Near my home is a stretch of beach that has not changed for hundreds of years. In the past 12 months, I have walked it often, because it offers me something concrete and certain at a time when uncertainty has become the norm.

During the pandemic, we will have all found our own versions of that beach: a buoy to cling to for stability. With the news of schools returning to face-to-face teaching on 8 March, teachers will have needed that stability more than ever. No other profession has been tossed back and forth on the tide of government policy like those who work in schools. And at the time of writing, there still seems so much we don’t know about what will happen next.

But what we do know is that for many - if not all - pupils, teachers will soon become the buoy to cling to. With new guidelines and with pandemic anxiety at its peak, that familiar and consistent teacher will be essential.

That’s a lot of pressure for the profession to contend with. So you would hope that ministers would acknowledge that, and put as much time into thinking about staff welfare as they have done pupil welfare: the two are connected, after all.

Government needs to support teachers

But the government does not seem to want to talk about teachers. It talks instead about schools. Yet what politicians really mean when they say school is the safest place for some students is that some children are safest when a good teacher is watching over them. What they mean when they say school is key to the development of countless soft skills and for pastoral milestones is that every child needs the guidance of a skilled, caring teacher. What they mean when they say school is essential is that teachers are essential.

You could argue the government’s use of “school” and apparent reluctance to bring teachers into the conversation is simply a matter of communication necessity. The word “schools” is, it may say, the fastest and clearest way to say what it means.

However, it’s not really worked out that way. Countless times it has been used as a catch-all when the reality is that the situations in primary, secondary, early years, alternative provision and special schools have been incredibly varied. The use of “schools” has brought confusion throughout the past 12 months, not clarity.

A more cynical take would be that the word selection was for another purpose: taking teachers out of the conversation is a useful way of dehumanising the profession and thus taking the emotion out of the conversation about how far schools should be open to face-to-face teaching. It is easier to whip up support for a school return if you lead the public to see education as a manufacturing process, and not one that relies on adults who have families, who may have shielding relatives, who may be vulnerable themselves, who are just like you.

We cannot let that narrative win out. In the short term, dehumanising education risks exacerbating the problems of the past year. In the long term, it threatens that fragile relationship of trust between teacher, pupil and parent. And without that relationship, education has no base from which to build.

We need to look after our teachers. The school funding to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic will be largely useless without healthy, happy and well-trained staff. We cannot expect teachers to work miracles with their hands tied by bureaucracy, with their minds fogged by exhaustion and with their standing in society tarnished.

Will that support come? Alas, this is, of course, not a new problem. The call above is depressingly familiar. And the consistent failure to properly support teachers to do their jobs is one familiarity that really isn’t welcome at the moment.

@jon_severs

This article originally appeared in the 26 February 2021 issue under the headline “In uncertain seas, teachers - not schools - keep children afloat”