Pupils pose no risk of spreading Covid, says study

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A landmark coronavirus study has found the risk of transmission in classrooms is minimal, ratcheting up pressure on the Education Secretary to fully reopen schools. 

Boris Johnson is understood to have warned that Gavin Williamson’s ‘head will be on the chopping block’ if pupils are not back in lessons next month.

The Prime Minister has declared resuming classes a ‘national priority’ and is planning an advertising blitz to urge anxious parents to send their child back to class.

His campaign was yesterday bolstered by encouraging scientific evidence which found a low threat of catching infection in schools.

Government Sage adviser Professor Russell Viner outlined the forthcoming Public Health England study and stressed that reopening schools was ‘imperative’.

‘A new study that has been done in UK schools confirms there is very little evidence that the virus is transmitted in schools,’ he told the Sunday Times.

‘This is some of the largest data you will find on schools anywhere. Britain has done very well in terms of thinking of collecting data in schools.’

Prof Viner, also president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said keeping schools shut would take a further toll on both young people’s academic attainment and mental health. 

Insisting the reopening of schools was non-negotiable, he followed chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty in suggesting activities such as going to the pub may have to be sacrificed as a trade-off.  

The PHE study, which will be published later this year, tested more than 20,000 pupils and 100 teachers. 

It is hoped to allay the concerns of wary teacher unions, which thwarted ministers’ initial attempts to resume classes for fears of staff catching the virus.

Reopening schools has so far been a thorny issue because of the opposition from union bosses, who were last night accused of ‘nit-picking’ after releasing an exhaustive list of 200 safety demands.

But the Prime Minister has threatened Mr Williamson with the sack if he does not succeed in reopening schools in September, according to the Sunday Times.

Mr Johnson today heralded the resuming of lessons a ‘moral duty’ and ‘crucial’ for pupils’ ‘welfare, their health and for their future.’  

Writing in the Mail on Sunday, the PM said: ‘The education of our children is crucial for their welfare, their health and for their future. 

‘That is why it is a national priority to get all pupils back into school in September. The message I have given to Ministers and civil servants is this: we can do it – and we will do it. Social justice demands it.’

He spoke of the ‘uplifting sight… as millions of parents rose to the challenge of educating their children’ amid the added pressures of lockdown, but said that had to end. 

Ministers are poised to lock horns with union bosses who have unveiled a list of demands if teachers are to go back next month.

Dr Mary Bousted, head of the National Education Union, urged schools to ignore ‘threatening noises’ from the Government and refuse to reopen if they feel it is unsafe. 

The National Education Union has urged its 450,000 teachers to ‘escalate’ action if their schools do not adhere to their 200-strong Covid-secure checklist.

The demands included assurances the working day will not be lengthened, children waiting to be picked up to be kept isolated, and support for staff suffering workload anxiety. 

Education select committee chair Robert Halfon MP last night hit out at the demands and told the Sun on Sunday: ‘It is incredible not one of these 200 nitpicking questions asks the most important thing of all – what’s best for the kids?’ 

To underscore the importance of getting children back into lessons, the PM is drawing up a PR blitz which will urge parents to send their children back to lessons. 

Not a single confirmed case of a school pupil passing on coronavirus to their teacher exists anywhere in the world, says a leading expert 

By Stephen Adams, Medical Editor for The Mail on Sunday

No confirmed cases exist anywhere in the world of school pupils passing on Covid to their teachers, an expert has said.

All the available evidence points to children being poor spreaders of the virus, said Professor Mark Woolhouse, who cast doubt on the theory that reopening schools will trigger a deadly second wave.

Last week, a modelling forecast published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health warned that opening schools across the UK in September could lead to a tsunami of new cases, more than twice the size of the first wave.

But Prof Woolhouse said a second study published in the medical journal the same day, which found infected children in Australian schools had passed the virus on to hardly anyone, had been largely ignored.

During the first wave, 15 schools and ten nurseries in the state of New South Wales reported 27 cases where children or staff had attended while infectious with Covid-19. 

Fifteen of these ‘index’ cases were staff and 12 were children.

These 12 children were in close contact with 103 staff, found contact tracers. 

Only one of them was discovered to have passed the virus on to a member of staff in a single instance, although this is understood to have occurred in a nursery. 

Nor did infected children pass the virus on to their classmates to any great degree, with that happening in only two of 649 close contacts – a virus ‘attack rate’ of just 0.3 per cent. 

