Boris Johnson has said it was “terrible” but “inevitable” to have to close schools for a second time during the pandemic in January 2021, after the emergence of a more transmissible Covid variant.
Appearing today at the Covid inquiry into how the pandemic response was handled by the government, the former prime minister said he had been “desperate to keep schools open” because it is “always the most vulnerable families [and] the poorest kids who come off worse from school closures”.
He added that this impact had been seen “without a shadow of a doubt” in the first lockdown.
Mr Johnson insisted that he had to “fight and fight and fight in my heart and head to keep schools open...but it just wasn’t a runner and we had to lock everything down”.
He said he had “listened respectfully” to his many colleagues, including his education secretary at the time, Gavin Williamson, who wanted to keep schools open.
Mr Johnson said: “The fact is that, sadly, schools are terrific reservoirs of the virus. And in the cold winter months, they were going to be a big vector of transmission for elderly people and it wasn’t a runner.”
The former prime minister had described Sir Gavin’s plans for schools as “probably feeble”, the inquiry heard from notes by the government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.
Surge in Covid cases
Former health secretary Matt Hancock told the Covid-19 inquiry last week that closing schools in January 2021 could have been avoided had the government acted more swiftly in the autumn of 2020 to slow the spread of the virus.
The January lockdown of schools came after a surge in Covid cases at the end of 2020.
In late December 2020, the DfE announced that all secondary schools would carry out Covid tests of their staff and students from the first week of January.
It also said that secondary schools would be going back in a staggered start to the term, with the majority of year groups learning online in the first week.
But at the start of the year, the plan was still for most primary schools to reopen.
Boris Johnson, who was prime minister at the time, appeared on TV to reaffirm this on the Sunday before the start of term.
Speaking on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show, Mr Johnson said that while he understood people’s anxieties over safety, there was no doubt in his mind that schools are safe.
However, just a day later, the government performed a massive U-turn and announced that schools were closing as part of a new national lockdown.
