Union snubs jabs for teachers
Hardline bosses accused of waging class war as they pour cold water on top schools’ drive to vaccinate 1million staff in half- term break
A HARDLINE teaching union last night turned its back on a bold plan to vaccinate the country’s entire classroom staff and get pupils back to school in weeks.
The Left-wing National Education Union dismissed the ambitious scheme to vaccinate one million teachers during a seven-day window next month, suggesting it would continue to oppose the reopening of classrooms even if school staff were prioritised for jabs.
Last night, an education expert accused the NEU, the UK’s largest teaching union with 450,000 members, of refusing to back the plan because it had been masterminded by top private schools and academies.
Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment
‘The NEU are looking for every reason to keep schools closed’
Research at the University of Buckingham, said: ‘What may have triggered this reaction from the NEU is the offer came from the independent school sector and academies.
‘Both are anathema to the NEU as a political organisation – the academies because they run schools outside of local authority control.’
This newspaper last week revealed how a coalition of leading private and state schools had made an extraordinary offer to vaccinate all of England’s teachers and education staff during a half-term blitz next month.
Under the emergency scheme, 150 independent schools and state academies would become vaccination hubs, with medically trained staff inoculating school workers for 16 hours a day.
St Paul’s School in London, Rugby in Warwickshire and St Peter’s in York are among those to volunteer to become vaccination centres.
The blueprint won the support of
Labour leader Keir Starmer who urged Boris Johnson to prioritise the vaccination of teachers.
Writing in today’s Mail on Sunday, Sir Keir said: ‘Across the country, parents are doing their best but there is no substitute for face-toface learning... I believe we can take a further step towards reopening our schools by getting our teachers and school staff vaccinated as soon as possible.’ His intervention came as: More than 108,000 parents signed a petition urging Ministers to back the plan;
Sir Richard Sykes, the ex-boss of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, supported calls for teachers to be vaccinated as a priority next month;
Historian Sir Anthony Seldon, f ormer Master of Wellington College, a £41,580-a-year private school, warned it will take a decade for Britain to recover from the damage school closures are causing to education and mental health;
One in five parents is unhappy with the online lessons provided by their child’s primary school in lockdown, a survey revealed.
The drive to vaccinate teachers in half term has been spearheaded by the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represent nearly 300 private schools; Cognita, a group of 40 private schools; and the Academy Enterprise Trust and Ormiston Academies Trust, which together sponsor almost 100 state-funded schools.
A petition on the Change.org website urging the Government to implement their plan has attracted more than 108,000 supporters, while Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis academy trust, which boasts 53 state schools, said the scheme was a ‘really good solution’.
But in a statement to the MoS, Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the NEU, said: ‘We think that putting teachers and sup
port staff through a vaccination programme with some priority is a good move, but we’ve never said when that should happen and although that would protect teachers and support staff and make them more confident about being in schools, it won’t stop community transmission.’
She also claimed that by December secondary school pupils ‘were the most infected age group, and primary pupils the second most infected ’ and that schools must be made ‘Covid-secure’ to prevent the spread of the virus.
Public Health England said that Dr Bousted’s claims ‘don’t correspond to our data’.
Weekly monitoring reports show that throughout last month the highest number of positive cases were found among 20- to 29-yearolds and then 30- to 39-year-olds.
Separate evidence gathered by PHE during the autumn term suggests transmission rates in primary schools is ‘extremely low and outbreaks are rare’.
The NEU said it based its figures on Department for Education data and ‘cannot be held responsible for the DfE releasing inaccurate information’.
Robin Bevan, president of the NEU and headteacher of Southend High School for Boys, criticised Mr Starmer’s support for the plan, last week accusing the leader of joining a ‘bandwagon’.
Writing on Twitter, he said: ‘As media-amplified voices clamour for schools to resume full attendance: let’s remember 10 Downing Street reverted to “remote learning” to reduce community viral transmission. Until that happens, ALL other concerns must be considered marginal. That’s it.’ But the NEU’s stance has horrified many parents juggling work with home schooling.
‘ They do not understand the pressure on parents,’ a 50-year-old mother- of- two in North Wales told the MoS. ‘It is just utterly exhausting and brings a level of mental and emotional stress that is not sustainable.’
Chris McGovern, a former education policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher and chairman of the Campaign For Real Education, said: ‘ The National Education Union should rename itself the Non Education Union.
‘ Clearly they are looking for every reason they can find to keep the schools closed.’
Sir Richard Sykes, who led a review of the Government’s Vaccines Taskforce last month, said there is a ‘very, very good case’ for vaccinating teachers once NHS staff, those over 70 and the extremely vulnerable are inoculated in mid- February. ‘ Young
‘They do not understand the pressures on parents’
people are the future, and if we don’t get them back to school and interacting with each other and learning and developing this is also a very serious problem.’
Sir Anthony Seldon, 67, said he would ‘willingly give up my vacci ne f or a t eacher’, adding: ‘Already it will take ten years to recover from this damage to the education and mental health of young people.’
Sally- Anne Huang, the High Master of St Paul’s who tested positive for Covid last month, said vaccinating teachers would help keep ‘schools running smoothly’ by reducing teacher absences. ‘It’s five weeks since my positive Covid test and I’m still not able to work a full day,’ she tweeted.
The NEU last night said it wants schools to open but ‘when it is safe to do so’. A spokesman added that Professor Smithers’s comments do not reflect its position on private schools or academies.
The NEC has thousands of members in independent schools and its view on the oversight of academies ‘has no bearing’ on its position on vaccinations, she added.