Education Route Map: Covid-19

Kate Osborne Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kate Osborne (Jarrow) (Lab) [V]]

I pay tribute to the schools and colleges in the Jarrow constituency that have gone the extra mile during this pandemic in ensuring that the impact on their pupils’ learning has been as minimal as possible. We must not forget that schools have never really been fully closed.

I want to see all children and all young people safely back in schools, colleges and higher education for their learning and wellbeing without any further disruption. This must be a priority. However, the Government must do everything to prevent a return to the scenes of last year where school staff and children were having to isolate, often multiple times, meaning further lost learning, further disruption, and an increase in infection rates in the community. The Government must rethink and set out a plan to introduce measures including effective mass testing, creating space with Nightingale classrooms, improving ventilation, vaccinating school staff, and increasing the financial support to allow schools to introduce covid safety measures.

Although cases are falling, along with hospitalisation rates, it remains true that cases are three times higher now than when schools reopened last September. From September to December 2020, covid infection rates rose among secondary and primary age groups, which meant that by Christmas, secondary students were the most infected age group and primaries the second most infected. Rushing all pupils back to school on 8 March without all safety measures effectively in place could potentially see our schools become once again, in the Prime Minister’s words, a “vector of transmission” into the community.

Why not take the same route as the devolved nations, whose cautious, phased approach to school opening will enable their Governments to assess the impact that a return to the classroom will have on the R rate and to make necessary adjustments to their plans? This is surely the common-sense approach, because the current plan to test all secondary school pupils three times on-site is a huge logistical challenge and will have a massive impact on teaching and learning time. That lost teaching time will undoubtedly have a knock-on effect on the wellbeing and mental health of children, and there is no long-term plan in the Government’s education recovery package to mitigate this. It would be better to plan and implement a successful and sustainable wider opening alongside vaccinating education staff as a priority. I urge the Minister and the Government to get it right this time to ensure that this is the final return to school and that they are guided by the science, along with listening to the trade unions, whose members work in this sector and who know how this should be done. I ask that the Health and Education Ministers listen to this and act.