The National Education Union has today written to the Prime
Minister and the Secretary of State for Education calling for new
measures to be put in place to ensure the safest possible return
of schools and colleges on the 4th of January.
With increasing infection rates and a new more easily
transmitted strain of the virus the NEU is calling for
-
Online learning for the first two weeks of the Spring
term except for key workers and vulnerable children to reduce
cases amongst students and get testing set up.
-
Directors of Public Health to set up a testing system to
be in place that would enable all children to be tested prior
to a return to person-to-person teaching.
-
The 2-week period from the 4th of January to be used to
begin vaccinating education staff alongside NHS and Care
staff.
The text of the NEU's
letter to the Prime Minister and Secretary of State is copied
below
Dear
Prime Minister
and Secretary of State for Education,
The new variant of the
virus will mean that we are all concerned about the best way to
see a return to education on the 4th of January.
It was clear at the end of
last term that cases were going up sharply amongst primary and
secondary children; the ONS Coronavirus Infection Survey suggests
that case rates in those two groups were the highest of any of
the age demographics.
Now, we all hope that cases
amongst school children will fall across the Christmas period
because schools are closed. But we have to be concerned about the
new variant having perhaps 70% more transmissibility, and the
suggestions that increased transmission amongst school age pupils
might underlie the increase in cases before
Christmas.
We want to work with the
Government to ensure that children who are positive do not infect
other children who might then infect their families or the school
staff; we do have a proper concern for school and college staff
that have no PPE or effective social distancing in their
classroom settings, as well as for the parents and carers of the
children they teach. Reducing infections in school and college
would also mean attendance would be higher than the low levels we
were seeing last term.
We support the desire of
the Government to have an accurate and effective system of mass
testing which could ensure that children who were asymptomatic
but positive did not return to the classroom until they were no
longer infectious, and which could find asymptomatic cases in
further weeks as well.
However, we are concerned
that such a system will not be in place for January
4th.
So the National Education
Union would like to discuss three steps with you that we believe
could radically reduce the overall disruption to education across
the Spring Term.
Firstly, we believe that
you should allow and encourage heads in ensuring that first two
weeks of learning should be online, apart from key worker and
vulnerable children, to allow cases to fall further and to allow
time to properly set up the system of mass testing. You will be
aware that the Scottish Government has put that step in place. We
hope that you would be able to support parents who had to stay at
home as a result of this and that Government will do
whatever it takes to ensure that all students have the devices
and facilities to continue learning online.
Secondly, we believe that
you should ask the local Directors of Public Health to set the
system of mass testing. We believe that the Government could
support them via a national advertising campaign to find the
staff and volunteers needed, as you did in finding the volunteers
to help the NHS at an earlier stage. We are confident that
schools and colleges and our members would be really pleased to
work alongside the Directors of Public Health to ensure that the
mass testing does then happen. We would hope that such a system
could then test all children, at their school site, prior to a
return to in-person teaching from 18th January
.
Thirdly, we believe that
you should use that two-week period to begin to vaccinate
education staff, alongside NHS and care staff. Part of the
disruption to education, and the extra stress on school leaders,
is caused both by the relatively high levels of staff absence due
to the virus and self-isolation and by the fear that vulnerable
staff have about working without PPE or social
distancing.
We hope you will
consider these suggestions favourably. We would be very pleased
to discuss them further with you and to work with you on ways of
implementing them.
Yours
sincerely,
Mary Bousted
Kevin Courtney
Joint General
Secretary Joint General Secretary
