Schools have been ideological battlegrounds in the past. In the coronavirus crisis, they are again.

Conflict between the federal and state governments broke into the open yesterday when education minister Dan Tehan attacked, and later apologised to, a premier over a sensitive element of the coronavirus pandemic’s management: school education.

The episode saw Tehan strenuously criticise Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews over his government’s refusal to allow face-to-face teaching for all students to resume in the state’s schools.