Shadow education secretary Kate Green has said she would “not rule out” compulsory vaccinations for teachers.
Asked on the BBC’s Today programme about compulsory vaccination, she said: “I think we’ve got to be wary about compulsory vaccinations; we wanted, as you know, to bring forward the vaccination programme for teachers to give them priority very early on this year because, if teachers are off sick, it means they have to go home and children can’t be in the classroom.
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“But compulsory vaccinations, I think, are a very difficult thing for us to contemplate when we know that some people are still struggling to get vaccination appointments...I certainly think we should do everything we can to encourage and ensure everyone is able to get the vaccine when they’re called to do so or are able to do so.
“I don’t rule it out completely as a matter of principle but I don’t think we have, by any means, reached the point where only compulsion is going to ensure that teachers are vaccinated. There’s a lot more to do to enable them to get the vaccinations that they all want to have.”
Ms Green added that if school bubbles and isolation measures to deal with Covid infections were to be replaced with testing, the government needed to invest in “infrastructure” to test in schools.
She said: “It’s certainly concerning that we had 375,000 children out of school last week and we can’t go on like this, with children missing school - perhaps on many, many occasions - because their bubble collapses.
“So I think it’s right to review the situation and to see if testing can prove a secure way to keep children in class but, of course, we know that the vast majority of children are not actually undertaking the home tests at the moment - something like 80 per cent of children are not doing these tests.
“So, if the government is serious about using testing as a replacement for the bubbles system, then it will need to put in place a proper infrastructure to enable that to happen.”
