Pupils sent home in half of England's secondary schools

[herecomesthsun]

...which are of course supposed to be covid secure. Nice that the BBC is covering it,though.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-54614111

I've had a teaching assistant die of COVID today though.

@ForthPlace

But the kids are well no one is dying thank god

I've had a teaching assistant die of COVID today though.

Oh that is terrible news

Half of all schools have had at least 1 case in one week.

Is that what this means? It really isn't clear.

In primaries the problem seems mostly to be infected teachers. This week two classes in DDs primary were sent home for that reason

We have teaching staff who are positive this week and last. Those teaching staff are spread across school and most don't have close contact (or any real contact) with one another - different bubbles, different parts of school.
We have parents from the affected classes who have tested positive.
No children have yet tested positive - but they are little so are likely not going to be ill or show symptoms even if they are apparently.

Re positive results: 8 staff, several parents, no children.

Coincidence??

As you know, immunity does not appear to persist reliably, so this is not a good reason for wanting children to get infected.

I don't think that's right. As far as I know reinfection seems extremely unlikely. See e.g. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.24.20179457v2

Sorry no, it is "Almost half of secondary schools in England sent home one or more pupils because of Covid incidents last week, the latest attendance figures show."

Forthplace :( So sorry to hear this. It really worries me when posters comment on it not being a problem because kids don't get ill - they might not (some May) but plenty of staff could well get ill. Schools don't only include children - I think our government likes to ignore this fact too.

Half of all schools have had at least 1 case in one week.Is that what this means? It really isn't clear.

I don't think that is what it means. But you are right it isn't super clear.

[quote Remmy123]@Judashascomeintosomemoney so shouid we lock kids away and do home learning?? I don't think so[/quote]
You didn’t answer the question.

What do you think the school should do instead? Or better?

I think some sort of circuit breaker to get on top of cases to start with.
Then maybe blended learning until we get the r rate down with a priority for exam year students.
Or some more mitigation put in place for exam students rather than three extra weeks of study. Dd missed that already this term.

I think sending close contacts home is an issue. 3 children all tested positive who attended one class where first person tested positive. None of them sent home together and teacher still in school.

@Aragog

In primaries the problem seems mostly to be infected teachers. This week two classes in DDs primary were sent home for that reason

We have teaching staff who are positive this week and last. Those teaching staff are spread across school and most don't have close contact (or any real contact) with one another - different bubbles, different parts of school.
We have parents from the affected classes who have tested positive.
No children have yet tested positive - but they are little so are likely not going to be ill or show symptoms even if they are apparently.

Re positive results: 8 staff, several parents, no children.

Coincidence??

That is both fantastic and scary at the same time. Fantastic that children are not affected medically by the virus but scary that they can still carry and spread it like an adult does. We can't possibly stop education though so I'm not sure there is an answer to that conundrum.

I know Op, you want the choice to keep dc home and not deregister.

I do agree that there shouldn't be a penalty and should be more choice for parents and children.
But then, if that happened, I can also see the problem too. There maybe some parents not sending children in and won't supervise their learning either, and those children falls even more behind.

Also the pressure on teachers to create work for home as well as teaching at school.
I just don't really see any perfect solution for every case.

If the number of teachers infected is higher than the number of parents of children at that school I don't think it can be the children infecting the teachers can it?

The reason I’m asking is because I have experience of this.
There is a Year 13 in my DDs year who has tested positive. My daughter knows her and (now) knows she was unwell from Thursday of last week. She did not inform school on Thursday. She got her positive test result yesterday. Before school started this morning she had informed her closest contacts and friends, who themselves did not attend school from this morning. There were still a few that she had been unable to inform yesterday and so school sent them home as soon as they could this morning. One of them (admittedly no symptoms) has been in close contact with my daughter (and many others) in two subject lessons on both Friday and Monday.

No one in the wider school community, outside of the closest contacts, has been informed there has been a confirmed positive case. My daughter has not been officially informed by the school, only informally told by the mutual contact and by her form tutor. There has been no contact from the school to any other parents whatsoever. Some teachers of my DDs classes today were also unaware there had been a positive case. So, I only ‘know’ because I know.

Both myself and my husband are very vulnerable - husband due to age and a health issue that is a legacy of two bouts of cancer, me because of both asthma (on inhalers and steroids on the original gov list) and an autoimmune disease. We’re now on a two week half term, otherwise I would be thinking that I might choose to ask the DDs to stay home for a period. Except if I didn’t have the inside knowledge, I wouldn’t have been informed by the school, so I wouldn’t have had the tools to make an informed choice.

The school have done nothing wrong, they’ve been working hard to do their best. They were the first school in the county to have a COVID spot check last week, and they passed all risk assessments. It isn’t the schools fault that the pupil who tested positive didn’t inform them at the onset of symptoms (as they should have done), at which point their close contacts would have been isolated in school (rather than sent home) instead of mixing with a much wider group for a further two school days. Once it was known that there was a positive case, whose close contacts had had further close contacts themselves in the two subsequent school days, the wider group should have all been officially informed and asked to self isolate for 14 days. It isn’t the schools fault that only the initial close contacts have been informed, instead of the wider group, or that parents in general haven’t been informed there has been a positive case, because that is the decision of the designated Local Health Protection Team based on their Rapid Risk Assessment.

