PM: I can’t guarantee when pupils will go back to school
BORIS JOHNSON was last night unable to guarantee that schools will return as planned after Christmas as the new virus strain threatened to inflict further damage on education.
The Prime Minister told yesterday’s press conference that he still wanted to see a staggered return, but said the plans would be kept ‘under constant review’.
‘The most useful thing I can tell you at this stage is obviously we want, if we possibly can, to get schools back in a staggered way at the beginning of January in the way that we have set out,’ he said.
‘Obviously ... the commonsensical thing to do is to follow the path of the epidemic and … to keep things under constant review.’
His comments came as the biggest education union said teachers should be given priority vaccines before next term, while pupils should be taught online until January 18.
The National Education Union also said public health officials rather than head teachers should be put in charge of making sense of the Government’s last-minute plans to test every secondary pupil in England in the new year.
The union’s letter to Mr Johnson came as doubts grew over whether schools would be able to reopen according to the Government’s preferred timeline, from January 4, especially in Tier Four areas. There were also concerns that the ambition,
‘A hint from the data’
tious testing plans would not be safe because of the new strain’s higher level of infectiousness.
Professor Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College London epidemiologist who also advises the Government, told Radio 4 yesterday that there was ‘a hint from the data that this variant may infect children slightly more effectively than the previous variants’.
Teachers were already deeply unhappy at the prospect of having to arrange testing for millions of pupils within weeks, and the Department for Education is yet to issue detailed instructions.
Writing to the PM and Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, the NEU said teaching should be kept online for a fortnight in January to ‘allow time to properly set up the system of mass testing’.
In an attempt to relieve the burden of schools having to organise the system, they also called for local directors of public health to set it up.
‘Thirdly, we believe that you should use that two-week period to begin to vaccinate education staff, alongside NHS and care staff,’ union leaders Kevin Courtney and Dr Mary Bousted added.
‘Part of the disruption to educaand the extra stress on school leaders, is caused both by the relatively high levels of staff absence due to the virus and self-isolation and by the fear that vulnerable staff have about working without PPE or social distancing.’
Last week teachers were left reeling over a plan to test every secondary school pupil for coronavirus, using a rapid lateral flow test, in the first week of next term.
The initiative would see most teenagers learning from home until January 11, when they will return to classrooms. Only those taking GCSEs and A-levels in the summer, as well as the children of key workers and those in vulnerable situations, will have face-to-face
learning from January 4. a Dfe spokesman said: ‘ Our huge expansion of rapid testing will support secondary schools to stay open to all pupils as well as reduce the risk of transmission within local communities.
‘There are no plans for schools to close and it has rightly been a national priority for all pupils to return to school full- time . Schools, colleges and early years settings have worked tremendously hard to put protective measures in place.’