There’s only one way to keep kids in school

September is being cast as a fresh start for the Covid-battered UK. Children will return to school, their parents can resume disrupted work lives and Britain’s economy can begin to right itself. Is there anything a shiny new pencil case can’t fix? “Even as adults, that feeling of going back to school after the summer often stays with us,” wrote Education Secretary Gavin Williamson in The Sunday Times newspaper. “This year it’s an opportunity to feel a sense of normality again.”
Back to normal sounds like a place you want to be right now. And you can hardly blame Boris Johnson’s government for wanting to move past its recent exam fiasco and other virus-related missteps. But changing the narrative will take more than just changing the conversation. A poll for MailOnline found almost a third of British parents said they don’t feel comfortable sending their kids back, despite the prime minister’s claim that it’s a moral duty. That’s hardly surprising given that the country’s repeated Covid-19 failings have made people more worried about the threat that the virus poses. Nobody questions the goal of reopening classrooms.
But keeping schools operating as virus cases rise will be the ultimate test for governments everywhere of whether their transmission detection and control systems are adequate. Trust in Johnson’s administration has held up surprisingly well despite all the mistakes and U-turns, although confidence in his leadership on Covid is only marginally better than Americans’ faith in President Donald Trump.
And schools are a special case. The cost of getting it wrong for young people — in economic terms as well as for individual children — will be enormous. Another Johnson bungling won’t be forgiven.
One thing seems sadly inevitable: Without adequate testing and tracing to help isolate infections, Britain will suffer a serious second wave of the pandemic this autumn. In a recent article in The Lancet, the authors modeled scenarios for different classroom reopening strategies. They found that for full-time schooling to return safely, the country would need to have a much more rigorous system of testing for all of its citizens to contain the spread of the virus from kids to adults.
The study estimated that three-quarters of Brits with symptomatic infections would need to be tested and isolated, with 68% of their contacts traced, if full-time schooling was to proceed without contributing to a second wave. Is the country’s health system really ready to deliver that?
Alarmingly, the authors reckon that full-time schooling — without that
recommended level of community testing — would lead to a second Covid-19 wave that’s at least twice as big as the first UK outbreak. We know by now
that the predictive value of such modelling depends on the parameters set and the data that goes into it. But if it’s in the ballpark, the findings suggest that keeping schools open will depend more on what happens outside their gates as within them.

—Bloomberg