Lucy Denyer:

Given the Government’s mixed messaging, is it any wonder that many dread the return of classes?

My three children are due to return to school next week. I’m counting down the days. But already, the parental Whatsapp groups are buzzing. “How do people feel about the safety of schools reopening?” one father asked at the weekend. He went on to explain that, although he and his wife were desperately wanting some sort of return to normality – not to mention an education for their children – their household also includes clinically vulnerable members. He’s not worried so much for his children’s health as the potential impact on adults at home.

The replies flowed thick and fast – with equal concern, urging regular testing, offering recourse to a PHE map of localised cases. All the responses were sympathetic. The majority said they trusted the school to take the right precautions.

It’s a scenario being repeated up and down the country this week, as the start of September looms. The PM is back in Downing Street to kick off a week-long drive to get every child back to school next month. But the battleground is no longer the teaching unions, or even the scientists – it’s the parents. Ministers can declare their determination to have every child back until they’re blue in the face; they can threaten as many fines as they like; but polling figures show that between a third and half of parents are still unsure about sending their children back to school next term.

Is that really surprising, though? Since lockdown officially began back in March, the Government has been pushing project fear. “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives” may have been one of the most successful slogans of all time, but now it’s come back to bite Downing Street. When official advice to working parents is still to “work safely”, including sticking to safe distances from others, and avoiding public transport at rush hour, is it any wonder that they’re reluctant to take little Johnny to school on the bus, or thrust him into a classroom of 30, with little social distancing to speak of? Such mixed messaging does not engender confidence.

The fear does not, largely, seem to be about the risks to children themselves. Most parents now know that, as Chris Whitty said at the weekend, the chances of children dying from Covid-19 are incredibly small – although it is probably still worth the Government continuing to hammer home this point. Less quantifiable is the likelihood of children transmitting the virus to adults – generally accepted to be low, but with enough uncertainty to make parents anxious – and transmission between adults, whether teacher-toteacher, or teacher-to-parent. Combine this with the hysteriainducing pressure cooker of a school Whatsapp group and it’s hardly surprising that there’s mutiny afoot.

Then there are the practicalities. Reopening schools is key if we want even half a chance of getting the economy back on track, but while declaiming that it is parents’ “moral duty” to send their children back to school, the Government yesterday admitted that they could yet be forced to shut during any future lockdown.

While government figures show that parents are significantly more likely to trust schools than the Government itself – support for the latter stands at just 38 per cent, compared with 67 per cent for the former – school leaders are contending with constantly evolving guidelines, many of which are vague in the extreme, and subject to being rewritten at a moment’s notice.

“Everyone’s p----- off ”, says one primary deputy head. “You put all the measures they ask for in place, and then they change something. We’ve also been told it might still be subject to change, so we can’t communicate too much to parents yet.”

Nobody, then, knows quite what’s going on, or what the future might hold. Against all this, what parent is going to dismantle the jigsaw of work, education and childcare that has been painstakingly assembled in recent months and organise a return to work if there’s a risk their children will be sent home again in three weeks?

Put bluntly, it’s a mess. Perhaps that’s not surprising in a pandemic, when contending with a novel virus of which there is much we don’t know. But if the Government is really serious about getting schools back, it needs to prepare for battle – on all fronts.