Covid-19: the return to school
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week children start to return to school in Scotland, with the rest of the UK due to reopen schools in September.
For most students this is the first time they'll be setting foot inside a school since March - the longest interruption to schooling in living memory.
But with the number of coronavirus cases back on the rise, how should we balance the risks of reopening schools, against the risks of keeping them shut?
Contributors:
Professor Bobby Duffy, Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London.
Professor Jonas Ludviggson, Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Russell Viner, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics & Child Health and is a scientific adviser to the government as a member of SAGE
Professor Anna Vignoles, University of Cambridge
Inès Hassan, researcher at the Global Health Governance Programme at the University of Edinburgh
Producers: Kirsteen Knight, Beth Sagar-Fenton and Rosamund Jones Studio manager: Neva Missirian Editor: Hugh Levinson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:05.0 | The briefing room is the audio space where you and I get together with some top experts |
| 0:09.5 | and inside half an hour find out what's what. |
| 0:13.0 | This week, school reopening. |
| 0:15.4 | How safe is it? |
| 0:16.5 | And what of our children already lost? |
| 0:22.5 | A sound I've missed. |
| 0:24.7 | I have two primary schools in playground hubbub distance of where I live, |
| 0:28.9 | and for the most part they've been depressingly silent in the long pandemic weeks since March. |
| 0:46.7 | Yeah. March. Next month, as all pupils in all schools across all the United Kingdom go back, |
| 0:51.8 | the noise will start up again. And in Scotland, they started returning this week. |
| 0:56.7 | Argument is still raging about how safe such openings are. |
| 1:00.1 | There are worries about parental reluctance to send their children back and there's an untold price being paid in terms of educational loss. |
| 1:05.0 | So this week, I want to know, as far as we can know, |
| 1:08.4 | what are the dangers of sending our kids back to school, and what will |
| 1:11.7 | they lose if we don't? So step inside the disinfected briefing room, take your usual seats, |
| 1:18.9 | and together we'll find out. |
| 1:25.6 | Let's start with the question of how parents are feeling about their children returning to the classroom and to the playground. |
| 1:33.0 | Bobby Duffy is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Policy Institute at King's College London, |
| 1:38.1 | and he's been tracking public opinion throughout the pandemic. |
| 1:41.8 | Bobby, as far as you can tell from your research, have our attitudes about whether children should return to school |
| 1:47.6 | changed during the pandemic? |
... |
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