How schools will stay open without priority teacher vaccinations?

[CadburysCrunchie]

I'm not a teacher, but I am wondering how our children's schools will stay open (and we can continue going to work) without teaching staff being given some sort of priority for the covid vaccination?

My child's school has already completely shut for two weeks in November due to rapidly increasing cases, then reopened, and now with 3 days notice is changing to home learning next week due to staff shortages (people being sick, shielding, or having to self-isolate for 2 weeks). The school thinks it is likely the school will have to go to home learning again next term due to all the staff shortages.

If you are not a keyworker so that your child can request to stay in school, how can you go to work outside the home (no home working alternative) if you have no childcare?? What about children who don't have access to a computer etc?

I don't know if this is allowed, but I am going to link to a petition I have seen: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/554316 - Admin, please remove this if the link is not allowed.

YABU - You should stop worrying
YANBU - You are right to worry about this.

@Yoshinori do you hug, drool, spit, bite the retail workers you come in contact for 6 hours a day in a small room with 2 tiny windows that only open a crack due to health and safety concerns? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't. Yes retail are in contact with a huge number of people and I feel sorry for them too but they are rarely in prolonged contact with those people and as they are all adults they should be maintaining the social distancing and wearing face masks.
Due to bubble system my kids get outside for the 1st hour of the day - the remaining 5 hours they are in the classroom - including snack and lunch time.
Due to it being a special needs school the children struggle with staff wearing ppe so we are asked to only wear it to serve food or do changes at toileting.
There is no social distancing. There is lots of physical skin to skin contact and often very little time to wash hands for the required period of time. We sanitise a lot but soap and water would be better.

@hibbledibble

Yabu, as the priority has to be to vaccinate those who are the most clinically vulnerable. Healthcare staff, and care home staff, are only being vaccinated as a priority in order to protect those at greatest risk.

Who would you have wait for their vaccine, in order to prioritise school staff who aren't clinically vulnerable? I would support having key workers having the vaccine as a priority within their age/risk group, but not to the detriment of vaccinating the elderly/extremely clinically vulnerable.

Exactly

YABU - As others have said, care workers, hospital staff and anyone in a clinical setting trump teachers, I'm afraid. I say that as a retail worker who interacts hundreds of coughing, spluttering and maskless morons on a daily basis. Supermarket workers haven't stopped working at all through this whole thing. We got absolutely battered with the virus and abuse from customers like you wouldn't imagine. I can't begin to imagine how incredibly hard it has been for healthcare workers during all of this. It overshadows everything I have experienced in these past 10 months. They absolutely must get first dibs.

Elderly/Vulnerable/Clinical & Care staff>everyone. Teachers, public service workers, retail staff and anyone in a prolonged public facing role should be next. You simply do not jump to the top of the pile because you provide education.

The government have spent years trying to disgrace teachers in the eyes of the public. They would rather nobody have sympathy or show support as they continue to allow privatisation of schools for profit & plan ever more raids on the teachers pension pot.

That schools have remained open throughout lockdown, demanded that high-risk teachers teach in person, told primary staff they cannot wear masks and now they are not planning on prioritising teachers for vaccines shows just how little teaching staff are valued in this country.

I for one am glad I got out of it.

I do think teachers (and other school staff) should be prioritised. The nature of their work puts them in sustained close contact with a very germ ridden demographic, who also tend to be grotty in hygiene terms.

If keeping schools open is an absolute priority, which I believe it should be, then vaccine priority should be part of that.

I have signed the petition, it is good to see something positive on a school thread for a change.

As an over 50 but working in the safety of my home for the last 9 months and for the forseeable, I would happily be behind these workers in the queue.

I'm happy for teachers to be prioritised above many other generally healthy working age people, as I think keeping schools open is important and valuable.
However I don't think teachers should be prioritised above the over 60s.

@Smurf123 You say that we should be staying away from people, but the amount of maskless customers I have had to shout at to keep distance, I have entirely lost count of. We've had people coming in, coughing on purpose and laughing about it, people coughing phlegm into their hands and wiping it on baked goods, children doing the same and then touching sweets and some of our equipment we use to replenish. At any one time, there are 60 of us on shift, nearly every one of them has a family with children, or partners going out to work, and the amount of them I have seen no washing their hands and following basic hygiene rules is shocking. So if you think about it, the fact we aren't in a tightly packed room doesn't mean a thing when you've got grotty people not washing after coughing/sneezing/using the bathroom, and then touching the doors to the back rooms or putting items on the shelf. All it takes is an accidental wipe of your eyes or mouth and you've potentially got someone else's germs in your body. Any public setting is going to be a hot bed for germs. I'm not saying shops have it worse, I'm just saying it makes little difference.

When bubbles are sent home, or schools close, it isn't to protect teachers. It's to stop spread in the community. So regardless of whether teachers are vaccinated, if 5 students in a year test positive, the bubbles/year/school will still close. Vaccinating teachers doesn't keep them open.
It would help schools to run because there would be less teacher shortages due to illness and of course, teachers are working without PPE and should be vaccinated for the protection of their health. But your argument that it will keep schools open doesn't hold water.

Just to clarify - I don't think teaching staff should have higher priority than groups like NHS or clinically vulnerable or the elderly etc. But they should have some sort of priority provision made for them to help keep schools open. Teaching staff should perhaps be vaccinated eg after everyone over a certain age has been vaccinated.

The petition is just one I found online when I was googling to see what was happening about teachers vaccinations. I just think the government has not considered it properly yet. However it is a really important issue and it hasn't been addressed in the vaccination priority list I have seen in the newspapers.

Secondary children have the highest rate of infection of any demographic.

Gav is so super worried about this (at least in some London areas, not so much in the north) that he’s trying to test all children.

