Jimmy and his boisterous class mates are standing in the corridor awaiting the arrival of their teacher.

Before the lockdown began in March, Jimmy’s teaching set would have gone to the teacher’s classroom, where the teacher would have calmly set everything ready for the lesson. Now according to the timetable, the teacher must finish the previous lesson in one part of the school and simultaneously begin the next lesson in another part of the school. Time is lost and the teacher arrives flustered and out of breath.

The Year 9 students are healthy fourteen year olds, there are more than thirty of them, they fill the corridor with their presence. Under the new rules, they are all wearing face masks.

”Good morning, Year 9, “ says the teacher, “please make sure you have sanitised your hands,”

”Jimmy,” says the teacher, “would you come in and hand out the exercise books.”

The exercise books are in a plastic box at the back of the classroom. They have been carried there by the teacher that morning. Jimmy’s set have lessons with the teacher in different classrooms.

The Year 9 students file into the room. They are not wearing masks.

What piece of magic happens at the door? Outside it, a mask is required to ward off Coronavirus. Inside it, a mask is not required. Can someone explain the logic of it?

The mask rules are the latest piece of illogical behaviour required of schools.

Students will arrive on Monday morning and having mixed freely during half-term they will be required to be in year “pods.”

Before March, they arrived in their own time and went to their classrooms in a calm way. Now, they are made to line up outside the buildings before being allowed inside to line up at the classroom doors. Making children cold and wet and then making them cram into corridor space is deemed to be a way of inhibiting the spread of the virus.

The Year 7 and Year 8 students spend nearly every lesson in the same rooms. It is intended to isolate them from the students of Years 9, 10 and 11. Of course, there are siblings and friends in different years with whom they will come into contact as soon as they go back out through the school gates, but perhaps contact is only dangerous within the school grounds.

How is it that the virus may be transmitted in the corridors but not in the classrooms? How can contact be deemed a threat inside the electric perimeter gates, but not be considered sufficiently dangerous for the government to ask children not to attend lest they mix together going to and from school?