There may be weightier crises facing schools, but let’s not forget to record the downright weird stuff going on, too. At my school, we’ve got the strange case of the disappearing hi-vis jackets.

The sleeveless hi-vis is now the required look for teachers strutting their stuff on break duty, although that rule may soon have to be relaxed around here, given the jackets’ steady departure to some other part of the cosmos.

No one knows where they are all going. Given their name and appearance, it’s an impressive trick.

They are supposedly borrowed and returned to communal bags around the site. Stocks are reportedly running low everywhere. The bag in the maths area was the first to be declared empty, just before Christmas. Other depleted areas seem to be in some kind of hi-vis denial, hoping for a miraculous mass homecoming one day.

Various explanations have been floated. One colleague pointed the finger at the gilets jaunes protesters in France. Admittedly, the spread of hi-vis over there does seem vaguely to coincide with the growing stock crisis at our school, though the evidence seems wafer thin. Yes, a retired, smiling French couple have been staying at a hotel in the town of late, and yes they did arrive with a big case, but really …

Rather than blaming innocent French tourists, we probably need to acknowledge one of two less comfortable but more likely explanations for all of this.

Either our colleagues must have some peculiar private habit involving hi-vis jackets or we simply accept that our school really is in the hands of dark, supernatural forces. It’s hard to decide which one is preferable.

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire