Sturgeon floats four-day working week to help rebuild after Covid-19
●First Minister says move will help balance work and family life ●More time outdoors for Scots in first phase of easing lockdown
Part-time schooling and a four-day working week may need to become the new norm in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has said, as she unveiled a four-phase “route map” out of coronavirus lockdown.
Urging Scots to “grasp the opportunity for change” in the months ahead, the First Minister revealed restrictions are likely be eased next week that will see people allowed to meet outside, sunbathe in parks and participate in some sports as part of “phase one” of a Scottish Government strategy.
The second phase, which may be brought in a few weeks later, could see Scots visit family members in their homes, as well as smaller shops reopening and a return of outdoor markets.
But all the measures are dependent on the virus continuing to be suppressed in Scotland. And Ms Sturgeon warned it may be months before the route map out of the current lockdown is fully implemented.
The plan set out yesterday will see schools return on 11 August and a new “blended” approach to teaching, which will see a “different model of learning” implemented in classrooms across the country. “This new model,
which will ensure adherence to safeguarding protocols such as appropriate physical distancing, will include parttime in-school learning and part-time in-home learning for almost all children,” the strategy document published by the Scottish Government yesterday states.
Teachers will return to schools next month to start preparing for the new year ahead, with pupils scheduled to transition from primary to secondary given additional support.
The absence of youngsters from school for long periods is likely to have major ramifications for parents trying to arrange childcare and implications for their return to work and business activity.
It is likely to mean a major overhaul in the way society operates, with flexible working patterns set to become increasingly prevalent.
Ms Sturgeon told MSPS: “While we want to repair things and get things back to normal, we’ve got to also take care not to simply slip back into old and bad ways of doing things. There are opportunities for change here and I think all of us want to grasp that.
“What I’ve just announced on schools will, potentially for a considerable period of time, give parents a very difficult balancing act between the need to work and the need to care for children when children are at home rather than in school. That is one reason, not the only reason, why we have to look at different working patterns.
“Things like a four-day week now are no longer things we should just be talking about. These are things we should be encouraging employers to look at embracing.”
The First Minister told Holyrood the first phase could begin on 28 May, but “not every phase one measure will necessarily be introduced immediately”.
The initial changes outlined in the Scottish Government document include:
● The gradual reopening of drive-through food outlets as well as garden centres and plant nurseries;
● People being allowed to use public outdoor spaces for recreational purposes, for example to sit in a public space;
● People from one household will be allowed to meet up with another household outdoors, including in gardens;
● Non-contact outdoor activities in the local area – such as golf, hiking, canoeing, outdoor swimming and angling;
● The safe restart of NHS services, covering primary, and community services including mental health.
The second phase could see Scots allowed to meet larger groups of family and friends outside, and also meet people from another household indoors with physical distancing and hygiene measures in place.
At that point pubs and restaurants can also open outdoor spaces such as beer gardens, again with physical distancing and increased hygiene routines. By phase three, things will “begin to feel closer to normal”.
That will see pubs and restaurants open indoor spaces and “personal retail services”, including hairdressers, begin to trade again.
Phase four will be reached when “the virus remains suppressed to very low levels and is no longer considered a significant threat to public health”, but the document warns the public will have to remain “safety conscious”.
This final phase will see mass gatherings resume, schools and childcare provision “operating with any necessary precautions”, and while working from home and flexible working will still be encouraged “all types of workplaces would be open in line with public health advice”.
Ms Sturgeon said the plan did “not yet set definite dates for all phases, because the virus is unpredictable”.
The First Minister also revealed 2,221 patients had now died after testing positive for coronavirus, up by 37 from Wednesday.
Sturgeon took to the podium caught between a rock and hard place
At 12.30pm when she rose to address Holyrood yesterday, things could have gone one of two ways for Nicola Sturgeon: she could have produced a roadmap out of lockdown which would have seen people take to the streets to party like it was Hogmanay, or she could have crushed the hopes of a nation and kickstarted a backlash to the way her government has handled the coronavirus pandemic.
A rock and a hard place then; knowing that the next steps could potentially increase the numbers of Scots who die from coronavirus; but also knowing that lockdown is already unravelling.
She couldn’t fail to have missed that. The pictures of sunbathers on Portobello beach yesterday, made her “want to cry” when she
saw them she said – but they pointed sharply to the fact that the “new normal” of staying at home is no longer working for many people, and disaffection has risen.
And while there has been considerable trust placed in how her government has handled the crisis, that too has begun to fray.
The Nike conference outbreak “cover-up” has been damaging. The rushing of elderly patients out of hospitals and into care homes, taking the virus with them, compounded by an initial lack of PPE for social care staff, and the resultant rising death toll, has been even more so. The lack of testing, questions about when other health services would resume as fears rise about cancers going unscreened... all these things were gnawing away at the apparent political truce between the parties in Holyrood. This was made particularly clear when the Scottish Parliament flexed its democratic scrutiny muscle and demanded that the route map be told to MSPS first, rather than at the daily briefing to the public, so politicians could ask the questions rather than journalists.
Yesterday then, was a vital moment, possibly the most critical in her career, as lives are literally on the line. She has put herself front and centre of the government’s coronavirus response – taking to the podium daily to reel off the figures of positive cases, deaths, intensive care numbers much to the chagrin of her detractors – and has not shied away from taking responsibility for it all. It’s been a direct contrast to the response in Downing Street, where the load has been shared across the Cabinet, a result of Boris Johnson’s illness and new fatherhood or his apparent boredom with the ritual, depending on your political view.
But if she got the tone wrong, the messages mixed, said anything which could see her compared unfavourably to Johnson and the way he revealed England’s roadmap – winks and nudges to journalists, before not quite announcing what had been planned, followed by a run of clarifications of what was said – and it could well have damaged her reputation irrevocably.
Instead, she managed to walk the very fine line of protecting public health and easing up on measures which are harming the economy and people’s mental health. Caution has been her watchword and remains so. Lockdown will be phased, and if numbers of people dying rise again, it could well be stopped - an appeal, not to common sense perhaps, as much as to people’s selfinterest.
It’s hard to believe Nicola Sturgeon does not think in terms of the politics of this crisis. She’s gone out of her way to say questions about her actions are legitimate and not politicised, and that perhaps in future she herself will not read the worst of motives in the actions of her opponents. But she will know that yesterday she survived one of the biggest challenges of her career. The task ahead now is to stick to the route map and keep Scotland’s people on the same page.