AIBU to want the UK to follow France and SPain with regards to school openings

[whacks493]

Just read on the BBC that in France and Spain(for the majority of schools) they will start in September when the new school year starts.

This would be a massive relief to me and reduce the worry over my son catching covid-19 at school.

DSis has no such information, she is DH of a primary.

As baby said there is so much already going on in schools, so much upheaval, they won't be able to go back to anything like normal for quite a while. And have any number of plans being constantly updated to try to get organised for what we may come.

We live in France and in fact my dc's classes resume 25 May. Between now and then there is a lot of facetime organised between small groups of students and the teacher, and they are continuing to send through work. I am not sure if parents have the option of keeping children at home for longer.

We live in an area with lots of outside space and very family orientated and I think young people here are faring better than elsewhere, I get that impression from emails anyway, but there is another thread about MH in children to do with lockdown and I think personally it would be better for there be things organised by schools for small groups before the summer, with homemade face masks and lots of organised handwashing, for those who want to participate, even if school work continues to be done at home.

I meant Spain and Italy, not France. The article is here on the BBC www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52459034

YABU for getting the facts wrong in the first place.

I thought France said they were going to start re-opening schools in mid May?

Primary and nursery will start to open on 11 May, with reduced class sizes, social distancing etc.

Why do people spout stuff like this as if social distancing is in ANY way possible in schools? If the government decide to send schools back they at least shouldn’t be allowed to pretend it’s possible to limit the spread of anything contagious in a school.

You need to get MN to edit your misleading title then OP

Now we’ve been told it’s ‘inconceivable’ that schools will go back without social distancing by Raab, surely that in turn means it’s inconceivable that they’ll go back any time soon? As social distancing is impossible in schools.
Not sure why September will be any better than June in that case though.

The idea that you can socially distance with young kids is a non-starter.
Our school has not many children because we are so rural. But it is a tiny building. There is no way we could have our normal number of children in and keep them distant. About a third of the children in, and we could possibly physically manage it. Although I don’t know how we help the children from 2 m away.
Behaviourally. Not a chance. When your working day already includes the sentence “Don’t lick his face, he doesn’t like it” then the idea that kids will always remember to stay 2m away from each other is a joke. And we only have 1 set of toilets for the whole school. We can’t clean them between each use, and much as we remind kids to wash their hands they don’t a lot of the time.

I want to go back to work. I love my job and there are a couple of kids in my class I am really worried about, children I’d worked hard on building a relationship with so I could be a safe person for them. They just don’t quite meet the criteria for vulnerable. My own Dd is Year 6 and gutted she is losing her last term of school with her friends, who are all going to other secondaries.

But we need to be realistic and think about the practicalities of returning. We cannot do social distancing. So how does that work? Are we saying it doesn’t matter? Or do we operate in a rota system to ensure few enough children are in both for reduced staff numbers to safely supervise but also to ensure we have enough physical space around the building? Do you want your children in every other week?

Regardless of when schools open again they will not stay open long term. As cases of COVID rise, stricter measures will come back in to try to reduce the R rate. Then as things calm down with respect to infections, more activities like schools will re-open. There is no chance, baring a vaccine or cure, that schools will remain open as usual during the next academic year.

@whacks493 Spain finishes on the 18th June Italy on the 6th. Scotland is the 24th june

unlike England

If our holidays started on those dates I have no doubt it would be September. They don’t my CC term dates end on the 22nd July

I’m hoping schools will open in June for my teens with a combination of part time physical time in school as well as continued home learning. I see it as so important to their MH to regain some time away from home with peers and also to get a bit more direction from teachers on home learning. They’re getting work sent home aimed at the entire year group but not had any contact personally from school or anything differentiated (ds is year 10 so he needs this in some subject that he finds easier).
They had numerous staff off with covid symptoms prior to school shutting, so hopefully many of them have already had it.

I am intrigued why a lot of people would be happy with September, when those who get infected around that time will be creeping into flu season by the time they are poorly. Saying that in theory I guess less people should catch flu if not out and about as much, but then again perhaps that will be counteracted by many vulnerable people not being able to access the flu jab if it comes to that. Either way, just because it's a new school year, intrigued why that will somehow be safer?

YABU for getting the facts wrong in the first place

This.
And I wish the government would actually start talking to us and managing people’s expectations about an exit strategy because until they do, all these armchair epidemiologists and people who seem to think they’re in the know more than others will continue to speculate around possible opening dates... which others then take as gospel.

