@iquitelikenormalityafterall
So this is sneaky. The Scottish education recovery group meeting mintues were available on the Scottish government website for their last meeting, 23rd December. They have taken the minutes down, obviously because the evidence in this meeting suggested all harms from lockdowns were worse for children than the threat of covid, which is contradictory to closing schools. Such a political move, they really are just destroying childhoods now. Why should children’s lives be put on hold?! I just don’t believe that cases will ever be low enough in the governments opinion for the schools to reopen. Shocked they took those minutes down, it’s going against scientific evidence to close schools for this long!
I totally agree with this... all this "school is not safe" or "make school safe" is meaningless. Nothing is safe. A child could be run over at the school gates. We aren't suggesting banning cars, or stopping cars from driving past schools (or even forbidding shitty parking by schools... In fact the current situation encourages it as more children are being dropped by car, and parents are waiting in their cars for children to come out, as they can't wait in the grounds). Our school burnt down just before the February break last year, with the fire starting in a classroom just after the end of the day and spreading through an entire wing before the fire service could put it out. That building obviously wasn't safe, yet children were expected to be taught in it. The high school had a wall fall down and kill a child about 5 years ago. That wasn't safe either, and we still don't have a new high school.
The decision therefore has to be whether the benefits of children being in school outweigh the risks, and how much time and money is it appropriate to spend to mitigate that risk and to what extent. The Scottish government has made the decision that the risk of children (and presumably staff) being in school due to covid outweighs the benefit of them being there, being educated, getting social interaction, getting welfare checks, in some cases getting fed and so on. I don't know whether they've considered further mitigations (reducing numbers in classes, spreading teaching into non school buildings, recruiting childcare specialists to assist teachers in some parts of the curriculum to increase adult numbers...) , but it seems not. Without seeing their data and their weighting it is impossible to know whether that is the right decision, but if what you say is that the expert evidence is questioning that decision, I think it is fair that we get to see that.
I also think it's incredible that all children's education, from birth to 18 (and possibly uni level, though, as usual that hasn't seemingly had any coverage from the briefing) is being treated exactly the same, when the evidence suggests that the risk is far from the same. That doesn't suggest an evidence led approach to me. That strikes me as a panic response, which is hardly how we should treat education, surely?