Pupils are victims of the SNP’s Covid rule shambles
WHAT, exactly, have Scottish school pupils done wrong to get the sort of treatment they’ve received from this SNP Government over Covid?
I mean there must be some form of misdemeanour to explain away the disproportionate, ill thought out, unfair shambles they have been subject to.
Leaving aside the disaster of last year’s exams and the results debacle that followed, ignoring the exams-but-not-exams farce this year, discounting the ‘blended learning solution’ leaving lockdown which saw some kids return to class for as little as one day a week, and setting to one side the horrific digital disparity that saw thousands of youngsters expected to learn online without the tablets promised to them to do so – this week’s announcement of ‘beyond Level 0’ restrictions have been spectacularly inept.
After massive confusion from first Nicola Sturgeon and then John Swinney regarding re-opening – whether masks need to be worn on a dancefloor or whether ‘vertical drinking’ is permitted at bars or not – Scotland’s clinical director, Professor Jason Leitch, was sent out to clarify what the new rules actually mean.
And here is where we are. Assemblies are not allowed in any Scottish school. But mass gatherings are permitted, including 50,000 people attending the TRNSMT festival.
School discos are banned, despite the amount of responsible supervision each one entails. But nightclubs are allowed to reopen from a minute past midnight, with all the alcohol and drunken behaviour they attract.
School plays continue to be forbidden, so no Romeo and Juliet in a school assembly hall where windows are able to be opened for ventilation.
Meanwhile, theatres are back, despite their auditoriums typically having no windows at all.
Pupils are barred from school changing rooms, despite the changing facilities at sports centres and gyms for adults having been open for months.
Finally, pupils sitting in class in rows, facing the same way and with windows open, are still required to wear face masks, while sweaty clubbers, energetically cutting a rug on the dancefloor in often poorly ventilated venues, can breathe all over each other without a face covering.
It makes a mockery of the idea that any of this is based on science or following best advice. Indeed, the SNP Government’s own advisory sub-group on education said in June that face coverings ‘should be removed in classrooms when possible’.
What’s the point of constituting an advisory group if, two months after they give you firm advice, you still haven’t taken it? Worse, making a proactive choice to disregard it, leaving children sitting in masks for hours to mitigate ‘risk’ while at the same time saying that drunken clubbers can go mask-free in perfect safety.
Similarly, the Scottish Wedding Industry Alliance tweeted in exasperation that the new rules meant wedding guests didn’t need to wear a mask while dancing, or at the drinks reception, or while enjoying canapés or any time they moved around and faced each other.
But the same guests at the same wedding would absolutely – under pain of law – be required to wear their masks during the ceremony, while seated and facing in the same direction. What a farce.
OF course, it’s not about the balance of risk. No one within the Scottish Government has weighed up whether using a changing room in a school carries more threat than using a changing room in a gym – in devising the rules for the rest of us, they haven’t thought about school children at all.
Once again pupils have been shunted to the back of the queue. Scotland’s pupils have missed out on so many experiences over the past 18 months, but still they are being denied experiences in schools that they’re allowed to do as soon as they take off their uniforms.
Scottish schools go back in a fortnight. It’s time that Ministers got their fingers out, stopped overlooking our youngest citizens and concentrated on providing a coherent set of rules that allows them to get back to some semblance of normality during the school day.
Until that happens, there’s not a chance children will fully catch up on what they’ve missed.