Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Teaching unions, not Boris, are the reckless ones

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The National Education Union, the largest teaching union in the UK, has branded Boris Johnson ‘reckless’. What’s he done now? He said Britain’s schools should start to reopen in June. 

This is how weird politics has become in Covid-hit Britain. The ‘Evil Tories’ want working people, especially teachers, to get back to work, while the unions are saying: ‘No, thanks. It’s too dangerous.’

Our apparently uncaring government wants kids to mix together once again and to get back to the incredibly serious business of learning. And the supposedly loving left is pushing back and pretty much insisting that schools should remain closed and kids should stay stuck at home. Political life has been turned upside down.

Boris made his schools comment in his address to the nation on Sunday night, the one that Oxbridge-educated journalists across the land – well, in the London media bubble – pretended not to understand. As part of the phased easing of lockdown (try to keep up, commentators), he said that next month we will hopefully be able to ‘get primary pupils back into schools, in stages, beginning with reception, Year 1 and Year 6’.

To me, this sounds like the opposite of reckless. He isn’t saying ‘let’s throw open the school gates’. He’s proposing a staggered return to schooling, starting with the very young. This is a great idea. It will lift children out of their isolation and it will free parents up to return to work.

And yet still the National Education Union isn’t happy. Its general secretary, Dr Mary Bousted, said Boris’s comments were ‘nothing short of reckless’. She said we still don’t know if it’s safe for kids and teachers to return to schools. We need to think about ‘the potential spread of the virus in schools’, she said.

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