Ministers plan to drop restrictions on classroom “bubbles” to let all pupils attend school full-time in England from September, the education secretary has said.
Gavin Williamson said lifting the 15-pupil cap and expanding the size of protective bubbles would enable whole classes of 30 to be taught together, overcoming the lack of space that has resulted in schools having to rotate year groups.
“We’ve been creating bubbles of children in the classroom, creating a protective environment for those children. Currently that is at 15 – what we would be looking at doing is expanding those bubbles to include the whole class,” Williamson told the Downing Street coronavirus press briefing on Friday.
He said further guidance on safety would be issued in the next two weeks.
The UK coronavirus alert level was lowered from 4 to 3 on Friday, meaning transmission is no longer judged to be “high or exponentially rising”.
Williamson’s comments echoed earlier remarks by Boris Johnson, who said “watch this space” when asked about the physical distancing requirement for schools being cut from 2 metres to 1 metre, “if the science allows”.
“I want every child, every pupil, every student, back in September. I’m sure it can be done,” the prime minister said during a visit to a school in Hertfordshire to publicise the government’s £1bn catch-up plan for schools in England announced on Friday.
The plan was quickly criticised for ignoring the needs of 1 million young people aged 16-18, and for being an inadequate response to “the biggest challenge facing schools” in generations.
Quick GuideWill there be a second wave of coronavirus?
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In recent days the UK has seen a sudden sharp increase in Covid-19 infection numbers, leading to fears that a second wave of cases is beginning.
Epidemics of infectious diseases behave in different ways but the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed more than 50 million people is regarded as a key example of a pandemic that occurred in multiple waves, with the latter more severe than the first. It has been replicated – albeit more mildly – in subsequent flu pandemics. Until now that had been what was expected from Covid-19.
How and why multiple-wave outbreaks occur, and how subsequent waves of infection can be prevented, has become a staple of epidemiological modelling studies and pandemic preparation, which have looked at everything from social behaviour and health policy to vaccination and the buildup of community immunity, also known as herd immunity.
Is there evidence of coronavirus coming back in a second wave?
This is being watched very carefully. Without a vaccine, and with no widespread immunity to the new disease, one alarm is being sounded by the experience of Singapore, which has seen a sudden resurgence in infections despite being lauded for its early handling of the outbreak.
Although Singapore instituted a strong contact tracing system for its general population, the disease re-emerged in cramped dormitory accommodation used by thousands of foreign workers with inadequate hygiene facilities and shared canteens.
Singapore’s experience, although very specific, has demonstrated the ability of the disease to come back strongly in places where people are in close proximity and its ability to exploit any weakness in public health regimes set up to counter it.
In June 2020, Beijing suffered from a new cluster of coronavirus cases which caused authorities to re-implement restrictions that China had previously been able to lift. In the UK, the city of Leicester was unable to come out of lockdown because of the development of a new spike of coronavirus cases. Clusters also emerged in Melbourne, requiring a re-imposition of lockdown conditions.
What are experts worried about?
Conventional wisdom among scientists suggests second waves of resistant infections occur after the capacity for treatment and isolation becomes exhausted. In this case the concern is that the social and political consensus supporting lockdowns is being overtaken by public frustration and the urgent need to reopen economies.
However Linda Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh, says “‘Second wave’ isn’t a term that we would use at the current time, as the virus hasn’t gone away, it’s in our population, it has spread to 188 countries so far, and what we are seeing now is essentially localised spikes or a localised return of a large number of cases.”
The overall threat declines when susceptibility of the population to the disease falls below a certain threshold or when widespread vaccination becomes available.
In general terms the ratio of susceptible and immune individuals in a population at the end of one wave determines the potential magnitude of a subsequent wave. The worry is that with a vaccine still many months away, and the real rate of infection only being guessed at, populations worldwide remain highly vulnerable to both resurgence and subsequent waves.
Under the plan, state schools in England would be given £650m to fund efforts to help pupils affected by the coronavirus lockdown, under which nurseries, schools and colleges have been closed to most children since mid-March.
While schools have made major efforts to provide remote learning, there are fears that pupils lacking parental support or internet access are in danger of falling behind their peers. But the extra funding is only to be applied to pupils aged between five and 16, provoking complaints from the heads of sixth form and further education colleges. Some of their students will have only seven months in the classroom until they sit exams next spring.
David Hughes, the chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said the funding proposals would fail to cover two-thirds of young people aged 16-18.
“It is indefensible to overlook the needs of the 700,000 in colleges,” he said. “I expect their exclusion from this announcement to be followed rapidly by clarification on the funding and support for college students. We are in contact with the Department for Education and hope to have this rectified as soon as possible.”
Matthew O’Leary, a professor of education at Birmingham City University, said: “Yet again, the government has ignored the needs of students in further education colleges. Despite having previously promised to make funds available to support 16-19 provision, further education has once again been left out, reinforcing how the sector seems to be invisible to this government.”
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimated that the £650m amounted to £80 per pupil, a 1% increase on current spending that still leaves spending per pupil 3% lower than in 2010. Luke Sibieta, a research fellow at the IFS, said that due to the exclusion of nursery and sixth-form pupils, the amount would rise to £88 per head.
The IFS said: “The loss of learning and the likely widening of educational inequalities since lockdown is the biggest challenge facing schools in generations. The £650m to be provided direct to schools this year … is modest relative to the scale of this challenge.”
The £1bn package will include a £350m subsidy for a national tutoring programme, to be established by a partnership including the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). The funds are to provide 75% of the cost of providing one-to-one or small-group tuition, which the EEF recommends as the most effective form of remedial teaching.
Several headteachers who spoke to the Guardian expressed scepticism that such a programme could be up and running by the start of the next school year, in September, with its scope potentially including 1 million pupils receiving free school meals.
The EEF’s guidance states that a well-structured tutoring programme would cost around £700 per pupil for 12 weeks, and include 30-minute sessions five times a week. But it also states that “the evidence suggests that impacts are generally higher when delivered by teachers”.
The EEF is piloting a national tutoring programme involving four external agencies, including two that pay tutors and two that use unpaid volunteers.
A volunteer who signed up to one of the agencies involved said she was dismayed to discover her unpaid work to help disadvantaged children would be used by the government to claim it was funding efforts to repair the education lost during the lockdown.
She said she had no teaching experience and would only receive two hours of training before tutoring children, although the agency had given her a disclosure and barring service (DBS) criminal records check. The main requirement for volunteer tutors was that they have a degree and an A-level in the subject they were to teach, and a minimum commitment of one hour a week.
“It seems like the government is trying to give the impression that they are budgeting for professional teachers, and that feels like a trick,” she said.
Nick Gibb, the schools minister, said the government was working with experts on how best to support under-fives and those aged 16-18, and “we’ll have more to say on that soon”.
Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of Schools and College Leaders, said: “It is very important that this guidance is supplied to schools and colleges as soon as possible. They are doing their best to put in place plans for September but they have so far had to do this in the dark without any input from the government.”