Australia has, at times, had the feel of a parallel universe during the pandemic. The Australian Open tennis tournament, which came to a conclusion last weekend, brought triumphs for Naomi Osaka and Novak Djokovic in front of stands that were allowed to be half full. Up to 30,000 spectators ambled daily through the Melbourne Park grounds - although crowds were absent for five days during a snap lockdown that reminded us how swiftly and decisively the Australian authorities are prepared to act when there are even the smallest signs of Covid-19 cases rising among the population.

This was, in terms of the number of spectators, described as the biggest sporting event held anywhere since the coronavirus swept across the globe. Meanwhile, in our part of the world, professional football and rugby teams play to a tiny gallery of substitutes, coaching staff and officials, with sporadic shouts from the pitch or the sidelines providing the only noise. It makes for an atmosphere akin to the austere clanking of silverware in a Victorian aristocrat’s dining room.

Yet how quickly we get used to change that only a year ago would have seemed bizarre and unsettling. I was shaken out of my acclimatisation to all the multifarious new normals in our lives when I got a message at Christmas time from an old friend who now lives in Australia. She was keen to commiserate with me (and everyone else who lives on this island) about how scary it must be to live in the UK just now.

To be honest, all the change and disruption of the past year had become so normalised that, by this stage, a sense of mild irritation was actually my default state. But this message from a friend, viewing the UK with alarm from afar, was a jolting reminder that our experience of the coronavirus is not inevitable and the same throughout the world - it depends largely on the decisions of our political leaders.

Concerns about reopening school buildings

Covid, while always likely to be a highly disruptive force in education, doesn’t have to result in quite the levels of discombobulation that people have felt this week. In England, there was consternation when news leaked late on Sunday night that all pupils were to prepare to return to schools on 8 March. A few hours later, many (mostly younger) pupils were back in classrooms in Scotland, but it was confirmed on Tuesday that it will be at least 15 March before any other groups are back in schools, and well into April for a full return of pupils.

And, while such decisions in Scotland tend to be delivered in a more organised fashion and in Parliament, we should certainly not pretend that the way ministers have presided over the return of pupils to school buildings has inspired huge confidence. Many school staff are, for example, deeply concerned about inadequate safety mitigations and the insistence that it is fine for schools to open up while just about every other aspect of society remains in the grip of lockdown.

The chaotic handling of the return to school in England has not set anyone at ease, but, for many, neither has the insistence in Scotland that it is fine for thousands of staff and pupils to be in schools at a time when we’re still being told to think twice before stepping outside our front door. As someone who works in a school, you may feel vulnerable because the handling of pupils’ return is all over the place - but the same sense of vulnerability is likely if you believe that a calculated decision has been made that some level of risk to staff is an acceptable trade-off to get pupils back inside schools.

Either way, whenever we get out of this crisis, governments in all parts of the UK may find themselves with an almighty task to inspire trust in the teaching profession.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 26 February 2021 issue under the headline “The way pupils’ return was served up warrants a volley of criticism”