Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I expect politicians to tell the truth and where they don’t, I expect them to be held to account by peers and public alike. I also expect them to use the right words and not mislead the public.
Boris says getting children back to schools are a “national priority”. Gavin Williamson the Education Minister has said the same – the word “priority” features high in the word count related to schools. Boris is even prepared to close pubs so that children can’t drop in to them at break times for a quick pint before their maths lesson. Yet when the schools commissioner says that testing – weekly testing – needs to be part of the measures to keep schools safe, the Schools Minister Nick Gibb says that isn’t going to happen. His view is that schools have got lots of other wonderful plans for dealing with the virus and keeping children safe, like not letting them play football at playtimes and making them walk a different way around the school through the day. Who needs testing when you have all that? But, Gibbs adds, of course we’ll get a child tested if he or she shows symptoms, it’s only fair isn’t it.
Hygiene routines are fine if applied correctly (ie, using specialist cleaners rather than making the teachers wield a duster and a squirty bottle of disinfectant between lessons), but the virus is carried by people as well, and under Gibbs’ approach, a child or teacher carrying the virus is only going to be tested AFTER their symptoms show, by which time they’ve had the chance to infect the whole of their “bubble”. The consequences are serious: if any child in a bubble is tested positive, the whole bubble is sent home immediately, never mind whether the parents are able or not to make adjustments to their working day to now look after them at home in a new bout of quarantine.
So maybe our Government is following the Trump line (you know, the one where he said that children are actually immune – so there’s no need to clean anything at all is there if that’s the case), but it’s scarcely a “priority” if they aren’t taking all the measures possible to protect the pupils, the teachers and by extension the parents and relatives of those pupils and teachers. Testing, and the associated tracing, has been regarded by the WHO and world-wide (with the exception of a few fanatical leaders) as the bedrock of plans to combat the virus. Not apparently in schools.
So as I watch our neighbours have another party in their back garden attended by 20 or more people including a number of children, I wonder how many of those children might be in my son’s class “bubble” come September.