Secondary school students arrive at school during the pandemic (AAP Image/Daniel Pockett)

Dear Year 12,

Please ignore the wallpaper of debate surrounding you — aimed at getting you back into the classroom and the exam room. It’s policy window-dressing at best, and a political ruse at worst. Your final academic score delivered to you before Christmas will mean nothing to your future.

But how you navigate this brutal pandemic will mean everything to the person you become, and the influence you will hold.

The babble about early vaccinations and premature face-to-face teaching is nothing more than warped political priorities aimed at making politicians look smart. What you need to do is focus on this extraordinary time in history and how it will mould you as a person.

If our politicians wanted to help, they’d focus more on your mental health and how you are coping with learning remotely. They’d be acting to slash queues at psychologists that now stretch out to more than a year. They’d be warning you against doing your classes in your bedroom, encouraging you to talk every day to friends, and working on bubble plans to allow you to escape home for some fresh air.

Instead of diverting vaccines and resources away from others, they’d look to what you need — not what makes them look good.

And a clever politician would develop a cabinet of educators to use this dreadful time in your senior year to “disrupt” the education system and forge an assessment model that could be exponentially more valuable than the creaky old one used now. That new model would measure the skills that a pandemic can deliver; skills that will determine how you lead down the track; skills like teamwork and critical thinking, emotional literacy and communication.

Clever politicians would be demanding our universities mould their archaic and inflexible entry practices and find new ways to fit students to study areas. That would mean graduating doctors would have a bedside manner suited to delivering a terminal prognosis; teachers who understood communication was as valuable a skill as the history curriculum they needed to deliver; politicians and policy-makers, public servants and professionals with heads, and hearts to match.

That’s what this pandemic can teach you. And it’s not a lesson that will be delivered with a rush back to the classroom and the introduction of rapid antigen testing.

The uncertainty you are feeling over whether exams will go ahead, be deferred or cancelled is crippling. I understand that. My daughter is one of you. So is the anxiety that has a queue of teen girls seeking assistance for physical gut problems that medicos say have no explanation.

It must be so, so hard not to listen to that daily tally and the maths book of numbers that continues to hide the real story: numbers of dead COVID patients; numbers of positive COVID patients; numbers of children infected; numbers of tests; numbers of vaccines and international arrivals and rally arrests.

This pandemic isn’t a maths lesson. It’s a lesson you write. What impact will this pandemic have on you? And how will you mould that? And if you need help, who will you ask?

That’s where you can be leaders in your school too. Our little ones in Years 1 and 2 have gone months, perhaps, without seeing the unmasked smile of a stranger. How might that influence them? The teen boy only a few years younger than you who lives for his Saturday football team that has been disbanded. How is he coping?

The girl in your science class whose grandmother died on Thursday and who is unable to attend her funeral because she doesn’t fit in that arbitrarily determined number of 10 allowed at funerals. What could you say to her today?

Forget about that final score. You’ll get to do what you want. In this bewildering time, where leaders are failing all of us, you need to believe that. And if you do, you’ll leave your own mark on the world.