As we have heard and read frequently during the last year, the Covid crisis has exposed the inequalities in our society: inequalities of health, wealth and wellbeing. The situation in our schools has illustrated this painfully. When schools were first closed in March 2020, all of them must have felt the shock and the fear. Some schools were able to respond immediately with online provision: those that had the resources in-school and could assume that all or most of their students had internet access, a screen of their own, a space to work from and a supportive adult at home. Most schools were not in this position. Some had in-house expertise in the technical aspects, but the shift from in-person to remote teaching was not just a flick of a switch, it was the turn of a tanker. And as the good ship Ever Given showed us when it got marooned across the Suez Canal this March, turning a tanker takes s more than goodwill and positive thinking.

If moving teachers and curricula from classrooms to screens was an uneven task, the attempt to move children in the same direction was not only more difficult but revealed the scale of what schools do without most of us noticing. Contrary to popular belief, not all children have a phone, tablet or laptop handed to them in the hospital delivery room. Those that have a screen don’t have unlimited internet access. As computers were being sourced and free data scrambled, well into the second academic year of the pandemic, it wasn’t just Maths and English that some children were missing out on. Schools, it turns out, are places of safety and sources of food, warmth and consistency for many children and their families. They are not just referrers but providers of essential services: purveyors of mental health support, child protection oversight, nurturers of physical development. As a secondary school governor, I’m asked to scrutinise and challenge the school on ‘the gap’ in academic attainment between ‘disadvantaged’ and other children. Schools are given additional funding (in the form of a pupil premium payment) to help supplement the standard provision. But what is the best means of support? What do we really want our schools to do for the children whose circumstances deprive them of a variety of things, but who are not always missing the same things as each other?

These are not new questions. Since the Education Act of 1944, state schools have been dispensers of ‘welfare’ as well as knowledge and skills. The Act specified the provision of food, milk, health checks and what we’d now describe as ‘well being’ oversight as the responsibility of Local Education Authorities. With its new ‘offer’ of secondary education for all until the age of fifteen (and the provisions that went with it) the Act assumed, rather than interrogated, the rightness of a selective secondary system that would eventually align schools around a series of binaries: academic or vocational training; traditional or progressive pedagogy; social mobility or social inclusion. In a sense, these were secondary considerations of the Act but have cast a long shadow.

Long after the selective system was broadly - though incompletely - replaced with comprehensive secondary education in the late 1960s and 1970s, these binaries continue to dominate education debate. Political tribes gather under their own educational banners: preserve academic ‘standards’, prepare a workforce, shape a citizen. Meanwhile, the other work that schools do - feeding, clothing, providing physical and emotional safety - is simply assumed and only indirectly rewarded when academic achievement hits designated targets. The weight of this work is far greater for some schools than for others. The same schools that were hustling for laptops this academic year were also delivering breakfasts and trying to track down children who had gone off the radar during the lockdowns. Extra tuition to get those children to the holy grail of Level 4 in Maths and English might be necessary but it is not sufficient. The ‘gap’ in academic attainment needs not only new answers but new questions. We can’t simply keep asking whether some children would benefit more from a watered down grammar school education, or a ramped up secondary modern one, whether they need their schools to dole out tougher discipline or more love. We need to ask why schools are currently the only answer to so many questions for so many children. After this past year, the needs of more children will be greater and the resource of the schools (financial and emotional) will be reduced. And the most energetic debate will be about why the GCSE and A level results are wrong again. Mind the gap; it’s about to get bigger.