@noblegiraffe
Insisting schools must stay open and listing issues with schools closing won't keep them open.
What will keep them open is low cases in the community, effective track and trace, and mitigation measures that will prevent the spread should the virus get into schools.
We haven't got any of those things, and the government spent the summer insisting that anyone who wanted the above was simply 'blocking the re-opening of schools' and campaign groups were shouting loudly that it was simply unthinkable that children might need to go back to school in any way different to completely normal.
People who wanted the above were insulted and smeared and told they were overreacting and lazy.
And now it's becoming obvious why we need those things, but it is too late. The testing system is fucked, the government spent the summer encouraging people into activities that increased cases, and six months have been wasted that could have been spent improving mitigation measures in schools.
And schools are closing. Partly or fully. There's an awful lot of children at home, unable to go to school right now because of this stupid, stupid, head in the sand approach.
Great post
noble.
This is not an academic exercise, we don't need perfect, peer reviewed publications before we can see that sending schools back without any of the mitigations recommended by WHO, Indie SAGE, Unicef and many many other scientific groups is CRAZY.
We KNOW that indoor, crowded environments where people are together without SD for long periods are the BEST way to spread covid-19. UK schools typify those environments.
And if we apply logic we know it will end in disaster as it already has for so many children.
If you want children to get a consistent education, sending schools back as they currently are in the UK is literally the worst thing you can do.
Children off isolating waiting for test and results, waiting for their siblings test and results, bubbles sent home, teachers sick. It's a shit show.
Teachers anxious, overworked, resentful of the way they're the only working group without protections of SD and/or masks.
The disruption of so many different children off at different times, trying to somehow deliver lessons with so many gaps in knowledge. Constantly chopping and changing how they're delivering the curriculum as colleagues go off sick, as bubbles close.
I wrote to my MP in June/July making it clear that SD school in small class sizes (plus masks where SD not possible) was the only way education would not be disrupted. I suggested using community spaces (as so many others have suggested and so many other countries have done - e.g. Italy). I predicted a lot of what's happened in that email. I'm not a genius, it was blindingly obvious this was going to happen. Indie Sage predicted it too.
Children in countries where they've given money to recruit TAs or secure extra space in the community (e.g. Italy) will have less disrupted education than the UK.
It's STRESSFUL for children for so many of their peers to be off not knowing if they've got coronavirus, wondering if they'll bring it home to their older / vulnerable parents. It's not a great education with all the disruption. Being in such big classes is just generally not good for covid-19 but also not that great anyway and at the bottom of the pile compared to many other European countries.
I'd have thought this would be the time that people actually held the government to account for their lack of investment in state education.