Teaching unions have safety concerns over schools’ return

Both the National Education Union and the NASUWT said that they want schools to reopen only when it is safe.

‘The data is more important than the date,’ said a spokesman for the NEU.

‘Education workers expect schools to reopen when it is safe to do so.’

The Civil Contingencies Authority is expected to announce when children will return to school at today’s 1pm media briefing.

States chief executive officer Paul Whitfield has said that this would be a phased return during the next stage of the Bailiwick’s exit from lockdown.

Whether this would be mid-March or after the Easter holidays depended on the success of stage one leading into stage two, he said.

The NEU spokesman echoed this by saying that any decision should reflect the situation in the Bailiwick rather than being driven by political decisions elsewhere.

‘It is particularly important that staff are given enough time to direct their preparations to the circumstances that will actually apply when schools reopen,’ he said.

Testing of staff and students was set to continue. ‘A testing regime is more likely to command support if can be effectively and fully implemented,’ said the spokesman.

‘Confidence levels are likely to be compromised if the operation of any home testing is perceived to be insufficiently completed.’

It has been announced that the Bailiwick would like to target specific employment groups with regards to vaccines, as well as rolling them out on an age-related basis, and some NEU members would like to see the adoption of employment-based criteria along the lines of those applied to health-care workers.

The spokesman went on to say that its members, along with colleagues across the local education service, had made a ‘huge professional contribution to the effort to combat the consequences of Covid-19’.

‘Our members recognise that their primary focus must be upon the educational welfare of students,’ said the spokesman.

But he said that the delivery of high standards of teaching and learning could suffer if some people in the community started to see schools as little more than a childcare facility to enable other areas of the economy to get back to normal.

NASUWT general secretary Dr Patrick Roach said that there was evidence to suggest that staff working in the schools may be more likely to be infected than the wider community. ‘Rates of virus prevalence amongst school staff [are reported to be] between three to four times higher than the prevalence rate for adults, and many cases in the recent outbreak in Guernsey were linked to schools,’ he said. ‘It is therefore right that extreme caution is exercised and that schools only open to all pupils once the scientific and health data indicates it is safe to do so.’

He said that once schools did reopen, all measures that can reasonably be taken should be put in place to ensure they were kept open safely and sustainably.

‘We have long called for a competent and effective system of routine testing of pupils and staff as part of the package of safety measures which should be in place to help protect safety.

‘We will be liaising with the States on the detail of how such a system will be introduced, as well as the broader safety mitigations and system of risk assessments which will need to be in operation in every school when all pupils do return.’