Corona pandemic: Great Britain relaxes rules for schools

The British government wants to relax the corona requirements for students – also to avoid hundreds of thousands of people having to go into self-isolation every week. A new test procedure should help.

The schools were the first in Britain to be released from strict lockdown. That was the beginning of March, the first step on the roadmap to freedom, as Boris Johnson called it. Children, adolescents and parents’ homes groaned under the months-long burden of teaching at home, the lack of contact with friends, the social isolation.

But the opening of the schools was linked to conditions: the pupils had to test themselves at home at least twice a week. Tests were also carried out at school, and if a positive case was discovered, the whole class had to go home if in doubt.

It can’t go on like this, says Education Secretary Gavin Williamson: “We recognize that the system of closed groups and self-isolation is causing damage to the education of many students.”

NHS health service introduces new test system

With the advent of the delta variant, the problem became particularly visible. While the older and middle sections of the population are increasingly protected by a high vaccination rate, the virus is now rampant in schools. In the past week, more than 640,000 students had to be sent home. Covid infection was only suspected in a tenth of them.

“So we’re going to end the closed-group system and instead introduce a testing system with the NHS for all early grades through to high school,” said Williamson.

In the future, an entire class will no longer have to go into quarantine because a single suspicion has arisen. Instead, a daily test is sufficient for all those affected. If this turns out negative, then the lesson continues.

New rules from mid-August

The mask requirement and distance requirements in schools will also be abolished again, as will the staggered start and end times for lessons. Pattrick Ottley-O’Connor, director of a secondary school near Manchester, says that the experience has been positive.

“At the end of last year, between October and Christmas, we had to send loads of students home, sometimes six or seven times,” says Ottley-O’Connor. This time they wanted to avoid that at all costs, so they took part in the experiment. “This has made it possible to keep around 500 students here at the school who would otherwise have been sent home,” says Ottley-O’Connor.

The new rules are to be introduced in England in mid-August for the next school year. In the other parts of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, they want to decide in the next few days how to proceed.