Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of the effectiveness of ventilation in schools at reducing the risk of covid-19 transmission.

Maintaining good ventilation creates a healthy indoor environment for staff and pupils and helps to improve alertness and concentration. Scientific evidence also shows that letting fresh air into indoor spaces can help remove virus particles and reduce the risk of respiratory illness, including COVID-19, flu, and Strep A. Evidence from Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) demonstrates that CO₂ monitoring is an effective method of identifying poor ventilation in multi occupant spaces. This is why the Department provided over 380,000 CO₂ monitors to cover approximately 50% of teaching spaces in England during the height of the pandemic through the first phase of the ventilation programme. The Department has since provided a further 320,000 CO₂ monitors to allow all eligible settings to have an assigned monitor for every teaching and childcare space.

In addition to CO₂ monitors, the Department has provided over 9,000 air cleaning units (ACUs) to over 1,300 settings that identified rooms with sustained high CO₂ readings. These units filter pollen, dust and microorganisms, including particles containing the COVID-19 and influenza virus, removing much of it from the air. The use of ACUs in poorly ventilated spaces is backed by SAGE’s Environmental Modelling Group (EMG) which advised that ACUs have limited benefit in spaces that are already adequately ventilated and should only be considered where the ventilation is inadequate and cannot be easily improved.

Maintaining adequate ventilation ultimately remains the responsibility of individual settings. The Department has recently published guidance to enable education settings to make the most out of their devices, which can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-co-monitors-and-air-cleaning-units-in-education-and-care-settings.