Back to class... and don’t forget your face masks?

EVERY pupil wearing a face mask – is that what classrooms will look like when schools reopen? However impracticable it sounds, it cannot be discounted as work gets under way on how to safeguard more than 900,000 primary and post-primary pupils, as well as further and higher education students, their teachers and lecturers, when they return to classrooms and colleges in the autumn.

Face coverings are a familiar feature of the return to school in some countries, including Vietnam and Taiwan, and it is not so farfetched for Ireland that it didn’t enter the thinking in the course of detailed planning for the now-abandoned Leaving Cert exams in July/August.

In the Dáil yesterday, Education Minister Joe McHugh referred to how consideration was given to the need for students to wear masks and gloves, and for exam superintendents to don personal protective equipment (PPE).

Chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan has spoken about the potential value of face coverings in community settings, such as shops and on public transport.

The elaborate arrangements drawn up for the exams gave a gasp-inducing view of the mammoth challenges associated with trying to sit 61,000 Leaving Cert candidates down in exam halls at the end of July.

The social distancing and strict hygiene regimen envisaged is just as applicable, if not more so, for the much bigger logistical exercise involved in reopening schools and colleges a month or so later.

For more than 100,000 school pupils, the day starts and ends on the school bus, but for the purposes of the exams the advice was for candidates not to use school transport. Public transport, where it’s available, does not offer any easier a solution.

The prospects of a daily health declaration, temperature checks and/or testing facilities were also raised. Temperature checks are happening in China and at least one school in Germany has students administering their own weekly Covid-19 swab tests.

To minimise the possibility of close contact, exam planners drew a picture of staggered start times and “military precision” queuing systems and movement patterns worked out in advance. There would be two-metre distances marked out in the yard, or around the school perimeter, and routes mapped out.

Once inside the exam centre, social distancing would require giving each candidate a space of 2.3sqm – a world away from the reality of the many overcrowded Irish classrooms. Sanitation was to take the form of a deep-cleaning regimen before, between and after exams each day.

Hygiene rules would also require a onestudent/one-desk rule and no movement between centres. That would be OK for exams, but leaves no scope for the sort of collaborative work carried on around shared tables, now encouraged in Irish classrooms, nor the movement between classrooms typically undertaken by student and teachers.

Even with all the best-laid social distancing and hygiene standards in place, there were other inevitable questions posed, for which there were no answers, including: ‘what happens if students are mingling or there is horseplay?’ and ‘what if somebody sneezes?’