By contrast, the 15 infected staff members passed it on to 4.4 per cent of colleagues who were close contacts (to seven out of 160).

Prof Woolhouse, head of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, said: ‘Science progresses by people publishing research. So what we do as carefully as we possibly can is scan what’s been published in the literature to see if there are any reported cases, in this case of a child transmitting to a teacher in the classroom.

‘The fact that there aren’t any that we can find, and there still aren’t, doesn’t mean that it’s not possible in principle and doesn’t mean that it won’t happen on occasion. 

‘But it does suggest that out of all the ways that we see and have found this virus to transmit – and remember, there are thousands and thousands of transmission events that have been inferred [from contact tracing] – out of all those thousands, still we can’t find a single one involving a child transmitting to a teacher in a classroom.’

He added: ‘Even if this virus doesn’t spread easily among the children, it certainly will spread among staff if it gets the opportunity. 

‘The evidence so far is that the most dangerous room in the school is not the classroom, it’s the staff room. So schools need to pay attention to that, and not take their eye off the right ball.’

Prof Woolhouse advises the Government on coronavirus as a member of the Scientific Pandemic Group on Modelling (SPI-M), although he stressed he was speaking in a personal capacity. 

His comments come amid renewed calls for caution by teaching unions, with the National Education Union urging schools to ignore ‘threatening noises’ from the Government and to refuse to reopen if they feel it is unsafe.

The unions will have felt emboldened to speak out by last week’s modelling study, by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and University College London (UCL). 

Academics concluded reopening schools without improving contact tracing could trigger a second wave up to 2.3 times the size of the first, leading to 250,000 more deaths.

Prof Woolhouse said that apocalyptic outcome was ‘highly unlikely given the current evidence’. 

He added: ‘I’m slightly worried that, just through an accident of timing, schools will get blamed for pushing the R number over 1. But all activity can contribute to R rising, not just schools.’

Missing out on school is disaster that lasts forever – as the huge damage inflicted on youngsters by a long break from the classroom is laid bare by several new studies

By Julie Henry for The Mail On Sunday

The huge damage inflicted on youngsters by a long break from school has been laid bare by several new studies.

Interrupted schooling has deep and long-lasting effects on children, according to Oxford University researchers who used data from school closures in a disaster zone. They said the study ‘has relevance for other disasters, including the Covid-19 pandemic’.

The study found that children’s test scores in areas of Pakistan hit by a 2005 earthquake were between one- and-a-half and two years behind their peers in untouched areas. 

Those affected face losing 15 per cent of their earnings every year for the rest of their lives.

In another study, US researchers looked at the effects of the ‘summer slide’ – when children forget over the long holidays what they have previously learned – to estimate the impact of school closures caused by the coronavirus.

It said students are likely to return to the classroom with less than 50 per cent of the knowledge and skills they had in maths.

Meanwhile, a major UK study into the long-term consequences of the Covid crisis on the younger generation is being undertaken by Exeter University.

Dr Lee Elliot Major, the university’s professor of social mobility, said: ‘What is already clear is that the drastic losses in learning will have profound impacts on the lives of many children and young people.

‘Every extra week away from face-to-face teaching adds to the cumulative damage over a lifetime. We need to assess the short-term risks of containing the virus against the longer-term, but in many ways more profound, risks of damaging the prospects for a whole generation.’

Natalie Perera, executive director of the independent Education Policy Institute (EPI), said: ‘Pupils across the country have suffered huge learning loss since the lockdown began, with the most disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils hit the hardest by school closures.

‘The period of disruption faced by schools is likely to have increased the achievement gap between the poorest pupils and the rest, which is already 18 months of learning by the end of compulsory education.

‘The Government must offer maximum support to schools so that they are able to continue with pupils’ education in a safe and secure environment.’

Maura Regan, chief executive officer of Bishop Hogarth Catholic Education Trust, which runs 18 academies in the North-East, told The Mail on Sunday that schools ‘owe it to society’ to have staff back working so that children’s education can get back on track and parents can return to work.

‘In essence we need to get children in school in September. I’d like to see us back full time and back permanently full time,’ she said.

‘There is a balance to be struck between the risk and the priority of getting children back and the economy going.

‘But the detrimental impact on children, especially the most vulnerable who might not have the drive or the parental support, is huge.’

Other research shows that the least well-off children have suffered the most from being out of school. 

An Institute for Fiscal Studies report found children from better-off households are spending 30 per cent more time each day on educational activities than children from the poorest fifth of homes.

