Our primary concern regarding schools reopening today has, rightly, been safety. Teachers and other education sector workers are nervous about the prospect of returning to a workplace where transmission rates of Covid-19 were continuing to rise before the Christmas break. As the government pushes ahead with its strategy of vaccinating the oldest and most vulnerable, rather than prioritising overexposed professions, there’s a justifiable anxiety in the air that repopulating England’s classrooms risks undoing the progress made over this third lockdown.

But there’s also another danger we must balance this risk against when we debate the decision taken by Boris Johnson’s administration. That is the long-term—possibly lifelong—danger presented to the country’s most disadvantaged children if their education is disrupted indefinitely.

My work at education charity Action Tutoring provides additional tutoring sessions in maths and English to pupils who qualify their school for additional Pupil Premium funding because their household’s income is below such a threshold as to deem them ‘disadvantaged’. Most of the children we work with are in Years 6 and 11, two decisive points in any child’s educational journey as SAT and GCSE exams typically loom at the end of the school year. Our aim is to help these pupils—bright kids who lack the confidence and resources of their better-off peers—to achieve ‘meaningful’ grades in the subject in which they are being tutored to better set them up for the next stage of life.

In trying to coach pupils to a certain level, our learning resources presume a certain amount of knowledge and skill that each child should have acquired by the start of that school year. When tutoring Year 6 maths, for instance, it would be sensible for our volunteer tutors to assume that the pupils they work with will know up to their 12-times tables. To my and my colleagues’ disbelief, we have heard multiple reports from maths tutors that the 10- and 11-year-olds they have worked with so far this year don’t know any of their times tables whatsoever.

It’s a glaring and fundamental knowledge gap, and an embarrassing indictment of Gavin Williamson and his Department for Education’s haphazard and highly ineffective remote schooling and catch-up strategies across a year of lockdowns and school closures. Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that daily learning time for the poorest children has fallen across the past year, while it has risen for those better-off, widening an already-significant learning gap between economic classes and underscoring Williamson’s inability—or indeed unwillingness—to provide working-class children with the technological resources required for effective home learning.

Young people who achieve below a grade 4 in their core GCSEs are more likely to be not in employment, education, or training (NEET) after the age of 16, facing a lifetime of social and economic alienation – and disadvantaged pupils are overwhelmingly more likely to fall short of this minimum requirement. While SATs do not necessarily dictate a child’s life in the same way, a pupil’s success or otherwise in them can massively affect their journey through secondary school and set them up for this dire outcome (this is why educational researchers such as Diane Reay are sceptical of state schools’ tendency to split pupils into ability-based ‘sets’).

Exams will not be going ahead as normal this year, with a centre-assessed approach looking the most likely for GCSEs and A levels, but the widespread attainment shortfall for disadvantaged pupils, exacerbated by a year under Covid-19, will still see huge numbers leaving school without the tools necessary to get on well in adult life.

How do we equip our state schools, and the children in them, to push back against this tide of adversity now that learning is set to resume ‘as normal’? The key is to change how we think about everything we thought we knew about education in this country before the pandemic, quite possibly in some surprising and radical ways.

Social mobility scholar Lee Elliot Major laid out a number of proposals last week to mitigate the impact for exam-aged pupils, the poorest of whom have lost up to half a year’s worth of learning and are estimated to be facing a 10 percent decline in what he calls their ‘social mobility prospects’ across their lives. His proposals push back against the Conservative government’s increasingly ‘distorted and narrowed’, test-oriented school curriculum, calling for measures such as an offer for pupils to repeat school years or access more ‘credible’ vocational training.

This thinking, predicated on the liberal concept of ‘social mobility’, can be adapted by the Left and extended to pupils of all ages. The entire national curriculum must be overhauled in direct collaboration with teachers, with modifications such as increased focus on projects, group work, and coursework, encouragement of critical thinking, curiosity, and creativity, and a steer away from memory-based examination for all subjects. This could create an affirmative learning environment for those pupils increasingly isolated by the current approach. A change in collective thinking around notions like ‘catch-up’ and ‘disadvantage’ and an increased public regard for the teaching profession (pushing back against the pejorative narrative pedalled by the likes of former Ofsted chief inspector Michael Wilshaw, and backing that up with better wages and employment rights) could serve to reinforce increased inclusivity in schools.

While these strategies look to the long term, and while we must embrace this disruptive opportunity to make sweeping change, there are also plenty of measures already in place that could be fortified or expanded, and others that could be implemented immediately.

The government’s £350 million National Tutoring Programme, providing disadvantaged pupils with the one-to-one and small group tutoring usually reserved for their privileged peers, must be extended across all year groups with guaranteed funding beyond this academic year and integrated closer and more meaningfully with the ongoing work of teaching staff in school. Extended school days and holiday revision sessions could be helpful, but are certainly not a panacea.

More helpful would be a greater concerted effort to continue providing disadvantaged households with tablets, laptops, and decent broadband so their children can benefit from the extracurricular learning opportunities therein, and answering local councils’ calls to extend and guarantee free school meals would mean pupils do not have to go hungry during school time and can therefore engage more substantially in class.

Physical safety cannot be disregarded, of course. Education unions like the NEU continue to rightly call for teaching staff to be prioritised for Covid vaccinations, while an increased provision of PPE to schools—with a particular focus on those with higher proportions of Pupil Premium funding—and stronger, clearer guidance on protective measures like social distancing will only increase education sector workers’ confidence in doing their vital jobs to the best of their abilities.

Catastrophic events like global pandemics bring with them an opportunity to see the faults in a system for what they are. As the gaps between economic classes continue to widen, especially for their youngest members, we must take control of the national narrative around our children’s education. A return to school will not be a return to normality for disadvantaged children – and nor was normality an appealing prospect to begin with. If we push for meaningful change, though, it could mean a brighter future for the children most at risk of losing out in the present.