In this week’s Sunday Telegraph Julie Burchill wrote compellingly about the different views on how important it is for schools in the UK to reopen. The main points she makes are:
- The Education Secretary and the teachers are still at loggerheads over the reopening of schools in September.
- This time last year teachers argued that it was unacceptable to parents to take their children out of school for a short holiday during term time. Now they seem to believe that suspending education indefinitely is wise.
- The Tory MP Jonathan Gullis, until recently a teacher, has argued that ‘A campaign is being run to breathe fear into parents … that these schools are a death trap.’
- 1,500 members of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health signed a letter stating that the current interruption risks ‘scarring the life chances of a generation’.
- The children of well-off and well-educated parents will survive.
She ends her article with the following worrying paragraph:
- ‘The doors of schools must open soon if not only the children of privilege are to have any kind of lives.’
Chris Goodwin