Schools: Coronavirus

(asked on 10th February 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of lifting covid-19 restrictions on sickness rates in school among pupils and teachers.


Answered by
Robin Walker Portrait
Robin Walker
This question was answered on 23rd February 2022

The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), which includes the modelling group, Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), leads on the overall assessments of the course of the COVID-19 outbreak and the impact of lifting COVID-19 restrictions.

The department regularly reviews data, analysis and advice from a number of different sources, including SAGE, the UK Health Security Agency, and the Office for National Statistics. We also work closely with the Department of Health and Social Care as well as local authorities and their directors of public health to inform our planning and response. The government will continue to be guided by the latest evidence, including the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advice on deploying vaccinations. This includes the recent decision to offer vaccination to all 5- to 11-year-olds.

The past 2 years have seen many necessary restrictions imposed on everyday life to manage COVID-19, but these have come with a huge toll on wellbeing, economic output and education. The department’s priority is for schools to deliver face to face, high-quality education to all pupils. The evidence is clear that being out of education causes significant harm to educational attainment, life chances and mental and physical health. Therefore, the government has made it a national priority that education and childcare providers should continue to operate as normally as possible during the COVID-19 outbreak. Latest published data from 10 February shows that COVID-19 related pupil absence in all state-funded schools had fallen to 2.2% and COVID-19 related teacher and leader absence had fallen to 2.8%.

The government is able to take the step of removing restrictions now because of the success of the vaccination programme, and the suite of pharmaceutical tools the NHS can deploy to treat people who are most vulnerable to COVID-19 and the most severely ill.

Reticulating Splines