I really hope that posters on other threads who are bleating about 'missing out' on going in to school for harvest festivals, special assemblies etc are reading this thread. I still cannot for the life of me understand why some schools have insisted on holding whole school assemblies, staff meetings and training sessions.
Do you understand now why the priority in all schools should be trying to keep them safe. This means NO unnecessary people in the building. There are damn good reasons why it is difficult to even get into the GP surgeries at the moment. They are health care experts and they know exactly why there have such a strict check in at the door.
I am fed up of listening to some parents complaining that schools need to get back to normal, and that their kids just need to have a whole school assembly, or to be able to wave at mummy during harvest festival. We ALL want to go back to normal, but we are not there yet - and this constant push to drive large numbers of people (many of them unvaccinated) into unventilated rooms is making the situation even worse.
We should have been allowed to focis on one thing. Getting kids back into education. That would have meant vaccinating school staff as a priority, ventilating rooms better, keeping kids in a class bubble where possible (much harder to do in secondaries), mask wearing in schools, and especially when in corridors, limiting access into the building to only the people who need to be there and parents being honest about when they have covid in their homes (oh yes, we know there are parents sending in kids with very obvious covid symptoms and passing it off as 'just a cold.') It would also have helped tremendously if parents had stuck to the rules and ensured their their children did. Allowing, even encouraging, your kids to go on sleep overs or your teens to attend parties when this was in breech of the rules. Yes, thanks for that - that's how many of our sixth form managed to catch and pass on covid - including to three of our staff.