Schools contingency framework released

[noblegiraffe]

The contingency framework guidelines for childcare settings, schools, colleges and universities has been released.

Not much to see except that schools should seek public health advice if:

For most education and childcare settings, whichever of these thresholds is reached first:
• 5 children, pupils, students or staff, who are likely to have mixed closely, test positive for COVID-19 within a 10-day period; or
• 10% of children, pupils, students or staff who are likely to have mixed closely test positive for COVID-19 within a 10-day period

Additional measures might be onsite testing or reintroducing masks but is much more likely to be simply:

At the point of reaching a threshold, education and childcare settings should review and reinforce the testing, hygiene and ventilation measures they already have in place. Settings should also consider:
• whether any activities could take place outdoors, including exercise, assemblies, or classes
• ways to improve ventilation indoors, where this would not significantly impact thermal comfort
• one-off enhanced cleaning focussing on touch points and any shared equipment

Interestingly, 'mixing closely' includes students who have shared a classroom, not just those who sat within 2m of a positive case.

No reassurance for CEV pupils.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1011704/20210817_Contingency_Framework_FINAL.pdf

They don't care about poor kids education - we know this obviously, even if you are a tory you can see that THIS cabinet, THIS government could not give a damn about the education or prospects of working class kids. They care presumably that shop workers, care home workers, factory food packers, etc etc can still go work for minimum wage and that they won't have to provide any kind of (much needed) provision for unavoidable parental leave EVEN in the face of a pandemic (we don't want them getting ideas).

Don't track and trace, don't isolate, don't even stop if you've got the school crammed on an icy playground, just make sure we can keep exploiting the lowest paid in society and leave them in the same situation of no real workers rights like proper sick pay, parental leave, etc. And don't worry about the rights of children to safe, suitable accommodation and care. Even better we'll get those workers hating teachers for having sick pay and proper contracts and blaming them if the reality of a pandemic and a school having to close could spell homelessness. Don't blame this government and the mass exploitation of and degrading of the working rights of the poor - blame teachers

It's the same old race to the bottom and divide and conquer and it keeps working! Then you get uber rich, unbelievably well connected networks claiming to be faux 'grass roots' movements claiming to care about the kids and the parents and singing the children are our future

We're ruled by millionaire sociopaths and nudge think tanks.

Daily Mirror www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/secondary-schools-opening-to-delayed-24811815?fbclid=IwAR3k_RoaZDT4AOo9OVAIil8t9pdaKK-I70IPakgzhODADcYW0HLWT9sJtsY

Secondary schools across England will open a week later than expected after the summer holidays, it has been reported.

The reopening of secondary schools will be delayed in parts of the country as headteachers call in millions of teenagers to be tested for coronavirus on-site.

The Department of Education confirmed that schools will be allowed to stagger their start dates so pupils can be tested twice for the disease.

Certainly not the case here. We are taking kids out of lessons to do it (not sure they have fully though that through) and DS's school is doing them on training day, and then on a Sunday!!

@herecomesthsun

Daily Mirror www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/secondary-schools-opening-to-delayed-24811815?fbclid=IwAR3k_RoaZDT4AOo9OVAIil8t9pdaKK-I70IPakgzhODADcYW0HLWT9sJtsY

Secondary schools across England will open a week later than expected after the summer holidays, it has been reported.

The reopening of secondary schools will be delayed in parts of the country as headteachers call in millions of teenagers to be tested for coronavirus on-site.

The Department of Education confirmed that schools will be allowed to stagger their start dates so pupils can be tested twice for the disease.

True of my school. Term starts Friday 3rd Sept. I don’t start teaching until the following Thursday due to testing.

@DanglingMod

I don't think we have any at our school, but a friend at another school said she had two unvaccinated through choice colleagues who said they are going to refuse to attend assemblies, trips etc in the autumn term as they don't feel safe

Surely they can increase their safety by getting vaccinated if not a medical issue.

What do those I individuals want, 🤔 refuse to do things but not help themselves.

The mass testing before term started last September made sense when LFTs were not readily available to all (and there were no vaccines!).

But now we all have boxes of LFTs at home. I will be testing DC the evening before term at home. They will not be being tested in school. In my opinion, that is not the right place for it.

My DC is also fully vaccinated (soon to be 18 years old in year 13) and will not be isolating if they are a close contact and have a negative test, just like all the other fully vaccinated people in the country. They will not be discriminated against because they go to school.

My DC is also fully vaccinated (soon to be 18 years old in year 13) and will not be isolating if they are a close contact and have a negative test, just like all the other fully vaccinated people in the country. They will not be discriminated against because they go to school.

Nobody under 18 years 3 months, whatever their vaccination status, has to isolate any more except if they themselves test positive. So all 18 and unders are treated the same as all double vaccinated anyway, whether they are in school or not.

thanks @cantkeepawayforever, I worry that the DfE have been typically spineless and seem to have given each individual school free rein to make up their own Covid restrictions, which is worrying from all points of view, depending on your point of view and that of your school. My DC's is at the ultra-cautious end of the scale and was already not afraid to go against the guidance at the end of last term that whole school years should not be isolating anymore.

Plus there seems to be moving goalposts. First teachers wanted to be vaccinated. Now they have been offered both. Then the pupils needed vaccinating. My DC and many of their peers are double-vaccinated (CEV/CV/area that was very ahead in its vaccination programme).
Even then, with double vaccinations on both sides of the teacher-pupil divide, with boxes of LFTs at home that we are willing to use, that's not enough for some apparently.

