Has the bubble burst for Covid policies that don’t work?

A new report reveals that isolating children had little impact. So why did we bother when it hurt so much, asks Harry de Quetteville

So now we know. All that disruption, all that pain, all that chaos, all that misery inflicted upon schoolchildren was for nothing. We watched as the numbers banished from class rocketed upwards: 200,000, 400,000, 600,000 finally reaching more than a million – one in seven pupils – and thought there must be a better way. We were right.

It was a wholesale summer term devastation of children’s lives that was made all the worse coinciding as it – almost insultingly – did with blase government announcements of freedom for all.

Every parent, every worker, knew what nonsense that was, scrambling for childcare, putting their own lives and jobs on hold as the dreaded call came through from the school office: “I’m afraid there’s been a case in class, so we’re going to have to send the bubble home. Can you pop in to pick your child up?” For which the usual answer was: No, not really. Not immediately. And certainly not easily.

But it was much worse for the children themselves, blasted from classrooms to perch at home or drift about in parks they were meant to be shunning.

Their education had already been hugely disrupted – exams scrapped, university applications upended. Now they were missing out on so much more – the year end plays and sports days, the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme expeditions, and all the simple yet significant rites of passage that mark the transition from one academic year to another.

Or the end of school altogether. Many left education without saying a proper goodbye to their teachers or classmates.

Surely, we thought as all this was unfolding, there must be a better solution than draconian isolation rules which, though drafted the summer of last year, were somehow still deemed valid for this, as though all our acquired knowledge of vaccines, treatments and tests has counted for nothing? This Government has proved itself more than capable of policy U-turns. So why, when it came to children, who, being largely unaffected by Covid, had least to gain and most to lose from rigid quarantine diktats, was it so wedded to rules which made no sense to parents and now turn out to have been as unnecessary as they were destructive?

These are the questions raised by the large Oxford University study which compared the current system of sending home whole “bubbles” after a Covid case with the alternative strategy of keeping the bubble in school and testing the remaining, unaffected, pupils each day.

Two findings from the study in particular will feel particularly galling for those who have long been crying out for a better system. First, it turns out, under the existing system, almost 99 per cent of children sent home for 10 days did not go on to develop Covid themselves. Secondly, even more infuriatingly, it turns out that keeping children in school and testing them daily is just as good as isolation, it is actually better – leading to 4 per cent fewer cases.

So how did we end up doggedly staying with a system that punished children to protect adults, and kept on punishing them even as those adults were protected by vaccines, and tests were available to do things better?

The answer seems to lie way back last year, with the lurch to lockdown that left so many, apparently including the Government, unprepared. As schools and parents reeled and repositioned to provide a remote education for children at home, it became clear that the effect on families and the nation was severe. Children’s learning suffered, as did parents’ careers. Soon, getting children back to school and keeping them there became a matter of political urgency. Last summer, the prime minister described it as a “national priority” and a “moral duty”.

But there was a problem. Schools could not accommodate pupils and maintain social distancing. So the “bubble” system was introduced, first in primary schools in the summer term of 2020, then in secondaries at the start of the school year in September.

At first, it seemed to work. As the Alpha (Kent) variant emerged throughout the autumn term and propelled the nation into a second national lockdown in November, schools were able to keep going. Overall attendance was 86 per cent, considered “relatively high” in a House of Commons report. The burden was spread across regions, at different times. The North West and Midlands suffered badly in the first half of term; London was largely spared. By the end of term, the reverse was true. By the new year, though, the bubble system, designed to cope with regional flare-ups of the original Covid variant, was buckling. Schools were closed again from January to March during Lockdown 3. When they did reopen, however, it was clear who the Government was thinking about – and it wasn’t primarily the welfare of children. Mask wearing was imposed on secondary school pupils – except that while the government had consulted with a host of “stakeholders” including the large trade union, Unison, other unions and local authorities, the measure was never assessed for negative health impacts on children themselves. Schoolchildren, voiceless in the debate about their educational fates, became faceless, too.

In March, millions of tests were shipped to schools. Secondary pupils would be given three tests at school when they returned then test twice a week at home afterwards. Sage experts said such testing would be “a game-changer”.

But it never really worked. To take a test and declare yourself positive was to deprive yourself of school and throw your family into chaos. There are 3.5m secondary school children in England. By mid-june, just 713,000 tests were being recorded each week – a tenth of the required figure (though more may have been done and not logged). As Delta ripped through the country, it rapidly became clear that the bubble system was out of date and in freefall. Yet there was nothing to replace it, nothing to take into account the success of the vaccination programme and the dramatic effect it had on the risk of transmission in multi-generational households, for example, between granny and grandchild.

Despite the bubble system failings, the same unions and local authorities that the Government had consulted about the mask enforcement were unwilling to abolish it without a coherent backup plan.

But coherent backup plan came there none. Parents began taking matters into their own hands. Sick of multiple isolations ruining term time, many determined not to let it ruin the holidays, too, withdrawing their children from the last days of school to prevent their getaways becoming the latest victim of the pingdemic.

Even the happy implications for schools of this week’s Oxford study seem uselessly out of sync with the national response – too late to be of any use this summer term; superseded by other national edicts for next. Under-18s, as the new Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced earlier this month, will no longer have to isolate from August 16 if they are pinged. That’s presuming that the Government sticks to its unlocking promises, which looks less likely by the day.

If it doesn’t, the countdown to the new school year will be freighted with even more uncertainty than the last – which is extraordinary, given that in August 2020 vaccines were a dream, rather than today’s reality.

But the study shouldn’t go to waste. It should stand as a reminder that we can treat children far better than we have, that properly weighing the impact on their education and social lives and mental and physical health means not sending them home for a one-in-100 chance of catching a disease that mostly doesn’t affect them. That may have made sense at the outbreak – but by September, all adults will have been offered a double jab and the vulnerable boosters. Which grandparent will want to see their grandchildren’s prospects torn apart again on that basis? Next term, we have a chance finally to put our children first. The Government should take it.