Meet the parents whose children won't be going back to school until a vaccine is found

Like much of the country, Jane Brown has spent the past two months educating her children at home. But unlike the parents thrilled to be sending their youngsters back from next week, following the Government’s plan to begin reopening primary schools from June 1, and secondaries two weeks later, her sons Dominic, 17, Harry, 13, and Arthur, 6 will remain at home until a vaccine is found.

‘Pro-co-vax’ parents are the latest faction to emerge in the debate that’s been raging on WhatsApp groups across England: will you or won’t you be sending your children back to school on Monday? The phased reopening is initially proposed for the youngest pupils in Reception and Year 1, plus Year 6 – but only in England. Meanwhile, neighbouring Wales’s education minister has said schools will only return when “it is the right time and the right thing to do”.

It’s all very confusing - as is what the classroom may look like when children do return for socially distant learning, with at-the-gate checks and chalk circles in which pupils must socialise in playgrounds currently being employed by schools elsewhere in the world. Research shows many families in England are feeling wary about a return to school. A survey of 20,000 parents by Childcare.co.uk found that 62 per cent of the parents believe it won’t be safe to return to school or any form of childcare until at least September, with a further 10 per cent stating they don’t think it will be safe until October 2020. Even teachers are offering little in the way of reassurance for nervous parents. In a major survey of 29,000 members of the teachers’ union NASUWT, 85 per cent of teachers said they do not think it will be safe to return on 1 June citing a lack of PPE provision, and the difficulties of ensuring social distancing.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that parents like Brown, a qualified accountant, feel only a vaccine can provide the kind of concrete reassurance protection they require to reintroduce their children back into the school environment. “I wouldn’t home school my children by choice,” she admits, but the family are all asthmatic, meaning she has had to reduce the amount of paid work she can take on while juggling A-level Latin, GCSE Chemistry and Reception-level phonics. And while it’s easy to dismiss parents’, and even teachers’, concerns about safety as over-anxious, the Government’s urge to “listen to the experts” has done little in the way of soothing them. After all, what do most of us really understand about that science beyond a quick google in between Zoom meetings and home-schooling sessions?

In the UK, three children below the age of 15 have thus far died of the virus, while under-10s currently account for around 0.7 per cent of cases. An evidence review by University College London found that children were half as likely as adults to catch it, while a global study released last month suggested that their ability to pass on the disease to adults was minimal.

Michael Gove, while insisting schools are safe to reopen, has admitted “you can never eliminate risk” - something mother-of-three Emma Blewden firmly believes. Her opinions may carry more weight than others on her class WhatsApp group: a mathematician turned science tutor with a keen interest in viruses, she says she “correctly calculated the R value to be 2.7, before it was published,” modelling it “based on Italy’s numbers when they first started to build” and consequently took her children out of school the week prior to lockdown. Blewden is in Caerphilly, Wales, so isn’t faced with the immediate return date for Eryn, 17, Dafydd, 10, and Dylan, 9, “but I wouldn’t be sending my children back any time soon”. Besides, she says “you never know when a child might have a serious underlying condition until it presents itself and that might just be too late.”

It’s not clear how long the pro-co-vaxxers will have to wait. While Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, announced last weekend that up to 30 million Covid-19 vaccine doses could be available by September, these first would be for emergency cases only. Whenever it arrives, key workers and the vulnerable are likely to be prioritised to receive the vaccine first. And so other estimates suggest 2021 may be more realistic for the general populace, by which time the children of pro-co-vaxxers will have missed at least eight months of formal education. Although, as Brown says, surely echoing the sentiments of many, “I would be happy to pay for a vaccine to get it earlier.”

*Some names have been changed

‘I feel they’re safer at home than at school’

By Katherine Houghton, founder and managing director at Early Years Staffroom

I feel they’re safer at home than at school. As a former primary school teacher, I know that children can’t socially

I feel they’re safer at home than at school. As a former primary school teacher, I know that children can’t socially distance, nor should they be expected to. Even if my children Jonas, 12, 10-year-old Jorgia 10 and Henry, 5, are grouped into small ‘bubbles’ of other pupils, they are all still sharing toilets, and there’s no government provision of hand sanitiser or soap or PPE - I don’t want them to catch anything or pass it on to us, either.

I’m an early years teacher but juggling three sets of education at once is hard: when we first started, they couldn’t do anything on their own. My 12-year-old would say “you need to show me how to do it, that’s what the teachers do,” but he is realising it’s far better for him to work out how to do it himself, he is learning how to learn, not just retaining facts, which is vital for lifelong learning. Now, I spend two hours teaching them every day, fitting it in when I can as I do it around my business – with my youngest, that might mean learning letters in the bath.

Each family has to weigh up whether they are better off at school or at home, and for us, their being here until a vaccine is found makes the most sense. I know not everyone is able to keep their children off school, but the more who can, the less risk there will be of it spreading.

‘Sending them back is a very risky gamble’

By Sofia Rachedi, private practice nurse

At home it’s just me and my girls Amara, 11, and six-year-old Aaliyah. I feel it’s a very risky gamble for them to return to school when there is not enough evidence out there that it is safe yet. If they were to get Covid-19 or if I were to get it, where would my kids go? I’m  single parent: they could potentially be motherless.

When I started home schooling I did think, ‘how am I going to do this with two children in a two-bed apartment with no garden?’ Amara has high functioning autism, and before lockdown, she was on target for passing her SATs, so I’m hoping she’ll still do well.

When lockdown began, I thought the Government had things under control. Now it seems that no one knows what’s going on anymore. It’s all so surreal.

Lockdown has certainly been a huge dampener for our mental well-being. But I think we would all be worse off mentally if they went back to school. I launched Heartfield Health, a private nursing practice, at the start of lockdown. I’ve tried to switch to telephone health consultations, but I can’t make a lot of money from those, and they’re currently my only source of income.

I’m optimistic about the future: we’ve had vaccines before, for everything else from tetanus to diptheria, and those were decades ago.  So I do believe one for coronavirus will be produced. And until then, we’ll wait.