I found the 'closing schools' issue really difficult. If the policy had been to keep them open, it would not have been reasonable – nor possibly legal – to require teaching and support staff to work. So an incremental number would be off sick due Covid, and others 'by choice' due medical vulnerability in family. Thus putting head teachers in impossible situation – stay open with fewer staff (changing daily), maintain teaching/childcare and duty of care to all whilst complying with laws eg health and safety. Many schools already operate close to breaking point. Some heads would have had no choice other than to close despite government policy. The Nightingale option wouldn't work. There would have been a media blame-fest. Closing schools was probably the least-worst option.
I should have added, my opinion is just that. It would be rather more useful if the Covid inquiry could discover the method, process etc by which HMG came to its decision.
Thanks for the kind comment, and thanks for the thoughts on the schools situation. I certainly don't think it's as black and white as "schools should definitely never have closed" - as you say, if they'd stayed open in March 2020 then I think a lot of people would have kept their kids home anyway, so we'd have ended up with a two-tier system by default.
In fact, I think in general there's a perfectly legitimate argument that it was right to close schools when we did - that is, that when deaths are as high as they were, you want to do everything possible to reduce transmission as fast as possible, because that will save the maximum number of lives. So even if it's only a 3% reduction on daily transmission (say), that would still be worth having because it would compound over time, and it's potentially a big saving on 1000 or more daily deaths. But then that argument doesn't really apply so much when deaths are much lower - there's a sort of law of diminishing returns that means such measures save fewer lives each day - so what was less forgiveable in my eyes was keeping schools closed for so long.
So in retrospect (and even at the time), I think reopening for everyone after half term in May 2020 would have been fine - for a lot of kids it turned into a long time away from from March to September (because of the summer holidays), with less and less benefit from a "saving lives" point of view as time went on.
But none of these questions were easy or obvious, I think!
I fully supported school closing at the start as there was no other pratical option party due to the level of teachers off sick. This is very different to believing schools should have remained closed for as long as they did. I also questioned at the time why schools could not offer each child at least few hours of outdoor activities per week after the 1st few weeks of lockdown.
I found the 'closing schools' issue really difficult. If the policy had been to keep them open, it would not have been reasonable – nor possibly legal – to require teaching and support staff to work. So an incremental number would be off sick due Covid, and others 'by choice' due medical vulnerability in family. Thus putting head teachers in impossible situation – stay open with fewer staff (changing daily), maintain teaching/childcare and duty of care to all whilst complying with laws eg health and safety. Many schools already operate close to breaking point. Some heads would have had no choice other than to close despite government policy. The Nightingale option wouldn't work. There would have been a media blame-fest. Closing schools was probably the least-worst option.
I should have added, my opinion is just that. It would be rather more useful if the Covid inquiry could discover the method, process etc by which HMG came to its decision.
Thanks for the kind comment, and thanks for the thoughts on the schools situation. I certainly don't think it's as black and white as "schools should definitely never have closed" - as you say, if they'd stayed open in March 2020 then I think a lot of people would have kept their kids home anyway, so we'd have ended up with a two-tier system by default.
In fact, I think in general there's a perfectly legitimate argument that it was right to close schools when we did - that is, that when deaths are as high as they were, you want to do everything possible to reduce transmission as fast as possible, because that will save the maximum number of lives. So even if it's only a 3% reduction on daily transmission (say), that would still be worth having because it would compound over time, and it's potentially a big saving on 1000 or more daily deaths. But then that argument doesn't really apply so much when deaths are much lower - there's a sort of law of diminishing returns that means such measures save fewer lives each day - so what was less forgiveable in my eyes was keeping schools closed for so long.
So in retrospect (and even at the time), I think reopening for everyone after half term in May 2020 would have been fine - for a lot of kids it turned into a long time away from from March to September (because of the summer holidays), with less and less benefit from a "saving lives" point of view as time went on.
But none of these questions were easy or obvious, I think!
I fully supported school closing at the start as there was no other pratical option party due to the level of teachers off sick. This is very different to believing schools should have remained closed for as long as they did. I also questioned at the time why schools could not offer each child at least few hours of outdoor activities per week after the 1st few weeks of lockdown.