Question One: do you trust the SNP to sort out the current mess in education?

YOUR time starts now – and no copying! First question: how sustainable is it to have part-time schooling for the whole of next year?

Second question: for how long will the SNP, past masters when it comes to blame avoidance, use Covid-19 as a smokescreen for their own failings on education?

Don’t worry, these questions are, well, academic, not least because there aren’t any exams, and there might not be any next year, either.

If you thought education was in trouble before the pandemic, stick around: the coming months will make the pre-virus era seem positively idyllic.

Dim recollections of Nicola Sturgeon promising schools were her top priority are fading fast – that’s a question for the ancient history paper.

We’re in survival mode now, but so far the omens for making pandemic schooling work effectively, or work at all, aren’t good.

What limited information is trickling through from local authorities suggests a patchwork of make-do-and-mend approaches that fall woefully short of the mark.

In Edinburgh, one-third of pupils will be in school buildings at any one time from August, and there are grim warnings that in some areas kids may be in school just one day a week.

For children in Glasgow, the plan is for two days a week in school, at least for primaries, and already education bosses have warned of subject cuts when the new term resumes.

It’s a nightmare prospect for parents, presenting childcare dilemmas if their children are attending school on different days.

And home-schooling won’t disappear – indeed, it’s the backbone of the so-called ‘blended learning’ strategy, but it hasn’t gone swimmingly over lockdown.

Work for many pupils is drying up as the end of the year approaches, and thousands have switched off from online lessons.

Not a single pupil has yet received a laptop under a £9million government scheme to provide 25,000 children with computers – an initiative announced on May 21.

Ministers are working with councils to ‘determine how many more devices will be needed’ – but just how much longer do they need, three months after schools shut?

There are profound economic consequences, for sure, not least because kids will be getting a substandard education.

But months of severe disruption mean more parents taking on childcare duties, and continuing their role as home educators, which means they won’t be working, or won’t be doing their jobs effectively.

Rightly the disaster in care homes, which resulted in hundreds of avoidable deaths, has dominated much of the discussion about the government’s response to coronavirus.

But the catastrophe in education will also have calamitous consequences.

More pupils dropping out of the system and joining the dole queue makes escaping from the economic doldrums harder.

Never before have we suspended state education in its entirety (barring special hubs for the children of key workers) – even during the Second World War the schools continued to function.

What’s enormously dispiriting is the familiar sense of defeatism that surrounds the re-launch of state education, not least from the union barons not renowned for their dynamic thinking.

The EIS teaching union has said it doesn’t want to see the two-metre rule watered down unless there has been a ‘significant improvement in the rate of infection’.

If that leads to teachers resisting any change – and there must be an alteration if the economy is to recover – then social distancing and half-empty schools are here to stay for the foreseeable.

(Dream team? Sturgeon and Swinney are under mounting pressure over reopening of schools)

But it’s not clear there’s much scientific justification for it.

After all, the government’s own public health scientists are divided on the issue – some of them say social distancing isn’t needed in schools, as kids tend not to get the virus, and are also poor ‘transmitters’ of it.

The youngest pupils won’t have to do it at all; but isn’t it odd we don’t hear more from these experts who aren’t toeing the line? Another question for the exam paper…

The net result is a barrage of odd ideas about requisitioning old offices and sports stadiums, and even building geo-domes (large greenhouses) to enable socially-distanced learning.

Grids mapped out on playground surfaces to enforce pupil separation are the stuff of bad dreams.

How they will be policed is anyone’s guess: perhaps headteachers will get ‘campus cops’ to hand out fixed penalties to those overstepping the mark.

Education Secretary John Swinney has proved the living antithesis of a ‘safe pair of hands’ – which was meant to be his unique selling-point for the job.

His every statement is another blow to the morale of parent-educators.

The buck has been passed back to councils, though now Miss Sturgeon says she’s taking charge. Well, she is First Minister…

Mr Swinney’s suggestion of part-time learning possibly for the whole of the next school year was one such example of an ingrained pessimism that is entirely tone-deaf to the mounting concerns of parents.

Miss Sturgeon slapped him down yesterday, or appeared to, saying there may be a legal minimum for the number of hours of face-to-face teaching once schools go back.

There is a ‘planning assumption’ to get back to normal as soon as possible, she insists, though planning hasn’t been a strong-point so far.

Mind you, she also said she was ‘deeply anxious’ about the impact of blended learning, and frankly who could blame her?

Maybe Mr Swinney is just being honest and engaging in what might be called ‘expectation management’: if people don’t expect much, they won’t be disappointed.

But if you’re looking for some kind of co-ordinated message from ministers and council bosses, keep looking: there isn’t one.

There are no easy answers, and no government would willingly undermine its own education system and economy without good reason.

Heading off a resurgence in Covid-19 is now the new top priority of this administration, supplanting school reform and even, temporarily, independence.

But it also provides a high degree of licence for ministers to attribute the blame for every deficiency in state education to coronavirus.

Parents know there’s a need for caution and accept that ‘we’re all on the same side’, as Miss Sturgeon assured us yesterday (though it was interesting that she felt the need to make this clear).

But we’re sick of conflicting messages, scientific advice kept under wraps, and disorganisation on an epic scale – even for this ham-fisted regime.

True, most administrations around the world were caught out by the virus.

All the same, devolution meant the Nationalists had a free hand to plan for the worst, and it’s obvious they didn’t.

So, time for a bonus question: if government had spent as much time on gearing up for a potential pandemic as they did on hatching plots for independence, would our schools – and economy – be in such a mess today?

Put your pens down, time’s up – not just for our mythical exam, but also for hapless ministers making it up as they go along, while parents lose all confidence in their judgment.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on June 16, 2020.