Class wars

On Monday May 10th the British Government announced that schools in England could re-open from June 1st. The National Education Union (NEU) immediately said no they can' t. This led to the Daily Mail leading with the headline "LET OUR TEACHERS BE HEROES". The implication was that teachers were chomping at the bit to get back to work and the only thing stopping them was "militant" trade unions.

The narrative of teachers vs unions conveniently forgets that over 95% of teachers belong to a union. 450,000 + to the NEU alone. According to BESA there are 506,400 full-time teachers in the UK. Perhaps, its the non-unionised one's that the Daily Mail was referring to? But, that being the case how could a trade union prevent them going to work?

The Daily Mail, along with the rest of the establishment media, have been at the forefront of the "Clap our key workers" campaign. Mostly aimed at the "heroes" in the NHS, the media in its enthusiasm for getting teachers back to work might have noticed that key workers included teaching and nursery staff.

It is interesting that shortly after the announcement on 10th May, the Government web page was changed. It no longer lists key workers instead it is only concerned with schools and nurseries. Although it states:
“The definition of critical workers remains unchanged.
Our ambition is to bring all primary year groups back to school before the summer holidays, for a month if feasible, though this will be kept under review.”

The Government justify their decision on the basis that the R number is down. Teachers appear unconvinced, as do many parents. But, the message is that schools are safe. The only reason they cannot open is because teachers, specifically teaching unions, refuse to accept the science. The Daily Telegraph reports that:
”..confusion over whether it's safe to return to school has done great damage to trust between schools and parents and teachers“

Nowhere in the Telegraph's coverage is there room for even the slightest hint that teachers may have the best interests of their pupils at heart. Their coverage this week has been solely to continue what it has done throughout this crisis: propagandise on behalf of a Government that has lurched from crisis to crisis.

The simple fact is that there is no confusion. Teachers do not want to return unless its safe to do so. Many local authorities (11 at the last count, but probably many more) will not force English schools to re-open on June 1st. According to a survey carried out by UNISON, 96% of "support staff" are not convinced that it is safe to completely re-open schools.

The parents organisation PARENTKIND surveyed 250,000 of its members in early May. 25% said they were happy with a September return. 18% said they did not want a return until teachers felt it was safe. 10% did not want a return until teachers and pupils had received a, still non-existent, vaccine. To be fair, 23% were happy to return when the Government felt it was safe to do so.
According to The Sun:
“John Jolly, Chief Executive of Parentkind, said: “Overwhelmingly parents tell us that they do not want their children to go back to school until it is safe to do so, with most wanting clarity on when this could be. It is vital that parents’ voices are heard and shape government action.”“

In other words, contrary to what the Mail and Telegraph might have us believe it appears that the only people keen on a return to school on June 1st are the government, journalists and Katie Hopkins. It might be pointed out that the children of the ministers and journalists promoting this return to school are almost exclusively in private education, which remains closed until September.

Alistair Campbell tweeted the question "can anybody name a Government minister whose children are educated in a state school?" Fair question. According to the Daily Express Michael Gove responded with a "quick witted" and "brutal" reply- "Yes". However, he failed to name a single one. 

In February, the Sutton Trust reported that 65% of the current cabinet had attended fee paying schools. Its not unrealistic to propose that their children, plus some of those who came from a state school background, will be in private education. (My apologies for not being as quick witted or brutal as Gove, that is something us state educated lesser mortals can only aspire to.)

Around 7% of the population attend fee-paying schools. These schools are often called "independent", although they are entirely dependent on an elite of rich people to maintain their dominant position. Amongst newspaper columnists, some of whom vociferously support the establishment government, 44% ( according to the Sutton Trust) were educated privately.

What becomes obvious is that those most keen on state schools re-opening have no real knowledge or commitment to those schools. Their children, as far as we can tell, will be safely ensconced at home with private tutors and nannies to do the hard-lifting for their parents busy allowing the UK to become a Covid-19 wasteland.

What of the science? We hear much of the R number. Is it above or below 1? Is it going up or down? But, does anybody outside a tiny minority of theoretical epidemiologists actually understand how the R number is calculated? Yours (and my) future well-being is being decided on the basis of R, so it is important that we understand the science behind it. According to the BBC "R" is a simple number. Well, all numbers are simple particularly if they are expressed as whole numbers (1, 2,3 etc.) The Government claimed that R was 2. 6 in March, shortly before the lockdown was announced. It then fell to 0.7, when it was deemed politically acceptable (or perhaps expedient) to 'ease" the Lockdown (a decision incidentally though not coincidentally that was announced as the Treasury released figures suggesting the Lockdown night "cost" upwards of £123 billion), and has since risen to 0. 9.

All of this makes some sort of sense. When the R number was 2.6 every infected person, on average, infected a further 2.6 people. When it was 0.7 every infected person was infecting less than one other person. So, as the R comes down the number of people infected falls. The goal is to have an R of considerably less than 1, particularly where infection carries with it the risk of a very uncomfortable hospital visit or even death. But, even if R makes sense at this level, it still raises questions about exactly how it is produced.

According to the Government's website calculating R involves a complicated modelling procedure (which they conveniently do not explain). What they do tell us is that they are using multiple models providing a range of figures from 0.7 to 0.9. But, still no explanation of what variables are being input to arrive at this figure.

