Treated with contempt

"Primary pupils do not and have not needed to be kept apart in the classroom" From 24 June – Coronavirus – Daily update to all early years, children’s social care, schools and further education providers

With the 15 words above in an update email today, the DfE has shown in just how much contempt it holds the teaching profession. As a Chief Executive of a Multi-Academy Trust, I am not trusted with details. So I cannot tell whether this contempt originates from Downing Street or from Gt Peter Street, although I suspect the former.

To get the detail out of the way early, the innocuous clause above contains an outright falsehood. The DfE is trying to suggest that it has always maintained that social distancing was not necessary in Primary Schools. This is not a cock-up, this is a re-writing of history (one of my colleagues has pointed me towards a good SchoolsWeek article highlighting exactly this). When challenged, it is going to fall back on the only sentence in the hundreds of pages of guidance it has issued to schools over the last 15 weeks that contains anything even close the idea that it does not want and has not repeatedly asked for social distancing measures to be implemented in primary schools. 

That sentence, issued on June 1st says,

"We know that, unlike older children and adults, early years and primary age children cannot be expected to remain 2 metres apart from each other and staff. In deciding to bring more children back to early years and schools, we are taking this into account."

Acknowledging that something is probably impossible amongst hundreds of pages of encouraging people to strive for it nonetheless is not the same as pretending that you never asked for it in the first place.

What follows is speculation but as this is a blog, I am allowed to speculate. I encourage anyone who can correct errors in my guesswork to point me towards evidence that I am wrong.

I am told that SAGE, when modelling the scenarios for Covid, always assumed that social distancing in primary schools would be impossible. This is not an unreasonable assumption. Small children like physical contact. But if this were the case, it would have been nice for them to tell us. Conversely everything that issued from the DfE over the Covid lockdown was about the paramount importance of 2m+, islolation, test and trace, 72 hours to leave contaminated spaces, PPE and all the rest.

The stress under which the primary school system was placed was immense. I would not be surprised if headteachers have died from the stress, although I must be clear that I do not know that this has happened. 

Behind all this lies a really difficult political choice. Whilst the impact of allowing the Covid virus to progress largely unchecked through the UK will cost tens of thousands of lives, it is also possible that keeping the UK economy locked down might cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The UK government has a choice to keep schools closed and society locked down to contain the spread of the virus and with that condemn this country to a recession it has not experienced since the Black Death in the 14th century. Or ease the restrictions to allow the economy to recover and by doing so allow people to die.

There is something really terrifying in that phrase, "Allow people to die". It has echoes of WWI and "Lions led by donkeys". But the greatest good of the greatest number is the principal responsibility of government and no-one said it would be easy. But if hundreds if not thousands of dead teachers and support staff, of which many BAME, is the price that we need to pay to avoid hundreds of thousands dying through a terrifying recession, then the very least we can do is tell them the truth about the risks they are taking.

If you want to have moral authority, you must first have morals.