Doubts raised over need to close schools

SCHOOL closures do not have a significant effect on the spread of infection, a study has found.

Shutting schools could in fact have “relatively small effects” on slowing the transmission of coronavirus, according to researchers at University College London, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Cambridge University and Sydney University.

Academics reviewed 16 studies on the impact of school closures during the Covid-19 outbreak so far, as well as during previous flu outbreaks including Sars in 2003 and Mers in 2012.

The paper, published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, found that data from flu outbreaks suggest that closures “could have relatively small effects on a virus with Covid-19’s high transmissibility and apparent low clinical effect on schoolchildren”.

At the same time, school closures can have profound economic and social consequences, it said, particularly for children from deprived backgrounds.

Data from the Sars outbreak in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore suggested that school closures did not contribute to the control of the epidemic, researchers found. Recent studies of Covid-19 predict that school closures alone would only prevent less than four per cent of deaths, much less than other social distancing measures.

Prof Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the study’s lead author, said that nearly 90 per cent of the world’s students – more than a billion and a half – are now out of school.

♦ Less than half of students think their predicted grade will accurately reflect their ability, according to a poll commissioned by the Higher Education Policy Institute.