Why go back to school before numbers are down or before test and trace is up and running? Why do it just as people are getting used to the idea? Why choose year six, reception and year one?
Well, here's a thought or two:
1.The government is worried that we might be adjusting too well to the situation, have realised the gravity of it all and have accepted the constraints.
2.Many parents have started to see the benefit to their children’s and to their own mental health. One parent spoke of how much better she felt not having her regular calls from school about how her son hadn’t got his shirt tucked in properly. (Yes really this is what education has come to in this country). Another parent talked about how her daughter has blossomed away from the bullying culture that sadly and all too often prevails in the school system where exam grades are everything and pastoral care is an add-on.
2b. Parents have spotted that not only do children survive, but that they actually thrive without wearing the same clothes as everybody else, taking any high stakes tests, without having any inspectors bob up with suits and serious faces, without having to go into an isolation booth just for being themselves.
No inspections means no damning labels [How awful, how demeaning that a school resorts to tying a vinyl banner to the school gates saying "This school is Good"];it means league tables where schools are compared with each other. The result of this invidious comparison is that the first wave of aspirational parents see the writing on the wall and take their [inevitably high-achieving] children out of School B, then, when the proverbial hits the proverbial, the second wave of aspirational parents take their children out of school, or don't even send them to School B in the first place, and then School B is not now just not as good as School A, but now is not nearly as good. Behaviour spirals downwards. Academic results plummet. Teachers leave the school [and the profession], the aspirationals are nowhere to be seen. The school becomes an academy, and no amount of bullying men and women with suits and inflated salaries can rescue the situation, the school, and the poor poor children who got left behind.
None of this can happen if schools aren't open.
2b. Parents have spotted that not only do children survive, but that they actually thrive without wearing the same clothes as everybody else, taking any high stakes tests, without having any inspectors bob up with suits and serious faces, without having to go into an isolation booth just for being themselves.
No inspections means no damning labels [How awful, how demeaning that a school resorts to tying a vinyl banner to the school gates saying "This school is Good"];it means league tables where schools are compared with each other. The result of this invidious comparison is that the first wave of aspirational parents see the writing on the wall and take their [inevitably high-achieving] children out of School B, then, when the proverbial hits the proverbial, the second wave of aspirational parents take their children out of school, or don't even send them to School B in the first place, and then School B is not now just not as good as School A, but now is not nearly as good. Behaviour spirals downwards. Academic results plummet. Teachers leave the school [and the profession], the aspirationals are nowhere to be seen. The school becomes an academy, and no amount of bullying men and women with suits and inflated salaries can rescue the situation, the school, and the poor poor children who got left behind.
None of this can happen if schools aren't open.
So the government chooses an unlikely set of tactics. 1. Send Dominic Cummings to chase some wild geese in Barnard Castle, and then leak out this information. 2. Alongside this they start to relax the rules on visiting other people and other places. 3.Then they start to talk about poorer kids missing out on education. The poor who were in the isolation booths; the poor who were sent home because their parents couldn't afford to buy the correctly labelled uniform;
But instead of suggesting that schools identify poorer families, they select two random year groups [who are, by their very age least able social distance] and year 6. This in the guise of restoring some sort of normality. Well, Year 6 might well want closure, say goodbye to the school, but the new normal is 1/4 sized classes and 3/4 of them don't get their own teacher. The younger ones have no chance of social distancing without being in some sort of straight jackets, so instead they only become superspreaders. This emphasis on children being more important than school staff and parents is sentimental rubbish. If children's lives, health and happiness are paramount, then making them the bearers of a disease which kills these adults is hardly a good ideas.
In short, the government, having no ideas at all of their own, and being reluctant to take advice from experts, are grasping at straws, but people can't go back to work if one child is in school and the other isn't. Parents aren't going to feel comfortable taking one child to school and bringing the other back. And this, and this doesn't bear thinking about, Yr 1 and Reception will exchange germs and then share them with teachers and relatives, some of whom will die, and some of whom will become immune and be able to go back to work.
So why open schools again exactly?
But instead of suggesting that schools identify poorer families, they select two random year groups [who are, by their very age least able social distance] and year 6. This in the guise of restoring some sort of normality. Well, Year 6 might well want closure, say goodbye to the school, but the new normal is 1/4 sized classes and 3/4 of them don't get their own teacher. The younger ones have no chance of social distancing without being in some sort of straight jackets, so instead they only become superspreaders. This emphasis on children being more important than school staff and parents is sentimental rubbish. If children's lives, health and happiness are paramount, then making them the bearers of a disease which kills these adults is hardly a good ideas.
In short, the government, having no ideas at all of their own, and being reluctant to take advice from experts, are grasping at straws, but people can't go back to work if one child is in school and the other isn't. Parents aren't going to feel comfortable taking one child to school and bringing the other back. And this, and this doesn't bear thinking about, Yr 1 and Reception will exchange germs and then share them with teachers and relatives, some of whom will die, and some of whom will become immune and be able to go back to work.
So why open schools again exactly?
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