The Covid-19 pandemic has created global disruption in education. It has served to highlight pre-existing inequalities, at the same time as it has stimulated new forms of educational provision, notably 'online learning'. This article focuses on the debates and conflicts provoked by the pandemic's impact on schooling in England. It aims to show how the historic policy preferences of Conservative governments have been carried forwards into a new situation and suggests how such preferences are at odds with ways of working developed by teachers. It places these different orientations in a broader European context and identifies a common tendency to evoke a meaning of teaching represented as at odds with the policy choices that have characterised government response to the pandemic.