes more existential as a question the more you look at it. One blog coined it “the worst term in modern school history” and that’s probably about all that needs saying.

The school is a place of routine. For innovators, this reality frustrates them; for everyone else, the reliable flow of the school year, the school day, and the clock on the classroom wall, keeps everything going. Ask a teacher in February 2020 what they loved about their job and they would tell you that every day is different; ask them now and that’s probably its worst aspect. As I write this, we still don’t know what the first day of term in January will look like. Senior leadership teams are on rota until Christmas Eve for track and trace, with no sense of whether or not they will get anything approaching a holiday. We don’t know who we will be teaching in school the first week or who will be learning online; we don’t know what elements of the exams will be included and what won’t; we don’t even know if or when anything of this information will be made available to us. There were announcements today- sure- but what value are those when they rarely survive the scrutiny of a half-tipsy Sunday broadsheet journalist?

This term, teachers have walked into half empty classrooms, desperately tried to upload work online and adjust their lesson to make it Zoom friendly, responded frantically to emails from pupils and parents, ‘Zoom’d’ (a new, much more depressing version of this verb) children in and ‘been Zoom’d’ into classrooms themselves. Cover supervisors have worked shifts not seen since the construction of the Tower of Babel- tasked with staffing a constantly changing rota of cover lessons. If at any point, something approaching the arc of learning has emerged in a two-week period, it has been brutally cut off by yet another swathe of students leaving to self-isolate, and others returning asking where they books are and what they have missed. The rainbows disappear as soon as they arrive.

It is the hope that gets you. As soon as a postponed workshop approaches, a member of the team emerges from self-isolation, or student has caught up successfully, something else goes. Of all the public services, I’ve always seen the constructive nature of education as its greatest benefit. Unlike social work, policing, or law, we have the chance to build lives, rather than do the damage limitation once the worst has already happened. We hope our relationships will make students happy. We hope our pastoral programmes will get students through the challenges of social media, fake news, and worse. We hope our teaching will equip students with critical thinking and knowledge to navigate life and terrible governments. But now, we can’t build. School safeguarding teams have the largest caseloads they’ve ever had with attendance figures at pitiful levels — we can barely access the students we most need to protect.

Public Health England, local government, and national government continue to squabble over whether schools should be open. They exchange legal challenges while teachers sit on their emails waiting to see where they should be tomorrow. As the vaccine begins to roll out across the NHS, I saw on Twitter that someone at the Department for Education has mooted some testing for teachers. For all the noise in the press, staff in schools have worked hard to keep children learning- without time to grieve for their own losses and without the resources to keep themselves safe. Teachers with serious underlying health conditions, teachers living with extremely vulnerable partners or parents, teachers in the later stages of pregnancy, have all turned up, every day, even during an exponential growth of the virus. In all of this, the government has barely managed to get an extra laptop to us. No tests. No masks. No pay rises.

How has work been? Maybe don’t ask.