I don’t know what shops others on this thread are referring to but I live close to a local high street with chain supermarkets and pharmacies. All staff are wearing masks and gloves, all tills closed off with Perspex screens, strips on floor to indicate 2 metre distance, restrictions on numbers entering, where possible customers sent to self service tills to pay. Some, such as the pharmacy, requires that people queue outside, only one person at a time allowed inside and if for prescriptions wait outside and then take the medicine out of a plastic basket that is left outside the door. So, in my area teachers would be getting far less protection than these other workers, and be exposed to much higher, sustained viral shedding, and that is not something that I would personally support. All workers should be provided with safe working environments and if that doesn’t happen for teachers and school staff, I hope they do refuse to enter schools, the government clearly won’t sort out appropriate resources except if put under extreme pressure. I am so tired, not a teacher btw, of the number of posters who blame teachers for circumstances that are not of their making, instead of laying this at the feet of those who are responsible for an ill-thought-out policy i.e. our current government. If they want schools to re-open they should consult with educational bodies and agree a plan to minimise risks to staff and to children.
And Flaxmeadow of course it’s political, no government is infallible, not every government is making the same decisions about how to manage this crisis, and clearly some are doing a lot better than others in containing the virus, and the decisions that specific governments make will affect how the virus impacts on their citizens. Our government has presided over (and arguably contributed to) an appallingly high death rate, given out mixed-messages, lack of PPE, ignored briefings on pandemic preparedness, allowed the virus to run rampant in care homes, ordered ventilators from cronies rather than taking part in the EU scheme, spent too long dithering over lockdown despite what was happening elsewhere in Europe. All of which strongly suggests that they are far from well-organised or fully trustworthy. And all governments under a democracy should be held up to scrutiny by those they supposedly represent, or would you prefer a dictatorship where no-one questions anything? And as for teachers ‘doing their bit’ that sounds suspiciously like the type of sloganeering designed to manipulate people into doing things that are unsafe, also a political, albeit stale, approach btw! It reminds me of the ways in which WW1 commanders cajoled men into going over the top of the trenches to certain doom...Teachers should not be set up to be the contemporary equivalent of cannon fodder.