“It remains our priority to reopen schools as normal after the holidays,” first minister Nicola Sturgeon said this afternoon.
The first minister underlined that objective during a parliamentary Covid statement where she announced measures to severely limit attendance at sporting and Hogmanay events.
Ms Sturgeon said that “one reason for asking adults to make sacrifices for a further period after Christmas is to help minimise any impact on children’s education”.
She added that, “to help ensure schools are safe environments for young people and staff, updated guidance based on the recommendations of the [Covid] Education Advisory Sub-group was published at the end of last week”. That guidance included a controversial plan to allow an exemption from self-isolation for some education staff.
Yesterday, Tes Scotland reported calls from teaching unions to mitigate the threat of the Omicron Covid variant by keeping school buildings closed for longer than usual after the Christmas holidays.
In questions after the first minister’s statement this afternoon, Tory MSP Murdo Fraser sought further confirmation that she would “commit to ensuring that there’s no delay in the start of the new school term after the Christmas and New Year break”.
Ms Sturgeon said she had made her views “very clear on that” and added: “I think everybody’s suffered through these last two years, but children and young people have suffered disproportionately particularly, given the very important stage of their lives and their education that they are at.”
She also addressed any suggestion that she was not taking seriously teachers’ concerns about Covid safety in schools and that teachers “think perhaps that I am dismissing concerns about their safety - I am not and I want to be very clear about that”.
She added: “We must make sure schools are safe environments for young people and for staff, which is why the [Covid and education] guidance published last week is so important.”
She also had a message for “all of us as adults” that “the best way of keeping schools safe and getting schools to open normally on time is to suppress community transmission of the virus”. Adults, she said, “need to accept some further sacrifices”, such as the fresh restrictions announced today, as this “helps us ensure normality in our schools”.
The new Covid guidance for education published last Friday contained details of the controversial plan to allow an exemption from self-isolation for some staff in “vital public services”, including teachers. That idea was strongly opposed by the EIS, Scotland’s largest teaching union.
