From goodness knows where, in the last few weeks school and college leaders have pulled out all the stops. Despite 10 years of real-term funding cuts and ongoing fears of redundancies, the education profession has risen to the Covid-19 challenge.

From nursery schools to further education colleges, colleagues have entrenched themselves in their communities, caring for the children of key workers and those at risk of harm while becoming distributors of food and providers of essential social care services.

Hundreds of thousands of teachers and support staff are busy at home trying to provide a support system for parents and a semblance of routine for children and young people. Many are reassuring those who would, in England, have been taking GCSEs and A-levels, or providing online learning resources and marking coursework for students of applied qualifications.

However, decisions and support from the Department for Education have been slow, reactionary, and leaked to the press rather than first shared with the profession. They have not been collaborative. School and college leaders, local authorities and trade unions have filled the gaping hole vacated by central government.

One thing is clear, when this is over, society will be fundamentally changed. Children and their families, our school and college communities, will need considerable support to deal with illness and bereavement, changes in employment and housing situations.

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No adult or child will be untouched. When we come out of social distancing and isolation, children and young people and their families will need help to manage mental health, self-esteem, friendships and relationships.

Education will need to change, too. We cannot simply return to the status quo. A third of teachers are actively thinking of leaving the profession within the next five years; there is a teacher and school leader recruitment crisis. Education support staff roles have been cut to the bone and teaching assistants, supporting the children with the most complex special needs, are being paid insultingly low wages that do not reflect their importance.

Cancelling Sats tests and public exams was the right decision. However, it is not only the 2019-20 cohort who will be affected by this crisis. The education, physical and mental health of a generation is at stake. Children of NHS and other key and essential workers will see their parents exhausted and exposed to the biggest health risk in a hundred years.

When we go back to school everything will be different – and it must be different. We need to ask ourselves the fundamental question: what is the purpose of education?

When the time is right we, the profession, the experts, must start formulating the answer. We must be ready to enter a new reality of an education system that values the professional judgment of teachers and leaders.

We cannot continue to have a system that has nearly 3,000 children with special educational needs and disabilities lacking a permanent school place. We cannot continue to have an exam system that leaves a third of pupils labelled as failures.

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The use of education as an ideological and political football that fails the most vulnerable must end. We cannot continue with a toxic exam system that is based on rote learning and an out-of-date curriculum chosen by whoever happens to be the education secretary, and an exam system that has been responsible for a dramatic rise in child and adolescent mental health illness.

We have got to stop the testing hamster wheel that burns out children. We cannot continue to allow 16-year-olds to sit 33 hours of GCSE exams, when education and training continues to age 18 and beyond.

We must end the fixation with A-levels as the “gold standard”, just because they’ve been around a long time. Our education system must recognise the achievements of all and must not continue to label those who take a vocational education route as less worthy or less valuable, or their qualifications less rigorous.

We must end the education “market” and the game playing, end the practice of schools competing against each other for pupils, results and league table places.

We cannot and will not continue to be terrorised by Ofsted, an overbearing accountability system that ends the careers of school leaders and teachers, discourages professional collaboration, drives up stress levels and disadvantages those working in the most deprived areas.

This pandemic is going to hurt those most at risk: those in precarious employment, those in rented accommodation and all those who, just weeks ago, the government labelled as unskilled – the essential workers in schools, shops, hospitality, social care, delivery and communications, cleaners, caretakers, the armed forces, police, fire, ambulance and the NHS.

If we don’t recognise now the vital importance of an inclusive education system and the positive impact it can have on developing a fairer society, then, I fear, we never will. We must use the situation we are faced with now to end child poverty and inequalities in education and the wider society.