Masks, no assembly and no choir: the science behind reopening schools safely

Whatever you do, don't do what we did: that is the message for the world from Israel on reopening schools. 

It started well. At the end of May, a newly formed government emboldened by low, and falling, coronavirus numbers jumped in headfirst, welcoming back the entire student body.

Within days, infections were reported at a high school in Jerusalem. The outbreak spread. Hundreds of teachers, students and family members were infected, and thousands more quarantined in outbreaks across the country. Hundreds of schools were forced to shut, and a nursery school teacher died. The move has been in part blamed for the country's now rampant second wave of the virus. 

So what can the rest of the world learn?

"They definitely should not do what we have done," Professor Eli Waxman, chair of the team advising Israel's national security council on its response to the virus, told the New York Times this week. "It was a major failure."

In fact, it was a whole sequence of failures, scientists said, from closing all the windows at school during a heatwave and putting on the air conditioning - giving the virus a chance to thrive - to failing to trace contacts, even down to which bus students came to school on.

But while Israel has become a cautionary tale, it is far from the whole story. In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests it is something of an outlier.

A number of other countries have also begun reopening their schools, and none - so far - have experienced a significant rise in cases as a result, according to a research paper put together by the Royal Society's Delve initiative, a group of scientists compiling data on Covid-19.

Even in England, so far, there has not been a spike associated with the partial re-openings which began on June 1, which saw pupils in nurseries, reception, year one, year six, and then later, years 10 and 12 in small groups, return slowly to the classroom.

The UK government is running a study to test teachers and students across up to 100 schools to provide a more accurate picture, with the results available later this summer, just before all schools go back at the start of September. 

These early figures are significant, because they address one of the key concerns over schools - that children, who do not seem to be badly affected by the virus themselves, could be major transmitters to their wider community.

As parents and teachers know, that is how flu and colds have always behaved, and without evidence to the contrary at the beginning of the pandemic, that's how it was assumed the novel coronavirus would also spread.

But actually, this does not seem to be the case.

As well as being less likely to suffer seriously with the virus, children are also marginally less likely to be infected, and - emerging evidence suggests - significantly less likely to spread it.

In schools specifically, the largest study so far from Australia found that 18 people with the virus (nine children and nine teachers) only infected two more people. The results from the research, a large-scale contact tracing study across 15 schools in New South Wales in March, seems to have been echoed in other early work, although the data is scarce as many schools are only just reopening.

Professor Devi Sridhar, who assessed the evidence for Delve, said it appeared likely that schools only have a limited role to play in transmission, particularly in countries where case numbers were already falling.

"The takeaway message is that if you have low prevalence, then schools don't seem to impact onwards transmission," she told the Telegraph. 

As such, she said the key element in re-opening schools was actually nothing to do with schools at all.

"The safest way to open schools is to have no community transmission or extremely low," she said. "Schools operate within communities, and that's my headline: the safest way to protect schools is to make sure it never gets to school in the first place."

That aim is still some distance away in England, where 892 new coronavirus cases were reported on Wednesday. But in Scotland, where Professor Sridhar advises the government and where schools open next week, there were just 64.

But pressure has increased on governments to prioritise schools. This week in the UK, the Children's Commissioner Anne Longfield said the government must put schools before pubs.

"There needs to be a discussion about getting cases as low as possible for schools to re-open, and the trade-off that involves, and increasingly countries are going to struggle with this," said Professor Sridhar.

Another issue on opening up other parts of society at the same time as schools means it blurs the data if outbreaks do occur, making them harder to trace. Professor Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, suggests this was another issue in Israel, where shopping malls, restaurants and gyms all opened alongside schools, with the president urging people to "go and have a good time". 

"Children have to be prioritised," said Professor Sridhar. 

The Delve paper stresses this particularly, emphasising the now well-documented risks of keeping children out of school for long periods of time, including the loss of learning, rising inequality, and deteriorating mental health. There is also the pressure on parents taking on childcare while trying to work.

