It is definitely worth reading the PHE paper and the accompanying data file.
My DS3 will be starting Y13 so I should declare a strong interest and desire for schools to fully re-open, and hopefully stay that may.
However:
1,646,00 kids in school then
If only that had been the case. The number relates to all educational settings and the 1.6m relates to June 30th. The mean was the study period 1st to 30th June was 1.04m.
I have also struggled to reconcile the numbers. I've included the table from the data file accompanying the report showing attendance each day. I've added columns for Primary year groups and Secondary Year Groups totals (anything I've added is in blue font). The pre-school column is not shown for every day.
PHE also included a handy chart relating to the data in their table. I've included that plus alongside it the same graph using the same data but which I have changed to be a stacked column.
I'm not sure how on 30th June we get to 1.64m, or indeed the equivalent figure on any other day in June. Taking June 1st as an example:
Early years settings 108,000 DCs
Primary Schools 213,000
Secondary Schools 0
Adding these three groupings gives me 321,000 which matches the data that PHE have used for the chart; but the children attending column in the PHE table shows a figure of 475,000. So the balance of 154,000 is made up of????????
I'm missing something so if anyone can help me out here that would be good.
From a media perspective the report has clearly been selectively quoted from. So a quote I've picked out from it is as follows:
There are, however, important limitations when considering the generalisability of our findings. Educational settings opened after national lockdown when SARS-CoV-2 incidence was low and only in regions with low community transmission. Settings that opened had stringent social distancing and infection control measures in please and, in addition to school attendance not being mandatory, there were strict protocols for class and bubble sizes, which may not be achievable when schools opening fully in the next academic year (and indeed, updated schools guidance now recognises that bubble size may need to be increased from September to ensure that a full range of activities is feasible). Only 1.6 million of the 8.9 million students nationally attended any educational setting during the summer mini-term.20 Additionally, very few secondary schools opened (and those that did, did so with small class sizes) during the summer mini-term and our results, therefore, are not likely to be generalisable to secondary schools, especially since the risk of infection, disease and transmission is likely to be higher in older than younger children. Moreover, each situation was risk-assessed on a case-by-case basis and only a few settings were selected for wider testing
As that quote also makes clear less than 20% of DCs (1.6m out of 8.9m) were at school during the period of analysis.
This is the direct link to the report and data file www.gov.uk/government/publications/sars-cov-2-infection-and-transmission-in-educational-settings
The figures and table I have referred to above are tab figure_S2 in the data file