Schools in England should go back at Easter

[GinAndTonicOnIt]

I'm terrified that full return will result in increased transmissions. This will increase the chance of more mutations. Which increases the chance of a mutant that is resistant to the current vaccines.

Or just back with full wards, and yet another lockdown.

I loathe lockdown. I would give anything to wake up tomorrow and life be back to normal. But it's for this reason I think we should wait that extra bit longer. Get those rates right down and vaccines out, then have a return to school that won't result in another lockdown.....!

AIBU for thinking this? Am I wrong?

@BettyBoomerang

Absolutely agree, OP. 100%. I'm literally just spending the weekend anxiously waiting and hoping that they don't send all the kids back at once.

I also don't really agree that children have 'sacrificed' or 'suffered enough' or any of these other melodramatic things. It's heartbreaking that some have suffered. (It's also heartbreaking that some suffer in school due to bullying, learning difficulties etc.) It's been a massively unusual time that they'll remember and the education they've gained this year is different from the usual books and numbers education they'd have got. I don't feel worried about the vast majority of them, and think that they will be fine to wait out another few weeks to ensure that it really is a 'time in their lives' and not an ongoing multi-year saga, which really would be damaging.

I don't agree when people dismiss the need of children with posts like this, implying that if anything this has been a good thing.

It's not. Children have been unable to go to school for a disease that rarely makes them ill, and very rarely seriously ill or worse. They have been unable to go to school to protect others. If that's not a sacrifice then I don't know what is.

My children have suffered as a result of lockdown. Minimally compared to others thankfully, but it's not been a positive experience for them.

I accept that schools have had to be closed for some of the time. But let's call a spade a spade. The decisions that have been made have not been to protect children. The decisions that have been made have not been good for children.

@Totallyfedup1979

Agreed. I know so many people that have cracked this weekend and met up with family members, I know all sorts of people from all walks of life and this weekend seems to be where people have just said fuck it!!!

I just don’t care anymore. Not one little bit.

[quote SeldomFollowedIt]@Totallyfedup1979

Agreed. I know so many people that have cracked this weekend and met up with family members, I know all sorts of people from all walks of life and this weekend seems to be where people have just said fuck it!!!

I just don’t care anymore. Not one little bit.[/quote]
Exactly.

I don’t care anymore. I can’t wait for schools to open up. If they end up closing again, don’t care either. As long as for a few weeks I get some flipping freedom and can go see my family and friends.

I think it's a huge positive it's just a few weeks

I don't get the why bother it's only a few weeks - even a week would be worth doing.

Mine went to school an afternoon a week last summer and it was worth it.

[quote SpencerGregson]@BettyBoomerang

How about the children who missed out on the end of secondary or primary school last year? Pretty significant events, I'd say, and current GCSE/A Level students are already losing experiences that I had always viewed as rites of passage.

Or opportunities to forge friendships if new to a school which other children in school are doing (my Yr R child won't do Zoom calls anymore, seeing his friends in is upsetting him too much).

I don't think sacrifice is too strong a word at all (although I'm not one of the previous posters to use it).

[/quote]
Yes my child was one of those that missed a school milestone. I still don't think it's suffering - just something different. These are all structures that we build for ourselves. You talk about a 'rite of passage' - so we make new ones. Or we miss a rite of passage but have a life experience in its place. That's life! It's rich and interesting. Kids take their cues from us, so I absolutely refuse to catastrophise this. Most children are fine. I'm sorry that some are not, but some are not even when things are different. There are plenty of children who don't go to the 'prom' because they have no friends as they are too shy or bullied or traumatised by group learning. There are plenty who find it much easier to chat or learn online than in person because their voice gets heard and not shut down by the 'leaders of the pack'. It's sad in all cases where children are missing out, but that doesn't mean that the whole collective effort of an entire country and so many excess lost lives all needs to be chucked away for the sake of a few extra weeks.

I don’t care anymore. I can’t wait for schools to open up. If they end up closing again, don’t care either. As long as for a few weeks I get some flipping freedom and can go see my family and friends.

Wouldn't you rather wait and have a free life where you can see family and friends as much as you like?

If we open up too soon and have a vaccine escape, this could go on and on and on. A few weeks could buy us an awful lot.

@BettyBoomerang We will have to disagree, in that case.

But having seen the wide variation in the way my 4 DC (aged 5-13) are coping with the current circumstances, it is much more complex than being attributable to my approach.

The fact that only one of them has seen any of their peers since 18 December is a major factor in this. Extending the lockdown to post-Easter would increase that to a four-month period. To say nothing of the time they are missing with extended family.

Still, I'll tell them to buck up and embrace it.

Betty thinks if we wait just a few more weeks we can kiss goodbye to covid forever.

Deluded. Irrespective of waiting or not, covid is here to stay. In which case doesn’t make a huge difference on when they return, and they need to go back. There WILL be covid variants. Viruses mutate. Shit happens. They’ll tweak the vaccine if needs be. All this hysterical waiting is catastrophic in itself.

I want them back from 8th. Numbers continue to come down vaccinations go up. Children need to be with other children.

@BettyBoomerang

I don’t care anymore. I can’t wait for schools to open up. If they end up closing again, don’t care either. As long as for a few weeks I get some flipping freedom and can go see my family and friends.

Wouldn't you rather wait and have a free life where you can see family and friends as much as you like?

If we open up too soon and have a vaccine escape, this could go on and on and on. A few weeks could buy us an awful lot.

