I suppose schools could just about manage in the short term with limited numbers of students in, others doing home learning somehow, no mixing of classes (although I don’t know how that would work for streamed classes at secondary?), work something out for primary and nursery dropoff and pickup.
But even if it is all possible in the short term it’s surely not going to be practical to do that indefinitely. If we’re looking at 12+ months before a vaccine that most people can get then we surely can’t just suspend most education until then. Not to mention how on Earth you’d manage to socially distance at nursery and younger primary, what it would do to children to be ‘learning’ in an environment where they’re told not to touch and not to play together, what would happen to play-based learning at primary and practical subjects at secondary, how are children of any age supposed to manage well without properly socialising with peers for so long?
I suppose they’ll just have to put in measures in short term with a plan to gradually return schools to basically normal over a few months while keeping the virus spread in check enough that schools aren’t high risk. I know we can’t allow hundreds of thousands to die unnecessarily, but we can’t throw the education and social/emotional wellbeing of all the under-18s under a bus either.