WHO would be an Education Secretary? Just a week or so ago, Gavin Williamson had three policies: the schools were going to remain open, there was going to be mass testing of pupils, and exams were definitely going to go ahead.

By yesterday, nothing remained of those policies and it looks as if the holidays over Christmas were wasted with schools trying to rustle up a testing programme when they should have been concentrating on creating on-line lessons.

Mr Williamson has bowed to the inevitable by accepting that exams cannot go ahead and teacher assessments, rather than the dreaded algorithm, are going to be used to set grades, and he has a couple of months to come up with a way of assuring that these assessments are going to be fair.

Once he has solved the schools crisis, students will be returning to universities – on-line. So is it fair for students to be contractually obliged to pay huge bills for accommodation they do not need, and is it right that they are getting a very different educational experience to the one they expected when they agreed to plunge themselves into debt to pay their tuition fees?