Covid-19: Impact on Attendance in Education Settings Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Education
Caroline Lucas
Main Page: Caroline Lucas (Green Party - Brighton, Pavilion)Department Debates - View all Caroline Lucas's debates with the Department for Education
Covid-19: Impact on Attendance in Education Settings
Caroline Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
I do not want to pre-empt the decision across Government on the next stage, but our direction is very clear about lifting the restrictions and ensuring that children are not in a situation where they have to bubble. That is very much part of the course of the road map, and of course we would very much expect that our children would not be facing that in September, as my right hon. Friend has said.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green) [V]
The Secretary of State says that his priority is to keep children in school, yet hundreds of thousands of them are missing yet more precious time in the classroom as well as important end-of-term rituals, and families are angry and desperate. For many months, organisations such as the Health and Safety Executive and the Royal Society of Medicine have been saying that one of the basic things that needs to be done to protect our children is to ensure better ventilation in all classrooms. People who live in New York, for example, can consult a public website to see the ventilation status of every single classroom in the state, and there has been serious investment in ventilation and filtration there. Why has the Secretary of State not done something similar here to introduce those basic mitigation measures and fast-track the assessment of testing pilots? Living with covid must not mean dumping all the risk on our children because the Education Secretary has not acted with anything like the urgency and ambition this crisis demands.
Gavin Williamson
At every stage, we have put in all the protective measures that are required in order to be able to keep children safe and ensure that they are back in the classroom and have the opportunity to learn.