This week the UN called school closures for more than a billion children globally a "generational catastrophe".

The Delve paper concludes: "Our assessment of the evidence suggests that keeping schools open should be the default position given the substantial risks from closures."

However, scientists said it was wrong to use this as a stick to beat teachers with, who had reasonable concerns about their own safety.

"You can't force teachers back into the classroom because you are guilting them about the damage they are causing children," said Professor Sridhar. "Teachers mostly went into education because they deeply care about children, but they want to feel safe. So this [damage] cannot be used as an excuse for not making schools as safe as possible for teachers."

Delve and other scientific groups, including the World Health Organization, have drawn up guidelines on reopening schools, which include distancing, improved hygiene, and other elements like staggered break times, as well as having a robust plan in place for when cases are discovered, as well as strong contact tracing.

In fact, a paper in The Lancet this week warned that reopening schools could see a second wave of coronavirus in the UK if the country's so-far inadequate contact tracing system is not improved (with one caveat: it also assumed reopening schools would see parents return to work and socialising).

The UK, as well as most other countries, has its own variation on these rules, including staggered break times and keeping a lid on riskier activities, like singing or mass gatherings - so no choir or assembly for now.

However, scientists said that one simple measure that would help teachers in particular feel safer was being ignored domestically: face masks.

In countries which have reopened successfully, like Germany, masks have been part of the strategy, particularly for teachers and older children, who seem to transmit the virus more than younger kids. There are other elements of their strategies, like huge outdoor lessons and very regular testing, that could also be incorporated. But masks could make a huge difference, particularly with some adjustments made to ensure that deaf students, for example, were not excluded by the policy, such as by using transparent masks.

Dr Sanjay Patel,  a paediatric infectious diseases consultant at University Hospital Southampton, said he didn't know why Public Health England was still advising teachers not to wear masks.

"Through this whole pandemic, the world has done something, like face masks, and we won't do it until the evidence shows it is 100 per cent right. Then two months later, we do it," he said. "I think face masks would make teachers feel a lot more confident, and I think for me I would feel more confident for them too."

He said getting teachers to feel safe about reopening was a major part of succeeding, and stressed that he did not blame them for feeling concerned. 

"If we don't win over teachers, we don't win over unions, and we don't win over headteachers, and we fail," he said. "And we cannot afford to fail - it's too important to fail. We cannot continue to mess up our children's education."

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The closing of the academic mind

A new report explodes the idea that campus censorship is a right-wing myth.

Campus censorship, according to some, is just a right-wing myth; claims of petitions, protests and No Platforming are simply a moral panic. In this fantasy, free speech is alive and kicking at a university near you. It might be the case, these academics and commentators concede, that Oxford’s Selina Todd needs to be accompanied to lectures by a security guard. It may be true, they begrudgingly acknowledge, that Reading’s Rosa Freedman had her office door covered in urine. But these examples are blown out of all proportion, they argue, and, what’s more, they’ve been misunderstood – issuing death threats and pissing on doors are actually expressions of free speech not attempts to shut down debate. Phew!

This week, a new report from Policy Exchange pushes back against the censorship deniers. Academic Freedom in the UK goes beyond a straightforward count of petitions and rescinded invitations. Instead, it explores a campus culture shaped by ‘widespread support for discrimination on political grounds in publication, hiring and promotion’. A survey commissioned by the report’s authors shows that ‘only 54 per cent of academics said that they would feel comfortable sitting next to a known Leave supporter at lunch. Just 37 per cent would feel comfortable sitting next to someone who, in relation to transgender rights, advocates gender-critical feminist views.’ This matters, they tell us, because a climate of political intolerance ‘threatens academic freedom, and likely results in self-censorship’.

Too often, those who argue there is no campus free speech crisis see threats to academic freedom in a narrowly formal way. According to this view, unless university managers – or, even better, government ministers – specifically prevent lectures from going ahead or papers from being published, then all is well. The latest Policy Exchange report is useful because it shows that threats to free speech do not come neatly sign-posted. More often they emanate from within the broader cultural context of the campus and involve individuals self-censoring rather than risking becoming the target of petitions.

