Why Gavin Williamson needs to save school exams

The Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, is worried that children will go feral if they don’t get back to school sooner rather than later. Actually, that’s not quite how he put it. He’s let it be known that he’s worried about the lack of pupil-teacher interaction while schools are closed and that it’ll affect progress if they don’t reopen until after the Whitsun half term.

Dead right, Mr W. My own children are 13 and 16 and frankly, I can’t see much difference between holiday and term time since the lockdown. One child was on Google classroom, which I thought – silly me – would be a kind of virtual version of an actual teaching session. In fact, it was nothing of the sort; the teachers set work and leave the children to it. I heard quite a lot of giggly noise as they interacted with each other; nil in the way of actual engagement with a teacher.