Now this is one school strike I can get behind. Faced with a demand to wear masks all day in lessons, pupils are in revolt. In one school in the north of England, reportedly just 67 out of 1,300 students are complying. The others sit down at their desks and, asked to mask up, say “no”.

God knows, this has been a long time coming. Seemingly at every turn in this pandemic, children’s interests have been sacrificed for the good of adults. In 2020, pubs reopened before schools. Nearly two years later, office workers, nightclub and restaurant-goers can go mask-free, but secondary school pupils are meant to cover up all day. We are living in backwards-land.

Masks are just the start. The jungle of Covid bureaucracy has ensnared us all, but it is schoolchildren who are caught in its darkest heart. Schools are tied up in a thicket of pointless checklists and constant re-interpretations of rules and procedures. A conspiracy of Government cowardice, administrative incompetence and union obstructionism has left children wandering in the Covid wilderness, while the rest of us return to normal. This cannot be allowed to stand.

The mask mandate is just one example of how precious learning time and energy are being wasted on Covid processology. Masks in schools are a policy the Government has previously said it would avoid, because they damage education. Yet the latest guidance declares that all secondary school pupils ought to wear them – except, er, in situations where someone “relies on … clear sound or facial expressions to communicate”.

The confusion doesn’t end there. If a disobliging teenager refuses to wear her mask (a situation seemingly considered so unlikely that it isn’t even covered by the guidance), the advice states that “no pupil should be denied education on the grounds that they are not wearing a face covering”. This is a recipe for conflict and chaos.

Given the stupidity of a rulebook that turns teachers into powerless enforcers of a bad policy, you might think the teaching unions would be the first to object. Think again. The unions’ only problem with the amount of bunkum being chucked at our schools is that it doesn’t go far enough. What they want instead is a ratchet of Covid requirements that appears specifically designed to ensure as much disruption as possible.

The country’s biggest teaching union, the National Education Union, for example, is not content with the recommendation that teachers and pupils test for Covid twice a week. Testing, it states, should “ideally” be “daily”. Such a regime, it adds, would require “a staggered start for the new term”, which is another way of saying that schools should not fully reopen when they’re meant to.

The union also wants its members to demand “updated risk assessments” with “revised procedures” for handling omicron. These measures, it suggests, should include banning school assemblies and parents’ evenings, sending twice-weekly spam texts about testing, “staggered timings for lunch breaks” and re-imposing “bubble” systems whereby pupils are not allowed to mix outside small groups.

As for managing Covid teacher absences, the NEU is adamant that “teachers should not routinely be expected to cover for absent colleagues”. Schools should not be allowed to merge classes, it claims, and teachers should certainly not have to teach children online at the same time as teaching children in school because this would supposedly mean “doing two jobs”. Union officers should take heart, meanwhile, from its “success” case studies. In one, a teacher recounts how she won the right to mute the microphones of all pupils studying online. Another recalls the glorious denouement of a hard-fought campaign to get lidded bins in all her school’s classrooms.

That’s all before we come to the ventilation farce. Schools are told by unions and Government that they ought to be constantly monitoring air flow in every classroom. If it isn’t sufficient, the NEU regards this as the perfect excuse for classes to downsize or move out. And if you’re wondering how to monitor air flow, the union links to a 134-line spreadsheet comparing different air purifiers so that members can flag it to their managers. No wonder so many teachers are at their wits’ end and have simply decided to open all their classroom windows and let everyone freeze.

Most teachers want to do a decent job in difficult circumstances and are trying to get on with it. Not so their unions. Page after page, their checklists and campaigns read like the work of obstructionist, selfish bureaucrats thinking up ways to make life more difficult for schools and all who rely on them for the sake of the lazy few and the political hacks who champion them. As for the children missing months of class time and social contact, from the disadvantaged falling behind on basic maths to those in chaotic or abusive homes, they can go to hell.

To defend their racket, the unions naturally need to portray schools as a horrific battlefield where teachers are being exposed to terrifying risks. The evidence simply doesn’t stand up. Neither official statistics nor scientific studies show any increased risk of Covid death for teachers compared with any other adult in the same age cohorts. Indeed, a recent study of 12 million people published by the Government shows that even adults who live with children are at no greater risk of Covid hospitalisation or death than anyone else under 65. Schools are not, it seems, the deadly petri dishes we are led to believe.

No one can claim that it’s an easy time for schools. Teacher and pupil absences are bound to be higher than usual for the next month. But the Government should be throwing everything at the effort to protect education and get life back to normal for schoolchildren, rather than piling on more bureaucracy and endless rounds of guidelines. Rather than obsessing over the risk children pose to adults, we should be raging against the catastrophic loss of potential and opportunity that occurs every time a schoolchild is sent home. Rather than engaging in facile debates about how to measure classroom CO2 levels, unions should be at the forefront of the battle to save our schools from becoming a national disgrace.

If instead they choose to act like petty teenagers, the Government should stop pandering and stop passing the buck to overwhelmed head teachers and parents. It should implement a clear policy of sending Britain back to school as normal immediately and then back schools and teachers to the hilt to implement it. Scrap excessive isolation periods, over-testing, masks and the endless procedural rigmarole and let teachers teach. If Boris Johnson is looking for his Thatcher moment, this is it. Does he have the guts to seize it?