Boris Johnson’s Next Big Test Is Getting Britain Back to School

(Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to get children back to school next month, but there is a sense of dread that the country is walking into another crisis after all that has gone wrong with his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

However traumatic the fiasco over exam grading for teenagers, it only involved two academic years. The start of the school year affects every child in a country that recorded more deaths than anywhere else in Europe.

The government sees reopening England’s 24,000 schools as mission critical, and there’s no room for error. Without parents back at work, there’s scant hope of emerging from the continent’s deepest economic slump.

Bloomberg spoke to government and union officials and education professionals across the country, many of whom asked not to be identified as they discussed their concerns. Teachers expressed their anxieties about going back to work, a sense of not being prepared for the challenge of keeping children apart, and of the effect on the mental health of families and themselves.

Several expressed doubts about the leadership of Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, already under pressure after a U-turn on how grades were awarded to school-leavers for examinations they never sat.

Then there’s the issue of getting parents on board when the well of public confidence is drying up. Pupils were sent home in the chaos of mid-March, and most haven’t been back since. Now Johnson wants all children back in class when the summer vacation ends at the start of September.

“We suspect that the biggest challenge will be winning confidence among some parents that it is safe for children to return to school,” said Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.

The British education system has been lauded by Johnson as a pillar of the country’s prestige as it tries to assert its new independence after leaving the European Union. The problem now is that it’s beginning to stand out for the wrong reasons. While other countries have faced the dilemma of how to get kids back into school, few governments have so much at stake to get it right.

The Department for Education said it has set out clear guidelines on staggered starts to the school day, minimizing contact between pupils and social distancing for teachers. Scotland, whose academic year started already, implemented its own similar measures.

“Making sure all children are back in the classroom full-time in September is a national priority,” a department spokesperson said by email in response to questions for this story.

Indeed, many schools say they are ready. At St Monica’s RC High School in Manchester, head teacher Chris Foley said students at will be arranged into “bubbles” based on their year group, for both classroom teaching and socializing at break times.

At the end of each lesson, pupils will wipe down their desks, sanitize their hands and follow the school’s new one-way system to their next class. “The school is dripping in hand sanitizer,” Foley said. “We are taking all the precautions we can.”

“Everyone who is a teacher wants to get back to teaching,” he added. “The environment we will create is safe, and the children need to be back in the building.”

Elsewhere there is less confidence. A group of London school heads met last month to discuss how they would respond to an outbreak of coronavirus. The U.K. government guidance was clear: they had to contact their local director of public health. The problem, they realized, was that none of them knew how to reach them.

Schools have also complained about apparent contradictions in the guidelines. These state that bubbles can be as big as a year group—which in some secondary schools means 200 students. Year groups aren’t supposed to mix, and neither are schools.

But many children have siblings in different years or at different schools, so one household infection is likely to affect multiple bubbles. At some schools, after-hours care will involve children from different bubbles looked after together.

One teacher said she felt the Department for Education had made the bubble system up, with no concept of how modern teaching works. It had left her with no confidence in the government’s ability to put proper guidelines in place.

On government advice, students will be sent home if they have coronavirus symptoms. One primary school teacher said this will mean her monitoring her class of six-year-olds, which will be an impossible task because most children tend to experience some sort of cough or cold across winter.

Teachers also raised concerns about their own health given the difficulty in maintaining a distance from pupils. The guidelines state that “those who are clinically extremely vulnerable can return to school,” provided that the school have the suggested controls in place. One teacher in a vulnerable category said she was eager to return to the classroom and had started therapy to keep her anxieties at bay.

The issue of teacher mental health was raised by the deputy head of one large London secondary school, who pointed to the stresses her colleagues had been under as they tried to allocate grades to pupils to simulate the cancelled exams, and then deal with the fallout. Now, she said, she knew many were worried about returning to work.

Staff absence rates matter because running a school is a huge logistical exercise. Every class has to have a teacher and a room for every hour of the day. On a normal day, a large school might expect an absence rate of just under 10%. Cover has to be found for every missing teacher.

In March, as large numbers of teachers started calling in sick with the virus, there were many days when the usual teacher agencies were unable to send any emergency staff. The fear this time around is staff being instructed to stay home because they’ve had contact with an infected person. If a teacher can’t be found for every class, the school has to consider closing.

The issue is made even more complicated by the staggered timetables, making it hard for one teacher to cover a colleague’s class. Then there is the question of rooms. The government has said it wants schools to teach a full curriculum, but also that they should stay in one room as much as possible. That creates a problem for subjects such as science and art, usually taught in dedicated spaces.

There simply isn’t anywhere in most schools to park children while rooms are cleaned after one class has left and before the next goes in. And with budgets tight, there isn’t the cleaning staff to do the job.

On top of concerns over the new arrangements, teachers are apprehensive about what students will have missed throughout lockdown depending on their home life. The government has allocated 650 million pounds ($850 million) to help teachers fill in gaps in things children have missed while out of school.

Then there’s the question of whether an increase in cases will lead to another lockdown, something governments across Europe are at pains to avoid. Scotland has seen a rise in infections, including at some reopened schools, though the administration in Edinburgh said they are under control.

“We would also like to see the government provide schools with funding so that they can afford the costs of implementing the safety controls,” said Barton at the Association of School and College Leaders. “It is essential that it comes up with a Plan B in the event of a second national shutdown.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.