Four in five teachers do not feel reassured by the government’s drive to install carbon-dioxide monitors in schools to help tackle the spread of Covid, new polling suggests.
And nearly a third say they do not commonly teach in well-ventilated classrooms, according to a survey conducted for Tes by Teacher Tapp.
The Department for Education has said it will spend £25 million providing 300,000 portable cabon-dioxide monitors to state schools from September, which will enable teachers to identify where ventilation needs improvement and “act quickly”.
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But as teachers and pupils prepare to go back to school, the polling data suggests that this has not succeeded in quelling concerns about the return to the classroom.
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Asked if they felt “reassured” by the government’s decision to send the monitors into schools, 80 per cent of more than 7,500 respondents said “no”.
Just 13 per cent said they did feel reassured, while 7 per cent said they could not answer the question.
Meanwhile, the polling suggests that nearly a third of teachers do not believe they work in “well-ventilated” classrooms.
Of the 5,810 teachers who responded to the statement: “The classroom I most commonly teach in is well-ventilated”, 63 per cent said they either agreed or strongly agreed, 31 per cent said they either disagreed or strongly disagreed, 5 per cent said they didn’t know, and 2 per cent said they couldn’t answer.
Teachers’ leaders have previously said the likely uptick in Covid cases when the new school term starts means that ventilation should not be the only measure in place to curb the spread of the virus.
And Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has asked “what happens next?” if ventilation problems are identified by the monitoring devices once they are installed.
“We know that there’s more [guidance from the government] that is going to come out around these CO2 devices,” he told Tes.
“Special schools and PRUs [pupil referral units] are likely to get them early on. But for most schools or colleges, they are unlikely to get them until towards the end of October, and, frankly, the procurement hasn’t happened yet.
“There is some misunderstanding around this. Some people are saying, ‘Great, this is the answer to the problem of ventilation.’ Of course, it’s not the answer. It simply gives you an indication of whether there is a ventilation issue.”
The DfE has been approached for comment.
