Schools and parents will need access to widespread and rapid coronavirus testing during the winter to ensure that teachers and children with seasonal flu are not mistaken for having Covid-19, a new report has warned.

It has called for schools and parents to be able to take tests with a “rapid turnaround time” to avoid schools being closed unnecessarily or actual cases of Covid-19 being undetected.

The report by the Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE) group, which advises government scientists, also said a major public Covid-19 winter public information campaign could help schools through the winter season.

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The report warns that the winter flu season will pose challenges as two of the most common symptoms of Covid-19 - a high fever and a continuous cough - can also be symptoms of seasonal flu.

It says this will make the “monitoring and outbreak response” of Covid-19 harder from the late autumn until spring.

The report suggests that if the parents of children suffering from influenza wrongly assume they have the onset of Covid-19, it could result in partial or full closures of schools.

It also warns that there is a “risk that children who contract Covid-19 may be believed (wrongly) to have influenza and not Covid-19, leading to a failure to test them.”

The report recommends the implementation of “an effective monitoring regime that can cope with the likely case load in winter.”

It says this should include “broad surveillance, linked to an effective, sufficiently scaled and rapid test-trace-isolate system, as well as systematic outbreak investigation. This is all essential to ensure that schools are reopened as quickly as possible.”

These recommendations comes as a separate report warns that there is “substantial uncertainty” over what the national full return of schools will do to the transmission rate of the virus.

This report by the Academy of Medical Sciences was presented to the SAGE advisory group earlier this month and published by the Department for Education today.

The DELVE group has also said that adults and older pupils should consider wearing masks or face shields to limit the transmission of the virus.