During the first lockdown, former schools minister Lord Adonis fulminated when not all schools were able to provide virtual lessons. He demanded that teachers should be online all day, every day, overlooking the patchy internet access and shortfall in laptop provision that denied access to many pupils.

Press and politicians depicted teachers as lazy, and offline learning as inferior and ineffective.

As the latest lockdown reaches its fourth week, the obsession with remote lessons continues. And now there’s a new stick to beat schools with. 

In this now well-worn groove of education reporting, commentators with little real insight into the totality of the curriculum conflate and confuse the small unit of the live lessons with the larger entity of education.

Online learning: Lessons as showpieces

For too long, lessons have been turned into showpieces of the performative elements of teaching. Celebrity teachers on the BBC are seen as superior to the professionals who teach hundreds of pupils (not just lessons) day in, day out.

It’s perfectly possible that good and excellent teachers will teach online lessons that are brilliant, outstanding, Oscar-winning or whatever this month’s superlative is. But they probably won’t be producing showstoppers all the time - especially at the start of February, four weeks into lockdown.

And, while a good teacher may produce good lessons, good lessons don’t necessarily make good teachers. And good schools do far more than act as theatres for staff productions.

Lessons are a carefully sequenced portion of the overarching, multi-dimensional curriculum that schools offer. Manageable distribution of the content is only one of the considerations that make up termly lesson planning. Children have a wide range of needs that are catered for, in complex models of differentiation. 

Just ask teachers how many questions they target at specific children during one lesson, and how often they reformulate explanations to keep everyone engaged. Pre-prepared content can’t do this - nor can it provide the sophisticated ongoing assessment that teachers carry out every minute.

Discerning professionals know how to judge the work of their pupils and move it onwards. Lessons are not a series of one-dimensional snapshots, but a continuous movie. 

The best teachers don’t have time to stop and congratulate themselves when the lesson looks glossy and the children are smiling. They’re self-evaluating, critically rechecking the next steps and tweaking the next lessons.

Like Doctor Who’s tardis, education is much bigger than you think

Learning is not - contrary to the overly simple views on offer in Parliament and the press - about the parroting of factual information followed by regurgitation on to an exam paper. Good education provides a holistic experience for pupils, as they make the journey to adulthood. Social, moral, spiritual and cultural themes underpin the arrangement of materials.

Learning is social. That’s why so much time is expended on a pastoral curriculum - yet another dimension of learning that is so often overlooked. Teachers will remember the emotion generated as pupils saw their classmates on the first day that school buildings could fulfil their function in September - even with all the modifications of bubbles. 

The unfolding drama of the pandemic has expanded schooling into a veritable tardis. So when I saw that Jodie Whittaker - the actor who plays the Doctor - was to make a virtual appearance hosting an assembly for Oak National Academy at the start of Children’s Mental Health Week, I was transported back to my favourite moment in any Doctor Who series, when every new companion to the Doctor wonders why the tardis is bigger on the inside than the outside. 

It’s the perfect metaphor for the way in which government demands and the socioeconomic needs of local communities have transformed schools so radically over the past 10 months.

Doctor Who viewers rarely get to see behind the main room of the tardis to the rooms beyond, which we are told exist. Similarly, it’s on very rare occasions that the public sees the innermost recesses of schools. Even reality TV doesn’t always have the stamina to go there.

Unlike Doctor Who, school staff might not have to save the universe. But they are doing their best to sustain families within their communities in the face of constant, eroding pressures, caused mainly by the pandemic and its social and economic consequences.

Some schools run food banks, and privately supply resources to those who don’t meet the government criteria for state assistance. Their role in looking after vulnerable children and those of key workers keeps the state functioning.

Sadly, we have the kind of tunnel vision from some press and politicians that stops at the tardis door, even after all these months. It obsesses itself with the one-dimensional display of online lessons and provides a temporary limelight for a few providers to make headlines.

Unseen and unappreciated by the public, the track and trace duty, combined now with setting up testing for staff and pupils, adds hours to the workload of heads, and extends into the holidays and weekends.

Teachers know the real struggle that makes up education in even the easiest of times. National necessity caused schools to migrate online at the cost of many hours’ unpaid overtime. The hard graft of adapting a sequenced, interactive curriculum to new circumstances remains a long haul. 

There’s far more to education than sparkling performance in the real and virtual classroom. Lessons are just the tiny front door - behind them is the multidimensional tardis that education professionals are piloting. 

Yvonne Williams has spent nearly 34 years in the classroom, and 22 years as a head of English. She has contributed chapters on workload and wellbeing to Mentoring English Teachers in the Secondary School, edited by Debbie Hickman (Routledge)