Johnson needs plan for reopening UK schools

Boris Johnson was elected as Britain’s prime minister because he’s a ruthless optimist, yet he has presided over one of the gloomiest periods in the country’s postwar history. If he wants to cheer people up again, he needs a credible plan for reopening the UK’s schools.
Release from lockdown is painfully slow here, and the economic recovery is stuttering because many parents can’t work when their kids are at home. Johnson has already abandoned his ambition to get most primary pupils in England back in the classroom for the summer — the latest evidence of a shambolic Covid-19 strategy. If he fails to reopen schools by September, when the new term begins, the political damage will be incalculable. The reopening has to happen not just for the economy’s sake, but for the sake of a generation of children too.
The prime minister’s old employer (and regular cheerleader), the ultra-Conservative Daily Telegraph, published an article by the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Keir Starmer, demanding “a national plan to restart classes.” ConservativeHome, the website for the Tory grassroots, is tearing more hair out over this subject than even Johnson’s blond mop could replenish.
McDonald’s is serving customers, shops are busy, and zoos and theme parks will soon be open to children. But not schools. Let them eat and ride, but not learn in the classroom.
Johnson is a proven vote winner and he retains a comfortable, if narrowing, lead over Starmer in the polls. But his allies miss his can-do spirit and the intelligent opportunism that often turns a crisis into an opportunity. They fear he’s not getting the big political calls right. Possibly, it’s the lagging effects of his debilitating bout of Covid-19. Whatever the stresses, a focus on the major decisions is essential.
Supporters in parliament are trying to goad the prime minister into action. Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative Party leader and Brexit ally, and John Redwood, a Sahara-dry economist, are begging him to relax the two-metre social distancing rule that prevents many classrooms from reopening and many factories from operating. “The number one and single most important priority to unlock the economy is getting the distance down to one meter,” says Duncan Smith.
But scientists in SAGE, the body that advises the government, say two-metre distancing must stay because the rate of virus transmission is still too high and the dangers of a second outbreak are too great. Ironically, Johnson and his fellow Brexiters scorned expert opinion during the referendum. Now he’s open to the charge of being too deferential to it.
At the beginning of the crisis, the prime minister sheltered behind scientific opinion when he wanted to defend his delay in locking down Britain. Now he’s finding out that there’s no consensus around “the science” — it’s not a monolithic entity and its practitioners are fallible because they work with limited, flawed data.

—Bloomberg