Back to school

I wonder what and how I’d be thinking if our children were younger and about to return to school. During ‘lockdown’, we’d have been heavily involved in home education, for sure, not least because we know just how damaging those months of school closures have been. ‘Kids’, as Boris Johnson pointedly and always calls children, lose out from not being in school, particularly those from what Johnson might quietly regard the lower-orders. So, we must believe him that schools are safe, right, and it’s okay for our ‘kids’ to go back? I’m not so sure.

The reason I am not sure is simple: in every aspect of dealing with COVID-19, Johnson’s government has messed up. We locked down too late, the protective ring his government threw around care homes (correction: they didn’t) caused the premature deaths of 20,000 people, the farce of both the telephone app and the track and trace fiasco and, lest we forget, the lack of sufficient and good quality PPE. Not only have they been completely incompetent from the very start, there is no evidence that they are competent today.

Let us be crystal clear why schools are opening: to keep the economy functioning, or more accurately, bumping along the bottom. I simply refuse to believe that Johnson and his right wing ideologues have any interest in children’s education. If they were being honest with us – and this is the notoriously dishonest Johnson we are talking about – they’d say it’s about the economy, stupid.

From what I can tell, children will be in ‘bubbles’. But not bubbles of two or three, but of two or three hundred. We know that children are less likely to die from COVID-19 than adults, so the idea is that if they infect each other, no harm will be done. Which in that sense is probably right. But hang on, is it’s that simple, why are some people anxious? Well, it’s quite simple, actually. Teachers are older than children – you have to get up early to catch me out – and they are more likely to suffer more. Older teachers could even face death, especially if they have underlying health conditions. So are school support workers, school bus drivers, parents and grandparents who often play major roles in their grandchildren’s lives.

So, what happens if there is a spike at a school? Worldwide experience tells us there will be spikes and lots of them. What’s the plan, then? 300 children in a bubble, a few get the virus, will all of them go straight into isolation? And will their parents and grandparents go into isolation, too? I don’t need to explain all the likely consequences but let me say this: many children are sent by their parents to schools some distance away, sometimes by bus, sometimes not. They then mingle with their local friends and those they see at their often far-flung schools. It is not hard to see what happens next, is it? That’s why I wince when politicians say, unequivocally, that schools are all safe. They are, in the main, safe, but with such a virulent virus still doing the rounds, nowhere is completely safe.

That’s why when we say children should go back to school, we do so in the knowledge that things could quickly unravel. And it is what the government says and does at that stage that matters more than anything. At the moment, we are concerned that Johnson does not have a Plan B. Teaching professionals are concerned he doesn’t even have a Plan A.

It’s no different to when health secretary Matt Hancock says offices are safe places to work. This is at least partly true, perhaps even mainly true, but it is not completely true. There is a small risk children might die from COVID-19 and a much larger risk they might infect adults who might then die.

I’d be very concerned if I had small children at the moment. The world in which they are growing up is far from normal and not a bit frightening. The things my generation took for granted no longer happen. The future is unknown. I’d definitely send my children to school, not least because I’d need to work in order to put bread on the table but I’d be very worried for people with whom they came into contact.

Boris Johnson is many things, none of them good, and above all he is a liar, a shyster and a charlatan. And I have concluded the only way to understand what he says is to imagine the precise opposite of anything he says to be the truth.