Statement sent to Derby Telegraph re school opening 14th May 2020

I don’t know any heads who aren’t concerned about being asked to reopen on 1^st June. The crisis has caused all employers to be even more acutely aware of their responsibilities for the health and wellbeing not just of their staff and students but also the communities that schools serve. As I and every other educator I know has said again and again, of course we want to be back working with our students; it is the reason we do what we do. But it cannot come at the cost of people’s lives. NEU members across Derby are meeting and discussing our concerns on a regular basis and we encourage concerned members to get in touch with their school reps or local officers to get help and advice.

The NEU is taking a firm line on school reopening, as I am sure you will have seen elsewhere in the press. I fully support this position, which is that when schools do reopen it must be in such a way that we do not cause a further deadly rise in infections. If we cannot open schools without killing people, we should not be doing it.

In his statement on Sunday, the Prime Minister announced 1^st June as an aspirational date, and we hold him to that. Unfortunately, the guidance that has subsequently come out from the government and from the Department for Education gives us little confidence that if a reopening were to be attempted from 1^st June that it could be done safely. I have spent some time going through the Plan to Rebuild document and the Actions for Education and Childcare Settings document and much of what is in there is alarming. The Plan to Rebuild states that the government hopes to be able to conduct 200,000 daily tests for Covid-19 nationwide by May 31^st. Clearly if that is the total national capacity then testing is not going to be routine at schools. In fact there is no assurance whatsoever in the government guidance that there will be robust testing or PPE available in schools by June 1^st. Without this, the government is preparing for many more to transmit the virus and get ill.

In one way I agree with the government’s documents – I have seen no evidence that children will be able to adequately social distance in schools, and the government has clearly also decided that it isn’t practical. Yet despite this tacit admission, they ask us to believe that it will be safe to reopen schools, knowing that when an outbreak occurs no one will be in a position to track or trace it for weeks after the initial infections begin.

Further worrying parts of the guidance include that children who live with those in ‘clinically vulnerable’ categories – including elderly people, pregnant people and those with asthma, should attend school, despite the high risk that would obviously create. If someone develops symptoms of Covid-19 they are to be sent home – but not those they have been working with. All of this looks like a recipe for disaster to me, and I am glad that the NEU at a national level is taking a strong lead in challenging these problems.

The NEU has five clear tests that we feel must be met to have confidence that schools are safe to reopen:

1. Much lower numbers of Covid-19 cases
2. A national plan for social distancing
3. Testing, testing, testing!
4. Whole school strategy
5. Protection for the vulnerable

I am also mindful that once more students are in schools, more parents and carers will be encouraged or induced back to work. So once an infection that is unlikely to be detected quickly does begin to spread through a school it is also likely to spread through more workplaces.

At the end of the day, what concerns me is that the government has not given us any confidence that it can meet all of the five tests, and instead is trying to put the burden onto local authorities and headteachers to create safe conditions in individual schools, which completely ignores the fact that without addressing the bigger problems at national level no school can be a safe environment, whatever the risk assessment says. We look forward to working with schools to help welcome our students back safely. But until the national situation is addressed, any attempt to devise a safe school risk assessment is like placing wallpaper over a hole in the ground and asking people to walk over it.