Covid-19: keeping schools shut will risk more lives than opening them

I have read more articles and social media posts than I can count recently about whether schools should reopen. Nearly all of them are sentimental, poignant and designed to pull at the heartstrings. Nearly all of them have in common that it's impossible to expect small children to social distance, that their mental and emotional health will be in jeopardy from the new systems, and that teachers and pupils would be risking their lives to return to a formal education setting. And most of them describe unrealistic scenarios that will not happen in practice.

As the wife of a Deputy Head I have found these posts painful and difficult to read. My husband does not actually have a choice about whether his school reopens (and incidentally, the schools never closed: they've always remained open to keyworker and vulnerable children). It doesn't matter whether he thinks it's right or wrong: his job is purely to facilitate it in the best way possible. This is a stressful, emotional and simultaneously incredibly tedious task.

While he sits in his makeshift office upstairs on call after call, going into school to walk around and hone procedures and painstakingly formulating and tweaking all these very high-stakes plans, the media, government and general public spend their time making known their opinions, which are not always very well informed or even well-intentioned.

Teachers are lazy, teachers should be "heroes", the unions are communists, schools should be refusing to open... there's something for everyone.

And meanwhile the actual teachers on the ground are just having to get on with the job of figuring it out.

I would urge anyone reading this to refrain from posting sentimental and ill-informed posts about the morals of children returning to school.

The fact is that schools NOT reopening will risk as many lives, if not more, as opening will. The proportion of the population not in care homes or hospitals who have Covid is currently projected at 0.24%. RO is under 1. The curve is dropping.

The curve that is shooting up exponentially, the disease that is catching faster than at any point in my lifetime now is poverty.

People talk of everything "going back to normal". There is not going to be a normal for a long, long time. We are entering a huge recession which will mean millions of UK families being plunged under the breadline. And schools are a lifeline for these children and their parents, who cannot return to work unless they have childcare.

Schools mean somewhere warm during the winter, a hot meal in a child's belly, a kind and friendly adult looking after them and being safe. It's a long time since schools were merely there to provide education. They are another branch of the NHS. Schools are where neglect and abuse is disclosed, where additional educational needs are discovered and referred to the experts, where children are safe, where they are given clean clothes, a healthy breakfast and love.

There are estimated to be 2,259,000 vulnerable children with "complex family needs" around the UK right now. There are around 831,000 living in homes where domestic abuse occurs. There are families who have struggled for weeks to access the free school meal vouchers. Food bank usage doubled at the Trussell Trust in just the first week of lockdown. At the start of April an extra 950,000 people had applied for Universal Credit in the space of two weeks.

Aside from the respite that a caring school offers to a child, there are many other millions of families who don't have any income now coming in because they cannot return to work while they have children at home. I have seen people scoff at the motivation of the government for reopening schools and workplaces first and foremost: but the economy is not always a bad motivation. The economy is what keeps us alive. We need people back to work if we are to save lives; and most people cannot work if the schools are not open.

This does not mean that everyone should send their children back to school. It is an individual choice and frankly, schools could not achieve the staffing necessary to welcome every child back into school on June 1st. This blog is not about whether you or I should choose to send our children in. It is about the UK-wide risks of either reopening fully or not.

The risks of Coronavirus will peter away. But the risks of poverty and vulnerability are only going to increase and they will kill far more, in the long term, than Covid. Whatever you think about the morality of schools reopening, the fact is that the economy collapsing is an equally morally weighted issue and one that we must pay swift attention to. Money, as well as medicine, saves lives.