PM promises tracing by June to help open schools

Unions welcome ‘real progress’ but say teachers must not be forced back

BORIS JOHNSON has pledged to get contact tracing in place by June 1 as he attempts to get children back to school and the country out of lockdown.

The Prime Minister wants primary schools to reopen to help get parents back to work and hopes the “world beating” test and trace system will satisfy teacher union concern over staff safety.

Unions had suggested the lack of such a system would stop teachers safely returning to school but yesterday in the Commons Mr Johnson insisted that it would be in place by June 1.

Last night the head of one of the country’s biggest teachers’ unions described the news as “real progress” but warned many schools would still see June 1 as premature. The Prime Minister made the announcement after his own ministers conceded councils and head teachers could ignore the date without sanctions and accepted there would not be a uniform reopening.

Ministers have been trying to persuade unions and councils to back the return date for primaries ever since it was announced on May 10 but have come up against resistance, with demands for safety guarantees and contact tracing. Mr Johnson told MPS that 24,000 people who had been recruited to carry out manual contact tracing would be able to track the contacts of up to 10,000 infected people each day.

A mobile phone app to alert users if they come into contact with an infected person will follow. Mr Johnson said: “We are making vast progress in testing and tracing and I have great confidence that by June 1 we will have a system that will help us greatly to defeat this disease and move the country forward.” His announcement came a day after Dame Angela Mclean, the deputy chief scientific adviser, said a “highly effective” test and trace system should be in place before any further changes to lockdown were considered.

Getting schools open remains the biggest obstacle to a wider lifting of lockdown as Cabinet ministers grow fearful of the damage to the economy, with 10million private sector workers relying on Government bail-out plans.

A Downing Street source said there was hope the testing programme would “give people more confidence” with the reopening of schools.

Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said having contact tracing “feels like a victory, it feels like real progress”.

About 20 mostly Labour councils have so far signalled they will set their own timetables for reopening, with some, such as Liverpool, pushing the date back to June 15. The Local Government Association said state schools should reopen on a regional basis depending on local levels of infection.

Graeme Miller, leader of Labour-run Sunderland council, said sending pupils back to school was “premature” because of infection levels in the area.

Ministers conceded the Government could do little to stop schools making their own decisions on returning, with No10 now setting a target of having “as many children as possible” back in primary school by June 1.

Robert Buckland, the Justice Secretary, said the date was conditional, adding: “I’m not going to sit here and pretend that suddenly on June 1 everything will be uniform. We need to listen very carefully to the concerns of employers and staff.”

Meanwhile, Lord Bethell admitted, that the Isle of Wight app trial has shown people seem unwilling to heed the advice it gives, as he said human contact tracing was now the priority.

The junior health and social care minister described it as a “mistake” to launch the app before people were prepared for the idea of digital tracing.

248,293 CORONAVIRUS CASES IN UK 35,704 DEATHS +363 177,216 DAILY TESTS 77,216 ABOVE TARGET

WHEN Boris Johnson announced that schools should prepare to reopen from June 1, he hoped that parents would breathe a collective sigh of relief.

After almost two months of lockdown, No10 aides felt that his Sunday night televised address would help to shift the mindsets away from the “Stay at Home” mentality that had become so ingrained in the nation’s psyche. The Prime Minister’s advisers drew up plans for children in nursery, Reception, Year One and Year Six to return to school from June 1, with the “ambition” that all primary age pupils would be able to return by the end of the month. Students in Year 10 and Year 12, who are midway through their GCSE and Alevel courses, would also be allowed some classroom teaching before the summer.

In order to set the country on the long road to economic recovery, people in certain industries needed to get used to the idea of going back to work, and reopening schools was crucial to this. Parents who had been struggling with home-schooling and childcare would have one less obstacle hindering their return to work. Meanwhile, it was hoped that teachers and educators – who had been so concerned about the most disadvantaged children falling behind during lockdown – would embrace the plan.

But just 10 days after Mr Johnson’s Sunday night address to the nation, No 10 faces a fight to stick to their plans on its June 1 date for schools to reopen.

