It’s not an understatement to say this school term has been the most challenging since the Second World War. An excellent organising effort by the National Education Union (NEU) over the summer resulted in an extra 50,000 members and a considerable increase in workplace rep density, but an overall lack of rank and file strength meant that demands for requisitioning extra classroom space, funding for digital learning, and a Plan B in the event of a second wave were ignored by the government.

The result is that schools have been chaotic and often unsafe for workers. Absence rates in secondary schools dropped to 78% nationally and even lower in the North West, which, in October, accounted for 35% of all positive cases in teachers. Worse, the positivity rate in secondary school-age children is now the highest of any age group, meaning that that age group is the most likely to bring infections into households.

The NEU called for schools to be included in the November national lockdown – a measure that Sage estimated would have saved 7,000 lives and eased case rates before the Christmas period. In response to the high positivity rates in older children, we then called for a rota system in secondary schools and colleges to reduce class sizes. This ‘blended learning’ model would have halved the number of children in school at any one time, enabling the crucial social distancing required elsewhere in workplaces across the country.

Again, the government ignored these calls and ploughed ahead. Lockdown measures were then eased, and the pattern of school cases driving community infection rates was repeated in London and the South East.

This week, in response to rocketing infection rates, and out of a desire to save lives in the community, Greenwich council decided to make all learning remote, except for vulnerable children and the children of key workers. Their move is supported by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and by the NEU. But rather than listen to those with first-hand experience of the situation in schools, the government has invoked emergency coronavirus laws and threatened a court injunction to force schools to stay open. This begs the question: why, in the face of so much evidence, does the government remain wedded to keeping schools open?

The National Education Union inflicted a significant defeat of the government back in the summer, opposing its plans to reopen primary schools on 1 June. This was despite a huge organised campaign from the media and the Conservatives, who understood that reopening schools – even at the height of the pandemic – was ‘key to unlocking labour’ and thereby returning profits to bosses and commercial landlords.

The government, keen to invoke a culture war against a trade union, have worked to ensure that this defeat does not reoccur, and have therefore dogmatically kept schools open throughout the autumn and winter, regardless of the risk to lives.

Eliciting a response from workers in schools has not been without its challenges. Invigorating and politicising a movement of 450,000 members takes time, and the spectre of anti-trade union laws and the time taken for industrial ballots has hampered attempts to build leverage and back national calls on health and safety. Where individual school union groups have built the capacity for action, that action has been isolated.

Now, there are promising signs of workplace organising. NEU reps, particularly socialists, have used the struggle of the pandemic to build workplace networks, to start negotiating cycles, and to instil a core of workplace democracy with the capacity to escalate. Even when unable to force the government into concessions, this long process of base-building continues.

Alongside organising, the task for socialists is to politicise workers into recognising the class-based nature of the pandemic. Education workers are being forced into unsafe workplaces in the name of capital. The government has refused to countenance students working remotely in the last week of term because of capital. There is still not a working system of contact tracing and over 70,000 people have died because of capital. Struggles against evictions, redundancies, institutional racism and food bank use are all struggles against capital.

Understanding this will help our movement gain the consciousness and confidence needed to force the government into conceding on demands for safe workplaces and safe communities – and to avoid a repeat of the loss of political agency that has befallen education workers in the winter months.

With an organised and safe workplace, the opportunities for significant gains in education are clear. At present, many of the neoliberal reforms to education have been paused, including high stakes testing, league tables, and performance-related pay; this is our chance to make the case for better alternatives.

And this is what the government fears more than anything else: an emboldened education union that is politicising itself and building bonds of solidarity with the community, in order to challenge one of the central tenets of capitalism – the reproduction of class inequality, capitalist hegemony, and knowledge control through its education system.

The short-term battle for Christmas school closures currently lies in the space between councils and government – but the long-term struggle for the radical potential of education to build working-class power lies, and has always lain, between capital and labour.