If teachers are expected to work with this demographic, then why shouldn’t we be prioritised for vaccination?

Schools have been insane since September- and staff absence is by far the biggest issue - well, that and the fact it’s impossible to deliver a curriculum to a cohort who are in and out all the time.

Vaccinating teachers isn't going to stop schools closing, which are doing so due to a child testing positive in the majority of cases.

But your argument that it will keep schools open doesn't hold water.

It does when schools are shut due to staff shortages. If staff are available, those closures won't happen.

But your argument that it will keep schools open doesn't hold water

Of the pod closures I know of, 75% have been due to staff testing positive rather than pupils (primary). In these cases, vaccination would have greatly reduced school time lost.

However I mainly feel that morally they should be offered the vaccine because they have no choice whether to expose themselves to risk, and vaccination mitigates that risk. My parents for example (in their 70s) can and do make sensible decisions about limiting contact until the vaccine is widely available, whereas teachers can't.

Agree they need to be higher priority than Joe public.

Elderly and clinically very vulnerable
NHS staff, care workers
Retail, teachers
Other people

Given most schools have been open every week since the end of the first lockdown, no I don't. Vaccines need to go to the most vulnerable first - that's the elderly.

The Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) have said vaccination of those at increased risk of exposure to Covid due to their occupation could also be a priority in the next vaccination phase - that is, when vaccination of healthy people under 50 starts.
Their list of occupations at increased risk of Covid exposure includes teachers, plus first responders (I think that means emergency services?), the military, those involved in the justice system, transport workers and public servants essential to the pandemic response.

JCVI do say it’s a policy decision rather than something for them to advise on, but this hopefully means that the government will consider prioritising who gets the vaccine first by vulnerable occupations, once all those considered clinically vulnerable have been offered the vaccine.

Link to the JCVI report on priority groups for the Covid vaccine on the gov.uk website below:

www.gov.uk/government/publications/priority-groups-for-coronavirus-covid-19-vaccination-advice-from-the-jcvi-2-december-2020/priority-groups-for-coronavirus-covid-19-vaccination-advice-from-the-jcvi-2-december-2020

Op I think it's very sad that your very valid point has been hijacked by people declaring that teachers want vulnerable or elderly people bumped off the priority list so they can elbow their way to the front. It sadly says more about their agenda than anything else.

I agree with you. I think teachers should be prioritised within phase 2 AFTER vulnerable and elderly people.

And to the poster who stated that many threads have included teachers asking to go above vulnerable and elderly people. I haven't seen any. Can you post them? I think you're being inflammatory.

@Sailorkerry - Elderly/Vulnerable/Clinical & Care staff>everyone

Clinical & care staff come before vulnerable currently though!

I’m ECV teaching staff and worked through the last lockdown, against gov advice as it would have cost my school a huge amount to cover me for 4 weeks!
I don’t want any medals, but it would have been sensible I think to let me have priority access.
Currently priority 4

@Yoshinori

Teachers shouldn’t be given priority just because they are teachers.

Imo teachers moan and moan about being exposed when so many other professions are also exposed to COVID risks and often even more so.

As a teacher you interact with mostly the same group of students, retail workers/shop workers are exposed to a greater pool of people all who are more likely to have Covid than young students.

Firstly, on behalf of all teachers who are desperate for the end of what has been the most horrific term of their entire careers, fuck off.

Secondly, as pp have said, most other professions have strict rules in place about social distancing (including wfh) and ppe. Even supermarket staff have some 'protection', such as it is, via masks and screens, and fleeting contact.

In my secondary school I teach up to 5 different classes a day for an hour, plus my form every day for 30 mins. I teach 7 different y7 classes, 5 different y8 classes 4 y9 classes each for one hour per week, plus a y11 class for 3 hours. That's nearly 630 kids a week, for mostly an hour.

Zero ppe

No masks in classrooms

Token line drawn on the floor

Enclosed cramped classroom with 2 windows open 6" max.

Schools must be open, parents need to work. I get it.

11-18 year olds have the highest positive rate at the moment (not a surprise to anyone who works in secondary education) and lockdown saw the smallest reduction in cases in this age range.

My brother works in A&E and has top to toe ppe at all times, full covid triage at the door, minimum if any accompanying visitors, he has been vaccinated this week.

Tell me again why teachers don't deserve to be prioritised?

Thanks op. I've signed and shared it with others

Some very good reasons listed in the petition. Ignore the "What about melee?" replies. I don't personally work in a school but can still see the benefits

Meeee not melee

I completely agree that we need to find much better ways to protect teachers. It's disgraceful how you have all been treated throughout this and as a parent I'm extremely grateful to every single one of you that still turns up day in, day out and puts yourself at risk. I wish you were allowed to wear masks, had access to fast testing to stop ill kids getting in and had funding to improve online resources and classroom ventilation. And a lot more respect from the govt!
The reason I believe teachers haven't been included as priority is because children haven't. To protect a population from infection you need herd immunity which I believe needs 60% of people in the population to be immune. This stops the virus spreading. If you vaccinated all teachers in a school ( probably not possible with the restrictions during pregnancy etc) you would still only be vaccinating 1 in about 30 of the school population. So it wouldn't bring numbers down or stop spread. It might protect those individual teachers but during a time when our hospitals are at crisis individuals can't be the priority.

I agree with whoever said all the arguments about vulnerable children, missed education etc etc seem to go out the window as soon as something that would actually help teachers achieve these things is proposed.

Schools can't stay open by magic- school closures are largely due to high numbers of school staff being off, due to testing positive. A vaccination would presumably mitigate this.

Seems like a lot of people want teachers to not get ill without actually giving them anything to stop this happening