Yesterday morning, Robert Buckland, the Justice Secretary, became the first minister to acknowledge that what we are more likely to see next month is a “mixed” picture, with some schools opening while others remain closed.

The Government must “respect and understand” that some schools and councils do not think it is safe to reopen, he added.

Later in the day Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, said that schools and councils that refuse to reopen on June 1 will not face any sanctions for doing so, emphasising the importance of reaching a “pragmatic and practical” solution.

The conciliatory tone that ministers adopted yesterday followed a week of mounting opposition to the plans from local councils and teacher unions.

Mr Johnson’s plans were met with immediate resistance from the unions.

The day after his announcement, the UK’S biggest union told teachers not to “engage” with plans to reopen on June 1. The National Education Union (NEU), which has 450,000 members, went on to call the plans “reckless” and issued five tests that needed to be met before schools could reopen, as well as a checklist of over 100 items.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers has threatened local councils with legal action if teachers who refuse to work are penalised.

Even the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), whose members are mainly primary school leaders, and is usually considered to be one of the more moderate unions, told its members to ignore plans to open for all primary school pupils by the end of June, arguing that this is not “realistic”. To scupper the Government’s plans to reopen schools, unions do not need to go on strike or ballot for industrial action. Under employment laws, they can refuse to work if they feel there is a “serious and imminent” threat to their health.

The unions received a major boost when the British Medical Association publicly backed them with a letter of support from their chair, Dr Chaand Nagpaul. (It later softened its stance, saying schools can reopen on June 1, or earlier, as long as it is “safe to do so”.)

At this stage, there was still support for the idea of schools reopening sooner rather than later, and the unions were seen by some as hindering this. Last weekend, ministers remained resolute about their plans. Michael Gove, the former education secretary, used his appearance on The Andrew

Marr Show last Sunday to urge teachers to end their opposition to schools in England reopening more widely.

He told them to “look to your responsibilities” and said that, if teachers really cared about children, they would want them to be in schools, because “teaching is a mission and a vocation”.

There was also vocal support for schools to reopen from chief executives of some of the country’s largest multi-academy trust chains.

In an attempt to change the narrative from the unions, 22 of the biggest and best-known academy trusts across England, which teach a third of a million children, backed Government plans to reopen schools.

In a letter to The Times published on Monday, they said that the impact of schools remaining closed would be calamitous and irreparable, particularly for poorer pupils.

But it was when local councils began to defy the Government that the plans were in real trouble. This started on Friday with Liverpool council saying its schools would open on June 15 at the earliest. It was followed by Hartlepool council, which said that as coronavirus cases in the area continued to rise they have told schools not to reopen on June 1. Bury and Calderdale councils followed suit this week.

On Monday, the Government’s hardline stance appeared to continue, with Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, refusing to rule out taking legal action against councils that refused to reopen their schools on June 1.

Then on Tuesday even the Conservative-led Solihull council warned that not all its schools would be ready to reopen by the start of next month.

By last night, more than two dozen councils across the country had said they would either refuse to open schools under their jurisdiction or would support head teachers who choose not to.

Kevin Courtney, general secretary of the NEU, said that, while he had not had any official approaches from Government officials to notify a change in their stance, the “mood music” was clear enough. “It’s good that they are recognising the real difficulty schools face,” he said. Meanwhile, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT, said: “Where we are getting to now is a realisation that the R rates are different in different parts of the country, and that levels of confidence among parents are different. The only way the Government will pass the confidence test is to allow decisions to be made locally.”

In the end, it was not the opposition from unions or from local councils that dealt the fatal blow to the Government’s plans to reopen schools on June 1, it was the quiet unease of parents about sending their children back to school. A Yougov poll on Monday showed that only 13 per cent of parents “strongly support” plans for schools to reopen, with another 23 per cent saying they “somewhat support” the plans.

The “Stay at Home” message had been too powerful, and it became clear to the Government that they had failed to win over popular support for their plans to reopen schools.