THERE is no need for us to await, Grenfell-like, the result of an inquiry into the causes of the coronavirus pandemic. Total deaths are well over the official 40,000: the highest total number of deaths of any country in Europe and one of highest death rates per million in the world. No insurance firm could write it off as an act of God. The guilty party is beyond doubt: it is the government.

Despite continued secrecy of much of the Sage deliberations and of course Cabinet papers (secret for 20 years) there is no need for us to expend effort to work it out. The overwhelming majority of us have already. The unanimous verdict — guilty as charged.

There are three phases in a crisis — preparedness, response and recovery. We have dealt in passing with preparedness, or rather the lack of it. We have also dealt with their response — criminally inadequate.

The NEU’s response has been magnificent. We have implemented the prime directive of trade unionism, building unity, within our own ranks and with our allies.

We have sought to build a united front with all the TUC-affiliated unions with members in education — NASUWT, NAHT, UCU, GMB, Unison and Unite — achieving remarkable success. We have sought to work with our non-TUC-affiliated education union, ASCL, with some success (let us hope our secondary head colleagues in ASCL see the value of unity and affiliate to the TUC, but no preaching).

We also received welcome support from the British Medical Association, the Fire Brigades Union, the train drivers’ union Aslef and others. We need to continue to work on developing our aims of building organisational and professional unity in education — on the basis that “if you’re in the building you’re in the union.”

Within the union, we focused on our members in schools and colleges, supporting and strengthening our workplace structures to respond to the crisis. This was the decisive factor in instituting rotas, pushing back pre-emptive wider opening and ensuring risk assessments were implemented.

We’ve saved lives — students’ lives, educators lives and lives in the community. We are stronger for it (with 20,000 new members and 2,000 new workplace reps) and better prepared to step up in future crises.

It is notable that these victories were won without the support of the Labour Party, with a few honourable exceptions including Rebecca Long-Bailey. Indeed, figures like Blunkett, Johnson and Adonis were wheeled out to attack the union. These have been workers’ victories secured over Westminster, not through it.

The question for us is what to do now the clapping has stopped.

We must not have a return to austerity. After the 2008 crash “austerity” was a political choice. In the book The Body Economic — Why Austerity Kills, Dr David Stuchler and Dr Sanjay Basu make this clear and conclude: “The central finding in this book; economic choices are not only matters of growth rates and deficits but matters of life and death.”

We do not want a bounce back: we want a bounce forward.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for the post-pandemic response to be “build back better” by creating more equal, inclusive and sustainable societies.

To build a better future, we need to put what has happened into its wider context. This is not to diminish the horror and devastation of the coronavirus catastrophe in Britain, but to show that a premature death, often by debilitating illness, is the norm for the overwhelming majority of people in our country, the working class.

Recently, for the first time in living memory, average life expectancy in Britain has fallen. Premature deaths caused by the differences in the lives of workers compared to those at the top of our society. The life expectancy of the rich and super-rich in our country continues to rise.

This means that the real fall in life expectancy for workers, especially the poorer, is hidden in the average. The real fall in the life expectancy for the working class will be greater than that indicated by the average. Millions of us die prematurely. For example, the report Health Equity In England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On (February 2020), found life expectancy to have stalled for the first time in a century after the austerity policies of the last decade.

The life expectancy of women in the most deprived areas fell by 0.3 years between 2010-12  and 2016-18 while those in the richest increased by around 0.5 years. Life expectancy for women in the most deprived communities in 2016 was 78.8 years, compared to 86.7 years in the most affluent group, according to research by the Imperial College London’s School of Public Health and published in the Lancet Public Health in November 2018.

Marmot urged ministers in the UK to put health equity “at the heart of all policymaking,” as it would lead to better outcomes across a range of issues. “It would lead to better environmental policy, it would lead to better social policy, it would lead to better healthcare policy and better politics.”

The Guardian, reporting on Marmot’s Review, wrote, “More than 4 million children now live in poverty; Britain has higher income inequality and lower social mobility rates than many European peers; by 2016, the richest 1 per cent owned 29 times what the bottom 20 per cent own” (February 25, 2020).

In a recent comment (UCL, April 9 2020) Marmot pointed out the unequal impact of the coronavirus on the poorest (ie class is the greatest inequality). Further that, “With Covid-19, everything [on austerity] went out of the window. It turns out austerity was a choice,” he said. “The government can spend anything [in the context of the coronavirus crisis] and they have socialised the economy.”

Johnson said that there will be no return to austerity and talks about “levelling up.” Great words, except that to achieve some levelling up there will have to be some levelling down. A good start would be to make the super-rich pay proper levels of taxation.

For example, Nicholas Shaxson, writing in the Guardian, points out: “Five big tech firms — Apple, Google, Facebook, Cisco and Microsoft — made an estimated £30bn in profit from UK customers from 2012 to 2017, but shifted most of these profits offshore for tax purposes, paying just £933m in UK tax between them: a rate of about 3 per cent.”

