There is a perfect shape to the story of the school year. 

That magic number, three, makes up a holy trinity of terms, with their own chapters, rising actions and climaxes.

Three stepping stones across a gulf of experiences contained within each year that itself is a rite of passage, with familiar customs and tests: the Year 7s, those snaps of newness, like tadpoles, swimming in a greater sea, right through to the crackle and complexity of that most fraught of pairings, Years 10 and 11.

Then, to conclude, with a pent-up pop of exit, Year 13, impatient to be grown. Each stage is key, unlocking new levels of understanding; each step is marked, weighted and valued by those who help write them into being.

A story without a conclusion

But if we can compare the academic year to a book, then this year’s final chapter is written in white: it’s there, but it is hard to read.

There is a sense of an ending, but it’s a confusing first draft with many authors and no editor. 

If it belonged to a genre, it would be a tragedy (with elements of farce, hastily scribbled in by Whitehall); if there is a theme, it is one of struggle, and if it has a dominant tone, it is sadness.

Denied the satisfaction of a denouement, we re-read the first two terms, looking for clues to see how things might have ended, finding comfort in cold mathematics as we calculate and rank, but discovering there is no pattern in two; so we keep returning, wistfully perhaps, to all those plots unthickened, the endless friendships unformed, the interrupted lives and paused careers.

The national reading group discusses, rightly, the students who have seen their schools close, their doors slamming as Covid-19 swept down the corridors. 

But when those doors warped, tight-shut, they also sealed off many pathways.

No hugs, no champagne

Because there are other unwritten stories, about those teachers moving on from jobs they love (or endure), to “pastures new”, or “challenges ahead”, or whatever clichés we reach for when words fail to capture what we really feel.

Some episodes will be précised on Twitter, retweeted, with a few dozen red hearts lit up below them; poor, transient replacements for the leaving cards uncirculated and undelivered. 

We may quickly forget the teachers who are unable to say farewell, properly, to those who meant so much to them, but they are being denied their final chapters, too.  

I find myself in this category now. 

And this feels like a particularly painful form of departure, but every teacher recognises that mixture of emotions that rise up when the moment comes to say to those students that they will have someone different in front of them from September: guilt, abandonment, regret (and sometimes relief).

And most teachers will have studied the panorama of expressions that greet our stumbled announcements, reading their faces for meaning, sometimes finding none, or the unexpected response.

Difficult though it always is, we would prefer to live through such a human experience than see it from a distance, through a screen if we’re lucky; through simple absence, if we’re not.

And spare a moment to think of those teachers retiring this year, not with a bang, or a bell or a standing ovation in a packed hall. No leaving presents handed over in an overcrowded staffroom, no lunchtime warm prosecco gulped down, guiltily, before returning to teach Year 9. No hugs.

Instead, these colleagues will have to say the farewell speeches they’d rehearsed for a year via the gallery setting of Zoom, a distanced, cold simulacrum of the warmth the profession provides every day.

The value of school

The academic year begins to close, but when it will open again, as it once was, remains unclear: it is drafted and redrafted, crossed out and ripped up, the authors unable to decide on a basic plot, let alone the characters who might shape its narrative arch.

We seem stuck on the preface. We need a different but familiar story that we can look forward to, and we need to write it now with fluency and imagination. 

And in that act we should recognise that schools, and the teachers who often live quietly heroic lives, performing unhistoric acts, always adding to the growing good of the world, are to be remembered and valued because we need them, and those who follow them, more than ever now. 

David James is deputy head (academic) at a leading UK independent school. He leaves his current role for another school at the end of this term