Jokers, there is no legal basis for schools asking children to isolate, so whatever the risk appetite of the school, they can't require this particular mitigation.

Where schools may differ is in e.g approaches to ventilation, distancing, masks etc - as each Head is legally responsible for the Health and Safety of their organisation, they may decide that keeping some of these mitigations is the only way they can meet their legal H&S obligations towards e.g. CEV students and staff.

Sorry, cross posted.

IME, all schools want to offer their students as high quality an education as possible. That is a careful juggling act of keeping teachers healthy (which will depend on the age and health profile of the staff, as well as on whether any physical distancing is possible); keeping children healthy (again depends on the specific profile of the children, and on things like whether windows can be opened for ventilation) and balancing the needs of those in school and those unavoidably out of school (both keyworkers / others during lockdown and those attending school / isolating through illness).

It's not as simple, in these days of delta and re-infection, as 'you are vaccinated, you are risk free, nothing to see here'.

Well interestingly, I've just read a twitter thread from a group who are considering legal action in the other direction (i.e. they wanted to take the DfE to court for inadequate guidance as they want more protection than it offers).

They have been advised by lawyers that the DfE have weaselled it so that they can't be sued, however individual schools can. If a school meets DfE guidance but doesn't meet Health and Safety law, then the school will not be able to use 'I was following DfE guidance' as a defence.

So schools could be threatened with legal action if they go beyond DfE guidance, and threatened with legal action if they don't. Awesome.

twitter.com/safeedforall_uk/status/1429739899444416516?s=21

We are also heavily dependent on how our community of parents behave. Not everything is in our control eg we had a family where symptomatic dad tested positive by pcr but still sent their son into school in the last week of term, screwing over education, booked holidays of parents and staff and delaying cancer treatment for one relative, as son predictably ended up positive too.

It takes a bit of sense and social responsibility from everyone to keep schools safe.

X post. Hideous position for individual schools to be sandwiched in.

@cantkeepawayforever

Jokers, there is no legal basis for schools asking children to isolate, so whatever the risk appetite of the school, they can't require this particular mitigation.

Where schools may differ is in e.g approaches to ventilation, distancing, masks etc - as each Head is legally responsible for the Health and Safety of their organisation, they may decide that keeping some of these mitigations is the only way they can meet their legal H&S obligations towards e.g. CEV students and staff.

Happy to continue with masks, if school require this, which they probably will. Scientifically I believe masks make a big difference to transmission.

Just can't take any more uncertainty, DC being treated as unvaccinated as a mass block of millions rather than treated as an individual, when actually fully vaccinated, continual cancellation and loss of opportunities (e.g. work experience, volunteering, paid employment etc, which seems to only be affecting the state system as the private system went down the close-contacts-only to isolate rather than whole year groups isolating, which was favoured by the state system, hence private pupils having more opportunities in year 12-13 than state, being at home without peer group contact for a DC with depression, limited access to school facilities as each part of the school was allocated for sole use of one year group, meaning my DC lost meaningful access to several key areas of the school last year). T

the private system went down the close-contacts-only to isolate rather than whole year groups isolating, which was favoured by the state system

No idea where you got this from. Close contacts isolating rather than year groups was the standard response in state schools from end of September 2020. It wasn't a state vs private thing.

I'm afraid that there's one thing that schools aren't going to be able to offer for the coming Autumn and that's certainty.

It's shit, but we're in a pandemic.

Yes. I’d feel happier if we were going back with masks. A very easy mitigation that clearly made a difference but disappeared.

We never did whole year groups in state school here unless it was clearly rife and we were going to have a deep clean or we were critically understaffed.

We literally seemed to only be allowed to send home kids who’d sat right next to the positive case or within a metre or so. I don’t understand this talk of whole year groups being sent home for a positive case.

It doesn’t seem to fit with any teacher’s experience and we’re all over the country.

I don't think there was a state/private divide in asking for isolations. I teach in state and we only ever isolated close contacts - the first case (last September) was in my class and only about a third of the class was sent home (the positive student sat near a wall so wasn't central in the room). Towards the end of term (both Christmas and summer) it did get a bit ridiculous with lots of classes having only a couple of children left in school, but they weren't close contacts so were still in (in many cases sat with just a cover teacher doing the same work as those at home)...

@noblegiraffe

the private system went down the close-contacts-only to isolate rather than whole year groups isolating, which was favoured by the state system

No idea where you got this from. Close contacts isolating rather than year groups was the standard response in state schools from end of September 2020. It wasn't a state vs private thing.

Yes, that is what Gavin Williamson said, but my DC's state school and I think all the state schools in my county (PHE in my county widely reputed to be one of the most cautious in country) were happily sending whole year groups home right up to and including July 2021. The local paper had a thread in which they updated multiples each day as each new year group at each school got closed down.

*multiple times (online obvs)

We only sent a whole year group home once (y12). Bubbles in the sixth form were even harder to manage than in main school

If that's what your local PH team were recommending, surely that would have applied to the private schools in your county, too?

There are many areas of inequality between the sectors but I don't believe this would ever be one.

We sent a whole year group home (year 10) when 25% of them tested positive in two days.