Pupils face the return of Covid measures, unions warn

HUNDREDS of schools across the country will be forced to reintroduce tougher Covid measures within weeks, teaching unions have claimed, as pupils begin to return to the classroom.

With many schools restarting this week, families have been warned to expect significant disruption to learning by the end of September owing to a rise in cases. The country’s largest education unions say that the removal of many of the mitigations in place in classrooms last year, including bubbles and face masks, will fuel the surge.

Some have also expressed concern that headteachers could come under pressure from parents to reimpose measures should large numbers of pupils test positive. However, the Government is insisting that the vaccination programme has helped turn the tide and there is a need to balance Covid measures against ensuring schools return to near normality.

Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “We have much higher prevalence now in the community than it was. So we’re going in with much higher rates of prevalence into schools where we are relying on one mitigation, which is lateral flow testing. My prediction is that very shortly we are going to see schools all over the country in their hundreds having to operate contingency frameworks. But what you’re doing there is shutting the stable door after the Covid horse has bolted.”

The Department for Education (DFE) has asked schools to conduct two on-site tests for every pupil at the start of term, with parents then asked to continue swabbing at home. Under the Dfe’s guidance, schools have also been told to consider moving classes and assemblies outdoors and step up cleaning and hygiene measures if five pupils and staff who have mixed closely test positive.

Last night a DFE spokesman said: “We have provided additional funding to cover exceptional costs such as staffing and cleaning that schools faced during the pandemic, and have invested directly in schemes such as £25 million to provide schools with carbon dioxide monitors to help improve ventilation.”

Schools return this week for the autumn term with uncertainty still hanging over the way classrooms will operate or whether exams are to be fully reinstated. Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, yesterday said that children would soon be “closer to the normality we have all been craving … free to chase a football around or hang out with friends”. But children have been doing that during the holidays. What they and their parents need to know is whether the classroom experience will be normal, which means no “bubbles”, no isolation when other pupils test positive, no masks. Indeed, a normal school life would have no testing either. We know that the virus affects children only mildly, so any mitigation procedures put in place are there to stop them spreading the contagion to adults. Since all of the latter have been offered vaccines, schools should just be allowed to function normally.

Yet Mr Williamson is hedging his bets. “It is important not to get too carried away with these new freedoms and throw caution to the wind,” he said in a newspaper article.

That means schools will need to continue to follow Covid precautions, with regular testing which Mr Williamson urged parents to ensure is carried out.

He said the “last thing” the Government wanted was for schools to be forced to close or for pupils to be sent home. But what is the purpose of the testing regime if it is not to take action when children are found to be asymptomatic carriers?

If the measures imposed in the recent past are not to be reintroduced, and schools kept open come what may, then why put children through the testing ritual at all?