Another year over / And a new one just begun” - a lyric that has been worming its way into our subconscious for weeks and weeks. And, for anyone working in Scottish education, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s deceptively acidic wordplay seems particularly appropriate now.

Beneath a thin coating of seasonal sentimentality, Lennon and Ono take aim at the failings of people in power: when it dawns on you that the parenthesis in Happy Xmas (War Is Over) is more important than the first two words, the lyrics that follow take on a new dimension. “So this is Christmas / And what have you done?” is more accusatory than reflective, a disdainful barb about US foreign policy rather than a gentle dig at our annual failure to see through new year’s resolutions.

Policy of an educational kind was the focus just before Christmas: there were signs of a pivotal moment in relations between educators and the Scottish government. Quite why astute politicians such as Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney dug their heels in over schools staying open in those last few days before Christmas, even after it was suddenly announced that there would be a delayed return to school in January, was hard to fathom for many. To some teachers, it was definitive proof that teacher safety and wellbeing were not the priorities they should be, and it led to a number of tweets from educators who said there was now no possibility of their faith in the government being restored.

The bizarre prospect of pupils as young as 11 traipsing around with logbooks of contacts - recording anyone they had come within two metres of - was emblematic of the
knots the government had tied itself in by insisting that keeping schools open was its top priority. It was pitched as a way of preventing school leaders from being sucked into contact tracing on Christmas Day and of ensuring that vulnerable pupils had the support of school for as long as possible, but the trade-off was heaping a huge amount of responsibility and stress on to young people.

Tracy Kirk, a legal academic who specialises in children’s rights, tweeted that she was “horrified” and that “we should be ashamed of the position we are putting young people in”. And it made people suspicious of the motives behind such decisions: was the plan all along to get parents thinking “this is just not worth it” and have their children stay at home en masse (while school was still there for those who couldn’t do that), thus removing responsibility from local and national government for making a difficult decision?

Well, plenty more difficult decisions await ministers in the weeks ahead - no one can say with any certainty when pupils will step back inside schools. The dawn of a new year is traditionally a time of renewed optimism, when clean slates are handed out to those we fought with the year before. But with Covid resurgent and relations between teachers and policymakers fraying, the prospect of new beginnings is harder to envisage this time.

In a recent article for Tes Scotland, secondary teacher Paul Hamilton said that he is confident that teachers will emerge stronger than ever in 2021, though. He tells his colleagues to “stand tall and reflect upon the difference they have made to the lives of so many young people” during the time of Covid. He reasons that teachers’ skills have been sharpened, that their bonds with parents are now stronger, that they can draw confidence from their own resilience and that - after being absent from school for so long in 2020 - there has been a fresh sense of excitement from working directly with pupils once again.

Despite everything, then, there is cause for fresh optimism as we step into 2021. A very happy new year to all our readers - let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.

This article originally appeared in the 1 January 2021 issue under the headline “Happy new year - let’s hope it’s a good 2021, without any fear”