I’ve seen so many people declaring - not even qualifying the statement that it’s their opinion - that ‘schools won’t open until September’ and to them I would say... how the fuck do you know? Stop spreading misinformation, please. Stick to facts.

Children will be the very last group to get vaccinated so people need to come to terms with the fact they cannot keep them locked up for years.

Agree Staticelle. My young DC are constantly snotty/coughing from october to February anyway, and if people are starting to go out and about more getting their children to school then there will also be a resurgence in seasonal flu at the same time. Double whammy.
I’ve seen people say that by September we’ll have treatments etc... what if we don’t? Do we keep them off until the following year? Until flu season is over? Until a vaccine?

Because Covid19 will have disappeared by September? Whether they go back in June, September or next year they are still going to be at risk of catching it. Its never going to go away. Not even if there is an available vaccine. In the same way thousands die each year of flu and other such virus's despite there being vaccines available. The sooner we all wake up to the reality of the situation and accept the inevitable (that for the majority of us it will be an illness that we recover from) the sooner some semblance of normality can resume.

@wakeupitsabeautifulmorning what facts do you have to back that up. Is this was the government have said ?

Pennylane I completely agree with you.

Widespread testing will have additional impact - not just on the exit strategy but in understanding the virus properly.
For example, we currently ace no real way of knowing how many are asymptomatic because we aren’t testing huge numbers.
Various data from around the world suggests that it could be as high as 75%, but as low as 5%
If it is in the higher region, many many more f us could have had it than originally thought. Meaning many may have immunity already.

It was already confirmed the first Covid death happened in the US weeks before they thought it did. I read an article in the British medical journal about the fact that many believe it has been circulating for longer than originally believed. If any of this turns out to be true, then why lockdown for that long??

Children will be the very last group to get vaccinated so people need to come to terms with the fact they cannot keep them locked up for years.

Surely if vulnerable people are vaccinated before children they would be protected from anything the D.C. might pick up though. So there is logic re a vaccine in there somewhere.

To be clear, the French PM said very explicitly yesterday that they are going to be collating as much data as possible on infection rates and that for now the plan is for schools to go back but if that is deemed inadvisable, the plan will change.

And it's on a purely voluntary basis.

(I do realise that apparently the thread is about Italy, not France. They are easily confused. Almost as easily as England and the UK.)

We can't keep children, who have a vanishingly low risk from covid at population level, off school for some indefinite period. If individual parents want to keep their own children at home that is up to them but we are hugely damaging many children's futures the longer this goes on.

Can't see it before September anyway and I'd be glad. The longer they are closed the better for me.

If you rely on school for childcare, are your hours exactly school hours or do you have someone else pick your children up? Can that continue? Can they go to someone else’s house for a couple of hours while you finish work? Do they go to grandparents houses?
Or will all after school clubs bounce back as normal? Will outside providers be able to send staff into schools? Or is this something else that an already reduced teaching staff will have to provide as an extra?

It’s not impossible but people need to have answers to these questions. Saying “My kids are ready to go back and I’m not worried if they catch it, they won’t suffer as much, and we can’t keep them off forever” doesn’t answer any of the questions.

Do you think they will need to socially distance still? If so, how? I terms of behaviour of kids and physical space in the building.
Are you looking for child care or education? How does child care work if your hours don’t fit school hours?
If it’s education as normal you want, what happens if there aren’t the staff available?
Would you be happy for your children to be in school on a rota, to accommodate some of the above issues?
What happens on the week your child isn’t in school? How do teachers stand in front of a class, and plan for that, while also being available online for the other 50%?
Do vulnerable children just not get to go back to school? (I mean vulnerable in terms of health). If the others all go back and life resumes ‘as normal’ (allowing for not as many staff), what happens if your child is at risk from Covid? Do you just not send them and they miss their education while everyone else carries on?
What about the SeN child who needs a 1 to 1 who can’t come in? Do we let that child just flounder, or throw things and run out of the classroom, because we just don’t have the adults?

We have to answer these questions, and know how we are going to deal with these situations. It is not going to be a ‘return to normality’ for your children, even if your school is open.

This is not about childcare. School is not childcare. It’s about the welfare of children and their mental health and well-being. They need to get back out there for their sake.