Educated guesses when schools will reopen

[frasersmummy]

Just that really

What do you think might be a realistic re-opening date.
Am I being optimistic thinking after the February break
I know no one has a crystal ball just looking for people's thoughts

I am being serious. The bunnies and SI are only to stop the NHS being overwhelmed, not to stop people catching it, and when the vulnerable are vaccinated the NHS will not be at risk.

Bunnies?! Bubbles

Once the elderly are vaccinated I think it will be very difficult to persuade them to stay locked down. If they start going about their business as normal it is pretty untenable to argue for closing schools in case of community transmission.

There is an argument to be had on vaccinating teachers to cut their risk but also to cut the risk of them transmitting to the DC. That is much more workable than keeping schools closed etc indefinitely.

For getting seniors into school, would it be possible to socially distance them, having smaller classes, having half staff in school to teach seniors only and half at home to do remote learning with s1-s3 only. It would means a rejig of the timetables. I don't work in a school though maybe there are practical reasons why this can't happen.

Larger primaries could do this for blended learning too, one teacher in school with dc and one at home doing remote learning for each year group.

We've got 3 classes per year group in our school. For remote learning the teachers are setting the same work for the whole year group just now so surely that's had a positive impact on their workload because it's one set of planning and prep for the full year group rather than x3 teachers planning for x3 classes. (it does mean some dc are really struggling and other are flying through the work easily as their is no differentiation but that's another issue...).

Half the class in at a time I really can't see working. The scenario you give of 3 classes.
3 half classes in needs 3 teachers.
Where's the spare teacher for the other 3 half classes at home?

DSs primary are working the year together but still differentiating the work between the top and lower groups.

It's not really that we would be vaccinating the vulnerable is it, we can vaccinate those known to have pre-existing conditions that are likely to lead to worse outcomes if the person catches covid.
We cannot know which people without known pre-existing conditions will have a poor outcome if they catch Covid.
So letting a virus have free rein in a school environment is certainly not without risk that individuals will become seriously ill or die.
It also surely gives it more opportunities to mutate into new varieties, and I've had quite enough of that thanks.

We've got 9 classes per year group. 7 higher classes. 8/9 N5 classes. Not sure how that'll work. But the seniors need to be back. We can't assess what we've not taught. We'll barely have time for assessment.

Interesting. Not sure what our stat was over Christmas but likely much higher. I would like to know what it was over summer. 1 in 1000 maybe.

Hearing noises about England saying Easter.
While Scotland likes to be more cautious than England about opening things up. It will look bad for the election to have English schools open before Scottish.

The case numbers are coming down now the r number is less than 1.. There is no way they can keep the schools closed to easter

"The case numbers are coming down now the r number is less than 1.. There is no way they can keep the schools closed to easter"

It might be less than 1 but we have tens of thousands of infections per day. We already know this can lead to mutations. Is it a good idea to let them spread in places with literally thousands of people and no social distancing? Another variant possibly detected in liverpool
httpss://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1352991206121369603?s=20

I’m sorry are you a parent?! Do you want to keep your child locked down without school forever? I honestly think some people love the misery. Or inflicting misery upon kids! We are in a lockdown, schools are shut, it’s been absolutely proven lockdowns are more damaging to children than covid and as soon as the hospitals are not in danger of being overwhelmed children should be back in school. Which sounds like it will be pretty soon. So all this keep us locked down all year shite won’t wash with me.

I saw a thing on the bbc news page where you could find covid stats for your specific area. So in my area of Shetland there has been 3 cases in the last 7 days and 1 death between March - Dec 2019.

Giving a case rate of 89.45 per 100k people and a rate of 29.4 deaths per 100k. It's made me really angry. I can't believe my children are missing school with those rates.

Nobody likes the misery we all want kids back in school but some are trying to be realistic as to when it will happen.

I calculated before Christmas that schools would be shut for the term, based on that calculation I made sure we were set up for it for it tech wise. DS now has his own laptop as I thought it would be easier than working of a tablet or the laptop we had going really slow with the amount of stuff that was on it.

@MrsAmaretto

I saw a thing on the bbc news page where you could find covid stats for your specific area. So in my area of Shetland there has been 3 cases in the last 7 days and 1 death between March - Dec 2019.

Giving a case rate of 89.45 per 100k people and a rate of 29.4 deaths per 100k. It's made me really angry. I can't believe my children are missing school with those rates.

But look what happened in the western isles. From nothing to the highest positivity rate in the country. It can spread so quickly, particularly in small close knit communities that have had hardly any cases.

@icanboogieboogiewoogie yes and the same thing has appended on Shetland. It's been spread here by extended families thinking they don't need to follow the rules and meeting up frequently, for a good few hours in each other's house for cups of tea or a dram 3,4,5 different households at a time. All the cases can be traced and it comes back to one family having a bloody party. Other cases are isolated and traced back to travel to the uk mainland.

Nothing to do with close knit communities - I've not been in my neighbours or friends houses since March even though we were allowed to.

If the central belt had the same stats as my local area schools would be opening. They need to look at opening up schools on an individual basis, just as they closed schools on an individual basis.

Looking at the stats online there are plenty of areas in mainland Scotland, including parts of forth valley, tayside etc with similar stats to my area of Shetland. They are fast enough to close schools down but opening seems to be a distant dream.

Not sure my post was clear - I live in a close knit community but we follow the rules so we don't have covid. Why is our school closed? When will it reopen fully? Summer?

I am desperate for schools to open for everyone too but it's simply not safe to at the moment. We have already had covid cases in school and I've been supporting children in my class who have sadly recently lost family members to covid.
We need to remember that we're in survival mode at the moment. 2 to 17 year olds were the most likely to introduce covid into a household. Look at D and G- a month or two ago, people there were complaining about restrictions as they felt they had very little covid/ deaths then very quickly it became the worst area in the country.

What is your definition of "safe" StarryEyeSurprise?

Infection rate numbers are now the same as in October and once vaccine is rolled out to over 80s this ought to mean the same infection rate leads to 80% less health impact (assuming Whitty's calcs are correct). In April infection numbers fell and remained suppressed and so seasonality is also very likely to provide a following wind.

Define 'safe' when the hospitals have a bit of capacity to deal with more people getting covid or any sort of incident, in a school.

Lockdownbear I am not sure hospitals will ever have "spare" capacity again (if they ever did) because the non-urgent backlog is so huge. Someone will need to make decisions about permanently increasing capacity and rationing non-essential care. No sign of any grown up conversation on this anywhere.

Otoh I was reading academic literature on NHS rationing and demand
/ offers of over treatment expanding to meet supply 30 years ago.

At the moment people are being turned away from A&E and told to wait at home until they have a time to treat them. Ok some of that will be trying to ensure social distancing in waiting areas.

Gawd knows what they'd do if a major incident was to happen when hospitals are already stretched.

The idea that primary children are plague vectors and spreading the virus is untrue. Jason Leitch has said it's untrue and the stats back him up. If they were, they'd be prioritised for vaccination like the normal flu vaccination programme.

They are not prioritised for vaccination because it has yet to be tested for that age group