Unfortunately, crisis deniers see nothing wrong with campus culture as it currently stands. To them, believing that sex is assigned at birth, that Britain is better in the EU, that global warming is the biggest threat facing the planet, and that structural racism is endemic, is simply common sense. These are not topics for political debate but the values that all decent people subscribe to. Sometimes these values are formally articulated in equality and diversity statements or made clear through mandatory inclusivity workshops. But more often the assumption of a shared moral outlook is made clear through jokes, coffee-break comments, posters pinned to doors and petitions that circulate among staff. Question this commonsense decency and – as the Policy Exchange report indicates – it’s not just lunch invites that dry up but promotions, publications and funding opportunities too.

Campus censorship is not a right-wing myth but, by the same token, ideological conformity is not a left-wing plot. Over a period of many decades, professors with a particular understanding of what it meant to be a scholar – a dedication to the pursuit of knowledge and a commitment to intellectual rigour and objectivity – have been replaced by a younger generation who see scholarship as more explicitly bound up with a commitment to social justice. They are more likely to see nods to objectivity as, at best, disingenuous, and at worst a dangerous pretence. Social justice demands recruiting historically under-represented groups when picking new staff and students resulting in campuses that look diverse but are increasingly ideologically homogenous. Students who fit in tend to be those who share the political and intellectual preoccupations of their lecturers. They then go on to become the next generation of academics. At the same time, those who don’t fit in often choose to opt out of academia altogether.

The domination of a clique of the likeminded is not restricted to universities. The same liberal view of the world is now shared by those who run the BBC, branches of the civil service, many NGOs and charities, the senior ranks of the police, advertising agencies and social-media companies. This, in turn, lends weight to the perception that elite values are not political but simply morally correct. For this reason, those who have never had a view that in any way challenges the consensus see no problem with free speech in universities. Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union (UCU), was quick to dismiss the findings of the Policy Exchange report: ‘The idea that academic freedom is under threat is a myth.’

Policy Exchange should be commended for raising the problem of today’s threats to free speech that are often experienced individually and subjectively. Far more difficult a question is how we change the culture on campus. Policy Exchange proposes that a national director for academic freedom should be appointed by the secretary of state for education and established within the Office for Students.

Enforcing academic freedom is tempting, but it risks lending moral justification to those who already claim persecution. It does little to challenge the climate on campus; enforced team lunches won’t make colleagues like one another or even give opposing views a fair hearing. Jokes, petitions and posters could all be outlawed but this would curtail, not enhance, free speech. Crucially, universities are part of and not separate from society. We need to make the case for free speech everywhere and challenge the stranglehold an out-of-touch elite has on all our institutions. More than new political appointments this requires individual acts of courage. Rather than self-censoring, or lamenting self-censorship, the onus has to be on us all to say what we think.

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Why we shouldn’t ‘decolonise’ libraries

Universities’ embrace of woke ideas threatens to undermine their very mission.

Goldsmiths Library, which is part of the University of London, has proudly announced that it plans to ‘decolonise and diversify’ its collections. This will apparently allow it ‘to de-centre Whiteness, [and] to challenge non-inclusive structures in knowledge management and their impact on library collections, users and services’.

Goldsmiths Library is far from alone. From the University of Sussex to Royal Holloway, other university libraries have also pledged to diversify their collections in order to combat Eurocentrism and de-centre Whiteness.

Of course, decolonising libraries is only one element of the broader project to decolonise the university, which also includes demands to decolonise curricula. But it is still a significant move.

At first glance, diversifying libraries sounds like a harmless idea. There is little to object to in the idea of sourcing more books from nations outside Europe. Students can benefit from being able to access books written by brilliant African authors just as they benefit from their existing access to books by European authors. After all, what matters is the quality of books, rather than their country of origin.

