Teachers/TAs - what can we do?

[Khara]

Ok - so as a primary school TA of a certain age (over 50) and overweight ( in the obese but not morbidly obese category) I am understandably nervous of going back to work next week in a newly tier 4 area.

My family, to whom I rant about these things, have said you need to stand up for yourself/do something. But what?

My dh says I need to complain to the Heath and safety executive. He says the risk-assessment provided by my school isn't worth the paper it's written on. (He works in the chemical industry and has been on courses about writing risk assessments.) Apparently it should include an actual numerically calculated risk. He has done some research and calculated my risk of death in the workplace as 1:400. The Health and Safety executive say that any risk lower than 1:1000000 is unacceptable.

Have any other teachers/TAs (especially in primary atm) considered actually complaining

[quote OverTheRubicon]**@cardibach* @FoxinaScarf* those figures, showing that teachers had the same rate of covid death as corporate managers, were from April 2020.www.google.com/amp/s/schoolsweek.co.uk/ons-figures-reveal-65-covid-related-deaths-in-education/amp/
Both schools and hairdressers closed from 23 March, but the rate for hairdressers, for example, was still far far above the rate for teachers. This was even though teachers had higher ongoing exposure as many stayed on to teach key worker and vulnerable children, and even though with an average age of 39 they are older than the average hairdressers, over 50% of
whom are 25-34 and many younger.

Given this, and given that it takes 5-14 days for symptoms to appear and that there was an average of 14 days from symptom onset to death for those who died in the first wave, it's fair to assume that the vast majority of the teachers (and hairdressers) who were shown in those figures contracted covid pre-lockdown. These figures are therefore likely to be indicative of real risk, though of course with small numbers.

As I said, I still believe that school staff have the right to safety, to better protection and priority vaccination. My DCs will be off for Jan in a hotspot area and I support that. BUT I also think that there's a subset of teachers on MN who show a worrying lack of basic maths when it comes to seeing the risk here. It's bad for people's mental health and it's bad for kids.[/quote]
Thank you for your sense talking x

HSE don’t say risk above 1 in 1000000 is unacceptable. This is the threshold between minimal and tolerable.
The threshold between tolerable and unacceptable could be as low as 1 in 1000 in some cases.

www.hse.gov.uk/risk/theory/r2p2.pdf