The BBC website includes the following information:
“Using data - such as the number of people dying, admitted to hospital or testing positive for the virus - allows you to estimate how easily the virus is spreading.”

This provides a little more detail but fails to explain what weighting is given to each, and, critically, how this data is crunched to arrive at 0.7, 0. 9, I or 2.6.

In a slight, but not unimportant twist we are now told that the R figure is not uniform across the UK but differs in different regions. Which would if true, be a good reason to ease the Lockdown in different regions at different times. This is certainly what happened in China and Italy. Apparently, the lowest R is in London, which a fortnight ago had a quarter of all Covid-related deaths in the UK. Forgive me for sounding cynical, but a figure that is too complicated to explain is being used to justify easing the lockdown and according to one model suggests that the largest city in the UK is virtually Covid-free, has just a hint of being politically useful to a Government desperate to prove how successful it has been. 

Forget the R number, the arguments for opening up schools have been based on a simpler statistic. Children have very little chance of catching Covid-19 and virtually no chance of dying from it.
This is the headline in Friday's Mail:
“Boost for schools reopening as biggest study of its kind finds children are 56% less likely to catch coronavirus than adults.”
The study conducted by University College London was according to the Mail:
“..the latest experts to throw their support behind Boris Johnson amid a furious row about English schools restarting in June.“

What is noticeable about this study is that it was not actually a study at all, but a review of existing studies mostly from countries which locked down far earlier than the UK, and all of which had contact tracing programmes which the UK does not. Furthermore, contrary to what the Mail claims the study authors never suggested that their study supported government policy. 

Although it was a large study the authors are rather more circumspect than the Mail claims. For the review, researchers screened 6,332 studies and identified 18 with useful data. Nine were contact tracing studies from China, Taiwan, Japan and Australia, eight were population-screening studies and one was a systematic review of small household cluster contact-screening.

Interestingly enough I am not aware that anybody, including teaching unions, has claimed that children were at high risk of dying from the disease. The debate has been about whether children can transmit the virus. Although, children may be less susceptible to the virus themselves nobody knows for sure if they can transmit it to others. The thing to remember here is that even if children have a low risk of transmission they are not the only one's in school. The teachers, teachers assistants, kitchen staff, administrators, caretakers and others are adults. And, the argument for children is that they are "low "risk not "no" risk.

There are, of course, already children in state schools. Teachers have been working with the children of key workers. The absence of a coherent test and trace regime means that we have no idea whether those children have passed the virus between themselves, or infected their teachers (or vice versa) or taken it home to their parents.

What we do know is that the more people in schools, the more likely it is that the virus will be transmitted. Whilst most people will survive the more the virus is free to circulate, the more likely it is to find those vulnerable to dying from it. That may not be children, or teachers or even the parents of those children but the grandparents or neighbours. For as night follows day we can be certain that opening schools will be followed by opening up more and more of the economy, including the hospitality and tourism sector which you probably know better as pubs and clubs . 

Ultimately, the opening up of schools is not a scientific issue, but a psychological one (my psychology friends will be devastated to find out they are not a science but there you have it). The so-called science, which policy is supposedly guided by is, to put it mildly, of dubious value. As members of the so-called science community have prostrated themselves before their Government paymasters, so science itself has become a political domain. But, in truth, it doesn't matter if every scientist in the UK sells their soul to Johnson and his team of incompetents, because the more "experts" the Government rallies to its cause, the more ordinary people will have to decide for themselves whether they "feel" at risk.

Feelings are often treated as soft, and if they emerge in political debate are swatted away in favour of hard, emotionless data. But people's feelings matter. If workers feel unsafe it is up to their employers to allay their fears, not employ the gutter press to berate them as cowardly. There is nothing more cowardly than Government ministers and so-called "journalists" whose own children are privately educated, demanding that those in the state sector take risks they are not prepared to take themselves.

Covid 19 remains a highly contagious, potentially lethal virus, for which there is no vaccine. The risks to some people may be relatively low, but they still exist. It is neither cowardly nor unpatriotic, nor militant for workers to say that their workplaces - be they schools, factories or offices - should be safe. It is absolutely correct for trade unions, who have a health and safety responsibility, to demand safe working conditions for their members.

Perhaps, the real issue here is not about schools at all, but how we as a society adapt to a World in which a lethal virus remains a constant threat. Throughout this crisis we have all said "when this is over" but what if it is never over? What if, like HIV, no vaccine is found? Then we need to think about how we educate children in a way that guarantees the safety of the children, their teachers and other workers. One possible solution is to accept that we can no longer have class sizes of 30+ children in state schools. In the long term that will mean more classrooms and more teachers. In the short term, it might mean children attending physically on a rota and investment in online learning for the remainder of the time. It will almost certainly mean testing children and staff on a regular (perhaps daily) basis, and isolating anybody and their families who shows signs of infection.

For now, it means backing workers and unions when they argue that they want their workplaces to be safe. In order to reduce the risk there has to be a rigorous test and trace regime. It really is time for politicians, journalists and scientists to stop quoting "risk" as if they were selling a lottery ticket. We are, literally, being asked to gamble our own and our children's lives on the basis of "scientific" models which are so obtuse nobody can adequately explain them. The real heroes here remain all the workers who have continued to work. These include teachers who are, despite what the Daily Mail thinks, already heroes. As ever we see a callous disregard for workers by a ruling elite who want the many to take the risk, so that the few can continue to make a profit.