However, as virtually everyone already knew (and if they didn’t before, they must do now), you can’t trust a word Johnson says. Transport for London is already being targeted by the government to pay back the money for free pandemic travel for key workers on TfL services. Actually, it was our money.

In London free travel for children has already been threatened (go back to school but get your parents to pay for it). Also, a leaked report proposing a pay freeze has been exposed. Make the working class pay for their crisis is their line.

If there is to be no return to austerity it will only be because we make it so.

As the UN Secretary General has indicated, the recovery should be treated as a wake-up call to improve our education system, with focus on reducing inequalities which have left many people more vulnerable during the pandemic, including those living in poverty.

A paper by Unicef’s Education in Emergencies (EIE) says: “Proponents of privatisation argue that in times of crises and in the absence of stable functional education, private participation is a necessary humanitarian intervention as a more ‘flexible,” responsive system. This calls into question the role of the state to provide quality education and is salient during times of crises and emergency, ie the UK’s current situation.”

“Private-sector participation undermines public provision and responsibility of the state to provide education as a human right. ‘Disaster capitalism’ has rarely missed an opportunity to use human misery and crisis to force education privatisation.

“For example, in post-hurricane-Katrina New Orleans, neoliberal education reforms capitalised on the crisis. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called hurricane Katrina ‘the best thing’ that happened to the New Orleans education system.”

Naomi Klein, in Shock Doctrine, said of New Orleans: “A network of right-wing think tanks… descended on the city after the storm. The administration of George W Bush backed up their plans with tens of millions of dollars to convert New Orleans schools into ‘charter schools,’ publicly funded institutions run by private entities according to their own rules…

“One of the first state actions, taken only three weeks after the storm, was to fire all the unionised teachers, disband the school board and turn the schools over to a state receiver in Baton Rouge, removing community accountability and effectively breaking the United Teachers of New Orleans.”

In England, some of our academy chains and free schools fell over themselves to be amongst the minority of schools that opened for all three year groups in Johnson’s failed attempt to dictate primary and nursery schools opening to these groups on June 1.

Even then many parents did not comply due to safety concerns, particularly the non-readiness of a proven reliable track-and-trace system. A handful of the worst academies even refused to allow the union to be involved in drawing up risk assessments, contrary to HSE policy and legislation, and thereby risked lives.

Planning for the future must mean stopping any more schools being privatised. In this crisis, local authorities have more than proved their worth. Given the money they can do an excellent job. Further we must call for the staff and parents of all academies and free schools to have the right to return their schools to local-authority control and support them in campaigning for this.

Renationalisation of key sectors of our economy must be a priority of any viable recovery plan. After ensuring that the profiteering privateers are removed from our NHS — and all PFI hospitals nationalised without compensation: they have already had more than enough — where better to start than education?

We also need to start debating our plan for what that education system looks like. This should be a wide-ranging discussion, encompassing all areas of school and college life. But there are some clear starting points.

Firstly, there is no place for Ofsted in our schools in 2020. For years, our broken accountability system has made life harder for educators, for children and for the system as a whole, contributing nothing to educational improvement.

During this crisis Ofsted has been exposed as worse than useless. As and when the majority of students return to their schools and colleges, they need time to rebuild and recover, not the pressure of inspection hanging over them. If necessary, schools should refuse to comply with inspection.

Secondly, our curriculum needs to be completely overhauled. Excessive cramming of “knowledge” has taken the place of education as a creative and critical process and our children are losing out.

Schools and colleges need to be supported in developing recovery curricula. This must not be a temporary process but rather the beginning of a rebalancing of our entire curriculum.

In addition, the very youngest children, who have missed crucial foundational stages in their education must be supported through the extension of the Early Years curriculum into year 1.

Thirdly, we need a robust assessment system which is fit for purpose. This crisis has dramatically shown that our current system is not. The over-reliance of GCSEs and A-levels on final exams and the culture of norm-referencing must end.

Primary-school testing, including SATs, multiplication checks, phonics checks and baseline (now covering every year of primary school except Y3 and Y5), has disappeared during the crisis and children are better for it. It must not return. We should not have a poverty of ambition.

Once, we had “the 3 Rs.” What we need now are the five Rs:

Retain — any good initiative developed during the crisis

Remove — Ofsted, SATs, baseline assessment and everything else that narrows and constrains our education system

Restore — the youth service, night schools, local-authority control of schools and local-authority supply pools

Rebuild — once-in-a-generation school building, rebuilding and upgrading plan, but also rebuild the breadth and creativity of our curriculum

Reinvent — our unions and how they operate — more professional unity, more social-movement trade unions, more grassroots organising and engagement.

There must be no going back, but forward to a new and better future. There is no time to waste.

Hank Roberts and Gawain Little are members of the National Education Union National Executive.