Parents face Monday’s return to school with trepidation

Many teachers and parents preparing for a mass return of children to classrooms in England next week are doing so with “trepidation” after ministers shut schools over the winter as the second wave of coronavirus hit.

Almost all English pupils will start face-to-face lessons on Monday as part of the UK government’s “big bang” return, defying pleas from the sector for a phased restart along with mitigating measures such as rotas to control attendance levels.

Instead, ministers have held off reopening other parts of the economy, introduced twice-weekly rapid testing for older pupils, and advised face masks be worn in secondary schools.

These measures would “reassure families and education staff” education secretary Gavin Williamson said last month, when he announced that all schools would reopen, nine weeks to the day since they were closed on January 4 in an abrupt government U-turn.

Teachers and parents have welcomed the return but concerns remain as they take the first step on Boris Johnson’s Covid “road map” that the prime minister hopes will lead to a lifting of all restrictions from England’s third lockdown by late June.

Educators want to avoid a repeat of the run-up to Christmas when a surge in cases nationally ultimately led to the third lockdown at the start of January.

“We all desperately want it to work even if we think it should have been done in a slower manner,” said Emma Knights, chief executive of the National Governance Association, representing school governors.

She said that headteachers were “pragmatic” and working hard to ensure a successful return and she hoped their instincts were wrong. “I think I would use the word trepidation,” she said. “We just don’t want to be seeing these rates rocket again — we don’t want to be in a position of saying I told you so.”

According to Teacher Tapp, a daily polling app, 60 per cent of teachers have said they would feel “somewhat” or “very” unsafe going back to school on Monday, and 4 per cent felt “very safe”. Nearly half said they felt “nervous” or “scared”, although more than 30 per cent were happy or relieved.

Parentkind, a family charity, found 69 per cent of parents in England were not confident a full reopening would be safe with 53 per cent “not at all confident”.

The education department sought to reassure parents on Friday. A spokesperson said children had been brought back to school as soon as the public health situation permitted “based on the latest scientific and medical advice.” 

There is support for the government’s position. Research by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Public Health England and the Office for National Statistics released this week found infection rates were slightly lower in schools than in the wider community in December.

Introducing regular, rapid testing of pupils is seen as central to ensuring the virus is kept in check. The government will supply so-called rapid lateral flow devices (LFD), which produce a result on site within 30 minutes, to all secondary schools in England. Students will take three tests at school as they return to lessons, before switching to testing themselves at home twice a week.

This process is well under way. Nearly half of secondary schools invited pupils to come to school ahead of reopening for tests this week, according to Teacher Tapp.

Jon Coles, the head of United Learning, a multi-academy trust with more than 80 schools, said most of them had started testing, and would return in full on Monday. “Our staff are overwhelmingly feeling really positive and confident and looking forward to seeing young people again,” he said.

But the LFD tests, which differ from the more established lab-analysed PCR tests, which can take up to 48 hours to return results, are the subject of fierce debate among public health experts and scientists.

Some reports suggest the tests, which were rolled out to universities in December, can miss between 30 and 60 per cent of people with the virus.

But Tim Peto, professor of medicine at Oxford university who has led studies into LFDs for the UK government, said what really matters is that the tests identify between 80 and 90 per cent of people who could infect others.

“I think lateral flow tests are going to make it much easier for us to live with Covid,” he said. “When you take people out of the school [who test positive] you’re reducing the risk in that school.”

Other scientists and public health experts have their reservations, pointing out that testing of the small number of children attending school during lockdown picked up few cases.

In the most recent week, 900,000 tests were taken at nurseries, primary schools and secondary schools, returning around 900 positive results, or one in 1,000 students. The latest Office for National Statistics Infection survey suggested that roughly 1 in 200 school-aged children are infected.

Jon Deeks, professor of biostatistics at Birmingham university and an outspoken critic of the mass testing strategy, said that as well as missing many infections, the tests also throw up false positives, forcing children to isolate unnecessarily. “A high proportion are going to be false positives, and everyone is going through an uncomfortable, unnecessary procedure,” he said.

Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said school leaders needed to “keep reminding people” that scientists have forecast an inevitable rise in infection rates after schools return.

He said conspiracy theories, such as stories about tests implanting microchips in pupils’ noses, have created alarm in some communities, while teachers may also have to deal with tensions if pupils refuse to wear face masks.

“The main thing school leaders are feeling is a vulnerability . . . There’s inevitable anxiety and uncertainty,” he said. “This is a pretty major social experiment.”