But even if these were well-intentioned plans, it is the unintended consequences we should be worried about. For a start, diversifying library collections is an expensive business. Many universities are already in a parlous financial position thanks to the pandemic, with student deferral rates up by 17 per cent, and the number of fee-paying international students set to plummet by nearly 50 per cent. In such challenging conditions, channeling dwindling finances into various decolonisation initiatives is only likely to result in other, arguably more important, university services being deprived of support and investment.

Moreover, libraries in universities and beyond often provide a vital service for many of the least advantaged groups in society. For those without wifi access or computers at home, they offer internet access. And for those living in crowded or noisy living conditions, they provide the space and quiet to read and concentrate. And, above all, they allow many simply to find and read books that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. That, after all, is the whole point of a library: to allow people access to books. Yet too much focus on fashionable diversity and decolonisation projects could easily see all these vital services suffer.

And what of the effect on domestic book suppliers and sellers? If a decolonised and diversified book provision is presented as virtuous, does that mean those who fail to diversify and decolonise will be condemned or, worse, cancelled? Think not just of other university libraries or local libraries, but also of small independent bookstores unable to import books from far away. Are they going to be singled out and cancelled if they cannot afford to decolonise? Something similar has already happened to The Tattered Cover, a small bookstore in Denver, US, which failed to toe the woke line on the Black Lives Matter protests earlier this summer.

There is no doubting the social and economic challenges that too many in the UK face today. Such challenges are only likely to grow in the devastating aftermath of the pandemic and lockdown. But is directing resources towards the decolonisation and diversification of library book shelves likely to help people overcome these challenges? It seems unlikely.

In order to tackle real problems, rather than make woke activists feel good about themselves, we need strong and bright young people. People, that is, who would benefit from the vital service libraries already on offer; namely, access to the best that has been thought and said. The decolonisation of libraries is likely to prove a costly and damaging distraction.

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Australia: Year 12 students claim ‘huge win’ after Victorian Government announces changes to ATAR system

Year 12s battling through remote learning have scored a “huge win” after a petition called on the State Government to cancel exams.

Victoria's secondary students will be tested against new standards as part of a major overhaul of the VCE. The state government is changing literacy and numeracy expectations ...
Victorian year 12s who will now be “individually assessed” for their VCE scores and ATAR rankings say the new changes are a “huge win” for the class of 2020.

Eltham High School student Tom McGinty said the compassionate approach gave him confidence he could secure a spot at university next year.

“I’m really stoked on the changes that have been implemented, As someone who has struggled with online learning this change brings me hope that I can actually obtain my desired ATAR score and get into my preferred course for next year,” he said.

Year 12 student Nathan Gunn petitioned to cancel VCE exams, saying he and his classmates had been burdened with the effects of COVID-19 and remote learning.

He launched the petition – which generated more than 4300 signatures – just days before Deputy Premier James Merlino announced every single VCE student would be individually assessed, with adverse impacts from COVID-19 reflected in their ATAR ranking.

“It’s a relief to know the Government has devised a new system of special consideration with the mental health of young people as a top priority,” the 18-year-old said.

“This new system is the first of its kind, which was crucial for all Victorian year 12s who are living and studying during a pandemic like none of us have ever seen.”

“We need physical interaction, we need to be there in the classroom asking questions,” he said.

Under the “extraordinary changes”, the Government will consider school closures and long absences as contributing factors to VCE students’ difficult year.

“We’ll look at things, for example, such as significant increase in family responsibilities as a result of COVID-19, and we’ll of course consider the mental health and wellbeing of students during this period,” Mr Merlino said.

“This year is like no other, it is an unprecedented year, and we need to support our students in an unprecedented way.”

Mr Merlino said the changes would help students go into their VCE exams, which start in early November, with confidence “knowing they will not be disadvantaged as a result of COVID-19”.

“This is a way that we can give every student and every parent of a VCE student the comfort and the confidence that their student will receive their final scores that take into account their individual circumstances. It puts them on a level playing field with every student across the state,” he said.

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