The return to school
As schools in England prepared to fully reopen next week, Boris Johnson called on all parents to send their children back to the classroom. He said it was “crucial” for pupils to resume formal education after five months of absence. The PM was backed by England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, who said pupils were at more risk of long-term harm from staying at home than from returning to class. In the wake of a similar move in Scotland, Johnson announced that secondary-school pupils in locked-down parts of England would have to wear face masks in all school communal areas.
The late announcement on masks marked yet another reversal of education policy following the decision last week to use teacher assessments to determine A-level and GCSE results in England, instead of the discredited algorithm developed by exam regulator Ofqual ( see page 22). The head of Ofqual, Sally Collier, resigned on Tuesday over the results chaos, which also affected hundreds of thousands of BTec students. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson faced more calls to quit after it emerged that he had been warned weeks ago about the algorithm’s flaws.
What the editorials said
The Government’s “haphazard” school policies epitomise its flawed response to the pandemic, said The Guardian. Again and again, it has acted too late or been forced to backtrack. After the WHO advised last weekend that children aged 12 and over should wear masks for instance, Scotland announced that secondary-school pupils would have to wear face coverings in corridors. By contrast, Johnson’s government initially insisted that it wouldn’t change its stance on masks in schools – only to do so days later under pressure.
Williamson’s job now reportedly rests on his success in getting children back to school, said The Sunday Times. But it’s remarkable that the Education Secretary hasn’t been sacked already given his incompetent handling of the whole exam issue. Having “exhausted his modest reserves of political capital”, he has been forced to draw on the reputation of Professor Whitty to help reassure parents, said The Independent. The case for pupils going back to class is compelling, but in the all-too possible event of a major resurgence of Covid-19, it would be hard to avoid further disruption to schools. Given that Whitty has cautioned that a vaccine is probably about nine months away, “another lost year certainly can not be ruled out”.
What the commentators said
What a ridiculous flap people have got into over schools reopening, said Alice Thomson in The Times. Some 65% of parents are apparently concerned about it. These are presumably some of the same people who have happily visited crowded beaches or taken packed flights to Europe. How can anyone have reservations about this? Until all schools go back, we won’t be able to return to “any sense of normality”. Parents must be free to work again and cooped-up children need to get out of the house. A cousin who works in a Scottish primary school says she barely recognised some of her pupils when they returned, they had put on so much weight.
New figures from Public Health England (PHE) show that returning to school poses almost no risk to pupils, said Camilla Tominey in The Daily Telegraph. Of the 1.6 million youngsters who went back to class in June for the final weeks of the summer term, just 70 tested positive for Covid-19 and not one of them needed hospital treatment. As for their teachers, 128 tested positive, and most of them caught it from adults. If parents nevertheless remain nervous, it’s partly because of the “mixed messages” we keep hearing. One minute we’re told that 91% of people in England live in neighbourhoods that haven’t had a single case of Covid in a month; the next we’re told that reopening schools could “push the R rate above the critical level of one”, threatening a new winter crisis.
The reopening of schools will inevitably increase community transmission, said Philip Ball in The Guardian. With luck, though, the effect should be limited. Sweden left its schools open and hasn’t seen many outbreaks as a result (its teachers have experienced lower rates of infection than taxi drivers or supermarket workers). Schools can help stem the spread through mitigation measures such as frequent handwashing, staggered start and end times, well ventilated classrooms and separation of year groups, said Professor Devi Sridhar in the same paper. Beyond that, our key defence is prompt testing, tracing and quarantining – both to snuff out school outbreaks and to ensure that the virus “never gets into schools in the first place”.
What next?
The Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, confirmed this week that parents in England could be fined if they fail to send their children back to school, although he said financial penalties would remain a “last resort”. The standard fine is £60, rising to £120 in the case of late payment.
Headteachers have expressed fears about the lack of contingency planning for short-term school closures caused by Covid outbreaks, reports The Guardian. No. 10 admitted on Monday that schools could be forced to close again if stricter local lockdown measures are needed to prevent the spread of the virus. In that event, teachers would be mandated to prepare remote learning for their pupils.