That's not the deal.

Honestly if it was genuinely keep everyone off school for 6 more weeks and it'll all be fine no one would do it?

This is going to be a long and drawn out process and we are just at the start of it.

@BettyBoomerang: "Wouldn't you rather wait and have a free life where you can see family and friends as much as you like?"

No way I trust the Government to make good on a deal like that!

If I comply, others still won't. And even if everyone does, it's still not enough to get things controlled —not controlled enough to re-open fully and any time soon.

Good luck to you, but best to make hay.

For gods sake - how many times do we have to hear ‘it’s only a few more weeks’ - kids need to be in school.
It was only a few weeks to flatten the curve roughly a year ago 😡 Yeay, that really worked a treat.

Unless you have kids, you don’t care less about them. When you were young and childless, would you have prioritised other people’s kids above yourself? Truthfully, I wouldn’t have.

^^
I think I would have realised that children’s need was greater than mine, even before i had kids. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been so selfish as to put my own needs first.

All this “why should childless/ child free people give a shit about children?” doesn’t sit at all well with me. I care about children who aren’t mine, not just my own!

@GertrudePerkinsPaperyThing

Unless you have kids, you don’t care less about them. When you were young and childless, would you have prioritised other people’s kids above yourself? Truthfully, I wouldn’t have.

^^
I think I would have realised that children’s need was greater than mine, even before i had kids. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been so selfish as to put my own needs first.

All this “why should childless/ child free people give a shit about children?” doesn’t sit at all well with me. I care about children who aren’t mine, not just my own!

Agree.

I like to think I'd have recognised the benefit of my own uninterrupted education and want the same for today's children.

Even if I was completely selfish I would definitely recognise the disruption and difficulties school closures are causing in my workplace.

[quote bathsh3ba]@WhenSheWasBad
Compulsory masks at all times when inside.
Year zones in school and year groups stayed in their zones
Staggered starts and finishes
Staggered lunch breaks
Clubs limited to year groups only
Dedicated school only transport with masks mandatory
Separate entrances and exits for every year group

Secondary school with a total of 7 cases, 6 students and 1 teacher. Only one bubble burst once.[/quote]
And that is pure luck. My dd's secondary school did pretty much all of this. Bubbles still burst constantly with so many children having to isolate.
Pure luck...

Yabu. The rationale for closing the schools was that hospitals might be overwhelmed. That’s no longer the case, which means schools should be open.

It’s reasonable to ruin children’s lives on the theoretical offchance of a weird mutation.

Not reasonable to ruin children’s lives. n o t . Stupid keyboard

@BettyBoomerang "Wouldn't you rather wait and have a free life where you can see family and friends as much as you like?"

You mean a bit like all those people who said we could have Christmas dinner another time so we shouldn't see anyone at Christmas to avoid a January lockdown.

Look how that worked out.

I never wanted schools to limit the number of children allowed to attend (schools have not closed), I’ve always wanted them to be fully open. I think all teachers have been absolutely gutted each time they’ve had to isolate or the government has limited numbers. But the pandemic is a reality and the frustrating thing is that if the government had had the guts to do a full lockdown at the very start and then eased off slowly, children would have been back to school ages ago. They’ve got to start listening to the experts and doing this properly. Teachers have all said how much easier it was to teach before all this happened so any reticence isn’t laziness or not wanting to do our job - we just want this handled properly so it doesn’t go on any longer than it already has. Precisely because we know that children need to be in school!

There may be an element of luck, but please can we have as many infection control procedures as would make some difference as well?

@VashtaNerada

I never wanted schools to limit the number of children allowed to attend (schools have not closed), I’ve always wanted them to be fully open. I think all teachers have been absolutely gutted each time they’ve had to isolate or the government has limited numbers. But the pandemic is a reality and the frustrating thing is that if the government had had the guts to do a full lockdown at the very start and then eased off slowly, children would have been back to school ages ago. They’ve got to start listening to the experts and doing this properly. Teachers have all said how much easier it was to teach before all this happened so any reticence isn’t laziness or not wanting to do our job - we just want this handled properly so it doesn’t go on any longer than it already has. Precisely because we know that children need to be in school!

Hope there is some common sense on Monday.

Does anyone know the rate that cases are dropping? we have 16 days until 8th March, trying to work out in my head if the pattern of decline continues what the R rate may be then and how many cases.

@SeldomFollowedIt

Betty thinks if we wait just a few more weeks we can kiss goodbye to covid forever.

Deluded. Irrespective of waiting or not, covid is here to stay. In which case doesn’t make a huge difference on when they return, and they need to go back. There WILL be covid variants. Viruses mutate. Shit happens. They’ll tweak the vaccine if needs be. All this hysterical waiting is catastrophic in itself.

All of this. 👏

You are so right op, but I expect Boris will bow down to pressure and often them all up too quickly and we'll be back to square one.

According to tomorrow's Times, the current seven day average is 11500 cases per day and Sage have advised that the easing of lockdown should be staged. The exception to this, it goes on, is schools as Sage members 'are acutely aware that the impact on schoolchildren is immense, and growing'. Which would hopefully suggest that they recognise that another 8 weeks out of school (not just another 3 weeks of home learning) might actually be an issue.

It does go on to state that the timing is for ministers but that they do not oppose the reopening on 8 March, one reason being that there will be a natural firebreak in the Easter holidays.