It is a bright Wednesday morning in May. My son, T, a Year 8 pupil, should be at school and I should be working, but instead we are playing tennis. We are also listening to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits because he’s supposed to be studying the play in class so I figure I can cover both PE and English literature in the next half an hour before we head home and I start the work I’m meant to be doing.

My son isn’t ill and isn’t playing truant. His school, along with five others in Lewisham, south London, is in the middle of 13 days of strike action called by the National Education Union (NEU). Prendergast Ladywell, Prendergast School, Prendergast Vale, Prendergast Sixth Form and Prendergast Primary are all part of the Leathersellers’ Federation, which wants to turn the schools into a multi-academy trust (MAT).

The NEU is against MATs and academies in general. These strikes are taking place in addition to the days of ‘national action’ over pay. Throw in half-term, bank holidays and coronations and basically my son has been going to school once or twice a week through May and will do until mid-June. Or perhaps mid-July, or perhaps mid-forever as the union wants to ballot its members for more strikes next week after talks broke down again.

Until three weeks ago I had no views whatsoever on academies. T’s school used to be a struggling inner-city state secondary that went from getting a solidly bad ‘requires improvement’ across all criteria from Ofsted in 2016 to hauling itself up to ‘good’ just before the pandemic began. It seemed to be going in the right direction under its current head and management team. Then an email popped up in parents’ inboxes in mid-February stating that the Federation schools were going to become an MAT and there would be a consultation period until the end of March. Just after the Easter holidays finished, the NEU announced its strike in opposition to the change.

My lack of knowledge of – or indeed interest in – the academy issue was swiftly corrected by the WhatsApp groups that sprang up. Bizarrely, the Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo got involved via a tweet against academies. Ruffalo contributed a ‘Words of Wisdom’ feature to the school in 2012 and seems to have been contacted by either the NEU or the striking teachers for more wise words.

Like Ruffalo’s input, most of the initial information flying around seemed pretty random and after a week or so the only thing I learnt that’s not debatable is that 80 per cent of UK secondary schools are now academies or free schools. So it is fair to surmise that the Leathersellers’ proposals are not radically different from what else is going on around the country.

There’s one markedly pro-NEU WhatsApp group which seems to have a mixture of union folk and the occasional strident parent who supports strike action. It is filled with high-minded, unforgiving, anti-academisation people who don’t seem to mind that the children are cannon fodder. For them academies are a Tory ruse designed to hand over control of schools to nasty capitalists who are going to pay themselves huge salaries while firing all the lovely teachers. At one point this group went down the rabbit-hole of trying to dig up dirt on the Leathersellers who actually turn out to support the schools through their charitable arm which is not allowed to be profit-making. But this isn’t good enough – the Leathersellers are based in the City and so must have nefarious intents.

For a while I was equally in despair with the other main WhatsApp group, made up of parents unhappy with the strike action and who want the Federation and the union to go back to talks. This sounds good in principle but for about a week they descended into a long discussion about how they should go about the community wearing non-confrontational badges. This plan, however, was abandoned: initially because no one could find the parent who said they had the badges – their WhatsApp identification didn’t include their photo – but then because the latest round of talks broke down.

Now the NEU wants to pause everything and have a working group, but the Federation’s main desire is to make sure that the NEU does not strike again in next year’s exam season. It wants the union to commit not to strike until June 2024, whereas the union says that it can only agree not to strike again until March 2024.

And that’s it. Talks fail completely over whether the NEU can call strikes next March or June. This seems typical of the debate: high-minded, abstruse, pointless. Meanwhile in Lewisham around 1,500 pupils are not at school. These are kids who have already missed chunks of education through Covid. And because the teachers are on strike there is no online learning as there was during the pandemic – just a couple of revision books tossed at the children when they were in school last Friday. Lewisham, despite pockets of gentrification, is still a poor borough. The NEU’s actions, no matter how principled they might seem to the strikers, are setting the kids there further behind.

Tennis and English literature over, I head back to my emails and work in a sweaty T-shirt. T turns his attention to Red Dead Redemption 2. Over lunch I ask him if the game counts as history or geography. ‘History definitely,’ he replies. What has he learnt in that case from a historical viewpoint? ‘That they had carriages not cars in the 18th century.’ I point out that the game is set at the end of the 19th, and he nods back sagely. Another parent messages to say that their child is watching Netflix so I feel slightly superior. Still I realise that this does not quite count as an adequate Year 8 education, so I ambush T with Collins KS3 English: Complete Revision & Practice. He complains loudly but opens it.

Ultimately I’m still not that bothered either way about academies – and given the number of secondary schools that have already converted, the Leathersellers’ MAT feels inevitable. I just want my child back at the school he was growing to like. Instead, WhatsApp beeps again: another set of letters being prepared by the parents in one chat, another set of angry missives about the evils of academies in the other.

While I’ve turned away, a bored T has returned to Red Dead. I pick up the revision book at page 57 and start reading the section headed ‘Features of Writing to Argue’: ‘Do not lose sight of the fact that you are looking at both sides of the argument, not just your viewpoint.’

I close the book, and don’t call T back. The PS4 game with guns blazing everywhere and bystanders screaming is, after all, probably more pertinent to real life.