Schools, Coronavirus and Wider Reopening - 1 Week Later

Full text of statement sent to Derby Telegraph Sunday 17th May 2020

It has now been a week since the alarming and confusing announcement by the Prime Minister that he wanted schools to begin wider opening to students as of 1^st June. This was alarming because neither the general public nor the education professions had seen any evidence that it would be safe for our communities to begin a significant increase in close social interaction that schools necessarily create, and because there had been no discussion or planning to put in place the conditions for a safe reopening. It was confusing within education because there had been absolutely no indications from the Department for Education before last Sunday’s announcement that such an early reopening was on the cards, and the other three nations in the UK were being much more cautious about when a safe reopening could happen.

It is important to take a brief look at how we got where we are, but before doing that the most important thing is to emphasise the NEU’s advice to our members, a view which is shared by all our sister unions in education.

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• Schools cannot individually decide that it is safe to reopen in the face of a worldwide pandemic that is not under control in this country. Schools cannot isolate themselves from the national situation. This is why we, along with the British Medical Association, think that the government needs to demonstrate that it has met our five tests before it can be safe for the children in our communities to return to school. The five tests are reasonable and can all be met if there is the political will to do so:

1.       A much lower number of Covid-19 cases

2.       A national plan for social distancing

3.       Comprehensive testing for children and staff

4.       Protocols for isolating whole schools when a case occurs

5.       Protection for the vulnerable

• Unless the five tests are met, opening the schools to larger numbers of students will cause more people to die. While the elderly, those with pre-existing medical conditions and especially the poorest and those from ethnic minorities are most at risk of death from the virus, anyone can get it and anyone can die from it.
• We know that legislation exists to protect workers and if schools are not safe we will support members who choose to use this.

As of Sunday night, headteachers, local authorities and multi-academy trusts were all left trying to work out how they could do the impossible, a position the government should not have put them in. 

This announcement was made in in the context of:

• the UK having the highest number of coronavirus-related deaths in Europe,
• daily deaths from Covid-19 still in the high hundreds,
• an R that was around 0.9,
• no tracking and tracing in place,
• no plans for safe social distancing, no agreement on even what appropriate PPE would be, let alone confidence that it could be distributed,
• government reluctance to publish the scientific advice upon which they were apparently making their decisions
• no prior discussions with the unions about how to achieve safe reopening.

Anyone who has spoken with me this week will feel I must be a stuck record at this point, but I feel it must be repeated. We educators are desperate to get back into schools and start working with children again. Education is what we love. But none of us signed up to contaminate our communities with a deadly virus, one which brutally exposes the inequalities in our society and kills the most vulnerable, the poorest and most discriminated against in the highest proportions. 

In the wake of the Prime Minister’s announcement last Sunday, a flurry of hastily put-together advice came out from the government. What we saw when we read them made us even more concerned. It was clear from the advice that there was no prospect of tracking and tracing being in place by 1^st June, and uniquely in Europe the government was not requiring social distancing in schools at all. There were many other pieces of advice in the government publications that would clearly make it more likely that the virus would not only be undetected when it entered school populations but would help to transmit it further. Advising schools that children who lived with clinically vulnerable people should attend school, for example.

As the  week went on it became more and more clear just how deadly wider reopening of schools at the moment would be, when the ONS published on the 14^th May data that shows children have the same rates of infection as the adult population, and government scientific advice was finally published to show that there was little to no evidence to suggest children are less infectious than adults. Towards the end of the week, the awful news broke that a Derby primary was going to have to close completely after two students tested positive for the virus. These are the terrible times in which we now live, and we can only imagine what would happen were schools to begin wider reopening at the moment.

We began to see some recognition of the dangers posed by a wider reopening on 1^st June by the government as we got towards the weekend. It was positive to see the government finally release some of its scientific advice, although the fact that their chief advisors had not been involved in the 1^st June proposal does not really support the government’s position. More significantly, the Education Secretary yesterday repeatedly emphasized that the 1^st June reopening will only be possible if the government’s five tests are met. This is welcome, as it has not been the tone coming out of government since the announcement last Sunday. 

More welcome are the decisions by an increasing number of local authorities from Liverpool to Brighton to make a clear statement that wider reopening cannot be achieved successfully at the moment, and therefore their schools will not reopen on 1^st June. We have seen many schools in Derby taking similar positions. What is needed from politicians now is an acknowledgement that this date will not be achievable safely and to start making progress towards a real national plan that will allow us to work with more of our students again in the reasonable belief that by doing so we will not be putting them, us, or loved ones in any more danger than necessary. 

Speaking personally, I have been asked by the Department for Education over the last ten years to follow policies and curricula which I strongly believe are damaging to children, but I have tried to do my job professionally and put the children in front of me first. If I am being asked to actively contribute to people’s deaths, that is a step too far for me and for my colleagues.