Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi has announced plans to block schools and local areas continuing to implement mask mandates.
The government-ordered requirement for masks to be worn in secondary school classrooms, as a measure against the spread of COVID, was ended Thursday. Mask-wearing in indoor communal areas in primary and secondary schools and universities and colleges will end next Thursday.
Zahawi has now written a letter to MPs explaining that any head teachers who choose to maintain this most basic of defences against the pandemic will be contacted by the Department for Education (DfE) to explain themselves.
The letter warns, “I met with directors of public health yesterday and we agreed that in the event of extraordinary outbreaks of Covid in localised areas, they will share their plans with me where they are recommending reintroducing face coverings in tightly-focused geographical zones, so that we can assess evidence and data to ensure any extra measures are proportionate.”
It remains to be seen how the DfE will deal with those schools deemed to be taking “disproportionate” action. But Zahawi’s intervention is the latest in a series of vicious threats levelled against schools and parents for resisting the government’s policy of mass infection.
In December 2020, then education secretary Gavin Williamson threatened schools with legal action for trying to close a few days early at the end of term, amid a massive surge of cases among schoolchildren.
Throughout this year, threats of fines and even prison have been made against parents who have chosen to keep their children out of school due to the dangers posed by COVID-19.
This most recent act of intimidation comes in response to a wave of opposition among public health officials and school workers against the government’s scrapping mask requirements. The Telegraph reported with outrage yesterday morning that over 100 schools had written to parents indicating their intention to maintain the use of face coverings in the classroom for a period.
Schools North East, a network of 1,150 schools, said 80 percent would be keeping masks in place. Case rates in the region are at 1,410 per 100,000. Most schools have more than 10 percent of staff and students absent for COVID-related reasons and a quarter have more than one in five staff off work.
In London, councils have taken similar action, drawing attention to dangerously low levels of vaccination in some communities. The capital’s 1.4 million children under 12, like the rest across the country, have not even been given the opportunity to be vaccinated. Infections among this primary school age group are at record levels according to data from the UK Health Security Agency—1,936 cases per 100,000 five to nine-year-olds in the week to 16 January, up 41 percent on the previous week.
Opposition to the government’s criminal policy finds no organised expression through the trade unions. The National Education Union (NEU) has said only, “The danger is we lift restrictions too quickly before the effects of returning to school are clear. This will result in more education disruption.”
Neither it nor the other education unions have even raised the possibility of action to protect school workers, children and their families. The NEU simply shrugs its shoulders and writes, “This disruption is at the door of the Government who should have got ventilation and filtration solutions in place before Omicron”.
They do not mention the danger to their members at all, only “education disruption”—more honestly, disruption to the government’s plans to use educators as child minders in schools transformed into COVID incubators, freeing parents to produce profits for the corporations.
School workers are seething at the unions’ complicity with the government, so that joint general secretary of the NEU Kevin Courtney cannot speak on any public platform without being subjected to a torrent of denunciations.
