Re-opening schools

In primary schools, teachers could teach a fifth of their class each day; that way all the children would receive equal provision at school and the rest of the week they could do home learning. Teachers would only have to plan and prepare one set of in-school lessons for the week (as they would teach the same set of lessons each day but to a different group of pupils from the class) while still setting some home learning tasks to consolidate the in-school learning. This would ensure a manageable workload for teachers and because the home learning would be designed to consolidate in-school learning, parents would not feel obliged to try and teach things from scratch.

Given that the maximum class size is in any case 33, this would mean a maximum of 7 children in the classroom on any given day, which would enable some sort of social distancing to be managed in existing school buildings, although speaking as a teacher who has worked in a childcare hub during the lockdown, it is frankly impossible to ensure that children of primary age comply strictly with the 2 metre rule. They just can't help interacting and they forget to stay apart, particularly in the playground, and it is obviously not acceptable (on lots of levels) to use any kind of physical intervention to enforce it. However, a reduction in the number of children in any one space would make it a lot easier to manage and hopefully reduce the risk. It would also make it a lot easier to manage regular frequent hand-washing - it takes a long time for 33 children to take turns to wash their hands and this significantly impacts on learning time.

It would help to start a manageable return to school, which would be of huge benefit to the workforce and to parents' and childrens' mental health.