MNHQ here - got a question about children returning to schools for the Independent SAGE?

[BojanaMumsnet]

Hello

We thought you might be interested in an event the Independent SAGE is running tomorrow (Friday 22 May) at 12pm - this will be a live public consultation, discussing whether schools should start to reopen on 1 June.

The former Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir David King is Chair of the Independent SAGE, whose aim they say is to: “provide robust, independent advice to HM Government with the purpose of helping the UK navigate COVID-19 whilst minimising fatalities”. You can find out more about what they do here and who the committee members are here.

This discussion will be hosted by Dr Michael Mosley and the panel of experts will take questions from a broad range of parties, including teachers, union reps, governors, and the general public.

If you’d like to share your questions, you can do so by emailing [email protected] or by sending them to @independentSAGE on Twitter.

If you’d like to put your question to the experts in person via Zoom, then please get in touch with them via the email or Twitter account above.

You can also watch the event live on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Comments on YouTube will also be sent to the scientists on the panel.

Tomorrow’s event will feed into the committee’s full report which will be presented to the government.

Hope this sounds like an interesting opportunity and thanks for reading!

MNHQ

I have been reading criticism of the ‘independent’ safe group online, saying it’s a ‘leftie’ organisation just wanting to keep schools closed. Yet the opposite could be said of the ‘actual’ sage group-in that they are paid by the Right wing government to back up their policy of opening schools ASAP.

Is there truly independent scientific advice on this? Are they both right? Is it true, the actual sage advice Re schools is very out of date?

If we are in any doubt about opening schools, wouldn’t it be better to wait a few weeks-see how the track, trace and isolate (are we still doing that bit??) goes, rather than send schools back the same day the deadline is for it being up and running? We have no idea if it’ll even work?!

will it be "safe" to send children back to school as normal (ie 30 to a class, all years in, 5 days a week) by September?

The blended learning that is being suggested is a terrible idea and would just cause a drop in attainment, poverty and further inequality for women.

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all the questions - @Herculesupatree I have emailed the questions over.

You can watch the

And just FYI here's a news story from this morning on the Independent SAGE committee's warning that 1 June is too early to reopen schools in England.

Apologies, knobchops. I was in a rush this morning and didn't qualify my response with that I don't think key worker children are an exposure risk. Was just pointing out to pp that schools are doing what they can to keep children separate so if there are suspected cases they can isolate certain groups not the whole school. (This is potentially so they can keep offering key worker provision if a returning child from another group comes down with covid).

Thanks for forwarding the questions Bojana. Sounds like they already have made up their minds but at least the article talks about what could be done over the summer to help children. I'm about as far from Scotland as I can get but the way the Scottish government seemed to be prepared to throw children and working parents under the bus makes me furious

Thanks @MNHQ but feeling frustrated with the discussion- was watching on FB and it seemed to just end without any real evidence being presented. I sent in several questions about the science and nothing like those topics was discussed.
One real frustration is the constant use of words like small or tiny or low to describe the risk to our children. What I haven’t seen is the relative risk ie a normal healthy child in UK has an extremely low risk of death anyway so eg 100% increase in risk will still give them a low absolute risk overall but a high relative risk. This info doesn’t help parents - and teachers - make good decisions.
In layman’s terms if parents were told your child has as much chance of dying of Covid 19 as say being killed at home in an accident that would make sense to send your kids to school. Alternatively if parents were told their children were 100 times more likely to die from catching Covid 19, than from staying at home, then it would make sense to keep them at home. But no one seems to be even trying to work out this data.

It's back on Facebook now @NameChange2PostThis , I don't know why it stopped though! I moved onto YouTube

I'm very troubled by the terminology "Independent SAGE". This is an assortment of scientists who have decided to give the world their opinion, which would be great, however they are deliberately misleading the UK public by using a group name that they must be fully aware will be confused with the government group "Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)". Where it would usually be expected that there would be a range of opinions with agreement and disagreement on different topics, everything I have seen appears to be primarily this group providing opinions that will conflict with SAGE and lots of press statements to get headlines, with the scientific evidence taking a back seat. Taken altogether, I am very confused about their motives. I'm surprised that Mumsnet has given this group a platform without at least being clear about who they are, to prevent the inevitable confusion we can see above where posters think the questions are going to the government advisory group.