We are a Tier One area. Please don’t think that you will ‘know’ if there had been a positive case in your child’s school. If the people advising your school say there is no need to inform you, then you will not know.

From an infection control point of view, it is very worrying if contacts aren't being sent home,or if we have to pretend that teachers are always 2m from children when we know very well this isn't happening etc.

This is one of the reasons that I am losing faith in any kind of leadership and consistent policy in schools. And consequently losing my faith in how safe they are being. For me in my area children are not being sent home, and classes are not even informed often if there is a case in their class. That isn’t managing, it is ignoring.

And on the other side, whole years being sent home from one case, which is bound to happen regularly, is also not managing, it is making me think where is the medical overview in contact tracing of who the close contacts are in a meaningful way? Obviously no one knows.

[quote notevenat20]As you know, immunity does not appear to persist reliably, so this is not a good reason for wanting children to get infected.

I don't think that's right. As far as I know reinfection seems extremely unlikely. See e.g. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.24.20179457v2[/quote]
We don't know enough about the illness to fully understand the situation with re-infection.

Especially as we didn't have much testing to confirm infection in the initial stages.

However we do know re-infection can happen. There was scientific confirmation of re-infection within a short time frame of just 6 weeks in fact, by slightly different strains , with the second infection being symptomatically more severe www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30764-7/fulltext.

So immunity does not appear to persist reliably.

Therefore some sort of attachment to the woeful notion of persistent immunity would in itself not be a good reason for children to be exposed to covid.

What objection is there to this line of reasoning?

@ForthPlace

But the kids are well no one is dying thank god

I've had a teaching assistant die of COVID today though.

I'm really sorry. That's terrible.

We've had the whole of Y10 isolating for 2 weeks because of several positive cases. We've also had the whole of Y11 isolating for a (separate) two weeks this term.

We have at least one pupil in every class marked as awaiting a test result/isolating because of family member showing symptoms - generally at least two in each class.

We're in a low infection area, which is worrying. I suspect because teachers (and parents) are generally only aware, often in the very vaguest of ways, what is happening in their child's school the big picture is being obscured.

@ForthPlace

But the kids are well no one is dying thank god

I've had a teaching assistant die of COVID today though.

Very sorry for your loss there.

Notevenat20

I don't know the number of parents positive over the same time period but from what I can gather it is likely higher than 8.

One or two staff you can put down to outside factors, but 8 within a week and a half? Who aren't in close contact with one another due to bubble systems? And most of whom are being careful outside of school too?

Seems to me that there is only one likely place where this is spreading, but how?

Also very sorry to hear about the poor TA. How very very sad.

@pastandpresent

I know Op, you want the choice to keep dc home and not deregister.

I do agree that there shouldn't be a penalty and should be more choice for parents and children.
But then, if that happened, I can also see the problem too. There maybe some parents not sending children in and won't supervise their learning either, and those children falls even more behind.

Also the pressure on teachers to create work for home as well as teaching at school.
I just don't really see any perfect solution for every case.

A good compromise for everyone would be to allow home learning without fines with strict rules in place, main one being if your child isn't doing enough at home or struggling to maintain their grades because online learning doesnt suit all children school can request they return to the classroom and normal absence procedure and fines continue. At least give families the option, but I do know to allow this causes practicality issues for the teachers having to monitor and supply the home learning.

Ah, I've found the data.

"On Thursday 15 October, approximately 21% of state-funded schools said they had one or more pupils self-isolating who had been asked to do so due to potential contact with a case of coronavirus inside the school. This is 46% of state-funded secondaries and 16% of state-funded primaries."

So herecome's interpretation was correct. Covid cases in at least 46% of secondaries last week.

My daughter is a teacher. Confirmed case of coronovirus in her class. Child has been sent home plus immediate contacts but there are almost bound to be asymptomatic pupils they have missed.

She lives with us, so only a matter of time before it comes home to her elderly Grandad. Open Day is still going ahead.

There maybe some parents not sending children in and won't supervise their learning either, and those children falls even more behind. This is not a good reason to impose fines on parents who may get Covid, might get it severely and for long periods.There will be few parents who just keep their child at home because they want to, but won’t help them, most struggling parents want their child in school.

However the impact of a parent who is seriously ill over many months has huge emotional, mental and financial costs for that child.

I am being forced to take the risk of getting long covid (which may be 10% of those who get it, we don’t know yet, but a high enough %) which would impact on my child’s future massively (I do all their therapies, SN)

Funnily enough, both my children did very well academically in lock down. Both entered into various on line competitions and activities and did well, also keeping up very well with their school work.

There is an advantage to having 1 to 1 input from well educated parents.

We don;t want to homeschool indefinitely though, we like the schools, the kids are well settled in their schools, which suit them. We also can't do socialisation and PE etc as well as school can.

I don't understand why we aren't being positively encouraged to do the best and safest thing for our children, that would also take pressure off the state system, at a difficult time.

Unless the plan is actively to get rid of some vulnerable people?