Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of covid-19 infection rates among staff in schools.

The Department intends to publish school workforce attendance data on 19 January. This data will be included as part of the publication ‘Attendance in education and early years settings during the coronavirus (Covid 19) outbreak’ and will be available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/attendance-in-education-and-early-years-settings-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak.

As set out in the Children’s Task and Finish Group report, the Office for National Statistics COVID-19 Infection Survey data from 2 September to 16 October show no evidence of difference in the rates of teachers/education workers testing positive for COVID-19 compared to key workers and other professions. This is seen even when combining different categories of school staff in the analysis. The report is available here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/948617/s0998-tfc-update-to-4-november-2020-paper-on-children-schools-transmission.pdf.

The Schools Infection Survey (SIS) confirms that, even with testing, there are low levels of infection in schools. As staff included in the SIS study are in school, these figures will reflect the levels of infection without clear symptoms in teachers only, as symptomatic individuals should not be attending. Whilst the SIS data may suggest a higher rate of infection among secondary school staff included in the survey than in primary schools, the estimates have wide and overlapping confidence intervals, and the difference is not statistically significant. More broadly, caution should be taken when interpreting the SIS findings: the SIS data is unweighted, and so cannot be generalised to the school population as a whole.

Analysis of the Department’s attendance data includes reports of those absent with confirmed COVID-19. The Department’s attendance data indicates that, whilst the percentage of students with confirmed infection is greater in secondary school than primary school students, the percentage of teachers with confirmed infection appears to be similar across primary and secondary schools.