BORIS JOHNSON: Keeping our schools closed a moment longer than is absolutely necessary is socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible

The education of our children is crucial for their welfare, their health and for their future. That is why it is a national priority to get all pupils back into school in September.

The message I have given to Ministers and civil servants is this: we can do it – and we will do it. Social justice demands it.

Back in March, we had no option but to close schools to all but vulnerable children and those of critical workers, as part of our wider effort to protect the NHS and save lives.

One of the most uplifting sights as our country came together during the lockdown was the transformation of living rooms and kitchens into classrooms, as millions of parents rose to the challenge of educating their children.

For many, this was achieved while juggling the pressures of work and childcare, compounded by the mounting toll of the restrictions necessarily imposed by our fight against coronavirus – swings and slides locked up, playdates banned, grandparents unable to help.

It was – and for many families continues to be – a truly Herculean effort of which I will always be in awe. It was also supported by many brilliant teachers providing remote learning for their pupils, the thousands of laptops and tablets we bought and shipped to the children who needed them to access online resources, and the stunning creation of Oak National Academy, which developed an entire online curriculum in just a matter of weeks.

But we are in a different situation now to the one we faced earlier this year.

Thanks to the enormous sacrifices made by the British people, we have made very significant progress in our fight against the virus. The number of infections has been forced down from an estimated 157,000 in early May to around 28,000 at the start of this month.

Scientists have learned more about how the virus spreads and how we can control it.

Crucially, studies have shown that children face a much lower risk than adults.

This pandemic isn’t over, and the last thing any of us can afford to do is become complacent.

But now that we know enough to reopen schools to all pupils safely, we have a moral duty to do so.

Because there is ultimately no substitute for a child learning at school to give them the knowledge, skills and wherewithal to succeed in life.

It’s why we’ve had compulsory schooling in this country for 140 years, and the evidence is incontrovertible.

Time spent out of class means lower average academic attainment, with a lasting effect on future life chances. The less children are in school, the worse it is for their health. Sport England reports one in three children has done less physical activity in lockdown, with many suffering from poorer mental health, including through reduced access to vital support.

Most painfully of all, the costs of school closure have fallen disproportionately on the most disadvantaged, the very children who need school the most. Surveys estimate that while the majority of pupils have been learning at home, as many as a quarter of pupils were doing less than two hours of school work a day.

Children in the richest families spent over 75 minutes more per day on home-schooling than those in the poorest, and one study predicted that the attainment gap between children from economically deprived households and their peers could widen by more than a third.

The Children’s Commissioner has reported increased risk of exposure to domestic violence, exploitation and addiction, both at home and on the streets.

The longer this continues, the more likely it is that some will tumble out of education, employment or training altogether, never to return. On top of all this, there are the spiralling economic costs of parents and carers unable to work without the school or wraparound childcare they depend on; and the devastating long-term cost looming from the stunting of our children’s future productivity.

This damage is taking place all over the world, with the United Nations Secretary General last week warning of a ‘generational catastrophe that could waste untold human potential, undermine decades of progress and exacerbate entrenched inequalities’.

We simply cannot allow this to continue.

Keeping our schools closed a moment longer than absolutely necessary is socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible.

I have always believed that talent is uniformly distributed but opportunity is not, and the first step to changing that is by helping those who have fallen behind to catch up.

So we are investing £1 billion in catch-up support, including a new £350 million National Tutoring Programme. We have announced £14 billion extra for schools and a new ten-year school building programme, as part of the Government’s mission to build back better.

But first of all we must open the school gates to all pupils once again.

The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies has advised that the risk to children themselves of becoming severely ill from coronavirus is low.

Our test and trace system is up and running – already, it has identified almost 200,000 people who might otherwise inadvertently spread the virus, and advised them to self-isolate – and we have worked closely with teaching unions and school leaders on measures to ensure that our schools are Covid secure.

Grouping children into bubbles, staggered drop-off times, regular handwashing and providing schools and colleges with a number of home-testing kits for those who would be unable to access a testing centre.

It is a detailed plan for getting all of our children back to school in a way that is safe.

In June, we began the phased return of Reception, Year 1 and Year 6 and, after some initial apprehension, many parents reported how much happier their children were and what a relief it was to be back.

Now we must all work together to bring this best practice to the task of reopening schools to all pupils in September.

Nothing will have a greater effect on the life chances of our children and nothing is more important for the future of our country.