Schools in England will not reopen after the February half-term
Addressing MPs in the Commons, Boris Johnson said there is not enough data to justify all pupils returning to the classroom.Instead, the Prime Minister said it was the government’s ambition for them to return from 8 March.
Johnson told the House of Commons that they also do not have enough data to know how “quickly the combination of vaccines and lockdown” will ease the pressure.
We are still in a “perilous situation”, he says adding that the overall picture should be clearer by mid-February.
He also said that in the week starting 22 Feb, he will publish the results of a review “and the plan for taking the country out of lockdown”.
It will depend on the vaccination programme, and “deaths falling at the pace we would expect”.
Johnson said it will be a gradual and phased approach beginning with schools.
“The first sign of normality should be pupils going back to classrooms,” he says.
Johnson said that children have been hit by the “huge impact” of school closures, and that to compensate for that he is pledging £300m of new money to schools for tutoring – with extra initiatives for summer schools also planned.
Finishing his speech, the PM says: “As we inoculate more people hour by hour, this is the time to hold our nerve in the endgame in the battle against the virus.
“Our goal now must be to bide the extra weeks we need to immunise the most vulnerable and get this virus under control, so that together we can defeat this most wretched disease.”
Commenting on the Prime Minister’s statement to the Commons on his roadmap for schools to begin opening more fully, Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said:
“We all want schools to open, but like the Prime Minister we want them to open when it is safe to do so. This has to be done sustainably and safely.
“We agree with Boris Johnson that this is a balancing act. He has a duty to assess the easing of lockdown according to the progress and effects of vaccination, a reduction in cases and the various other criteria he has set out. But in setting out a potential date of 8 March, falling once again into his characteristic and too often misplaced optimism, he is pre-empting a decision that will have to be made in mid-February at the very earliest.
“If we come out too early, we will end up in lockdown again. Hinging his argument for schools according to the first four vaccine groups developing immunity by 8 March, is not enough in itself. This may protect the elderly and most vulnerable adults in the population, but it does not protect parents. It fails completely to recognise the role schools have played in community transmission. The Prime Minister has already forgotten what he told the nation at the beginning of this lockdown, that schools are a ‘vector for transmission’.
“When schools were reopened after the Spring 2020 lockdown, 1 in 1,000 were infected with coronavirus . Currently 1 in 55 people have coronavirus and R is only just below 1 , so cases are falling slowly. It would have been fine to have set out a roadmap, but to suggest a date at this stage runs the risk of creating false hope. The Prime Minister may now be immune to the embarrassment of u-turns, but school leaders, teachers and support staff, not to mention families and students, are utterly exhausted by them.”
