Schools should be kept open “at all costs”, first minister Nicola Sturgeon has said.
She made the comments this afternoon while taking questions after a Covid briefing, where she had said that Scotland should prepare for a “tsunami of infections” from the new Omicron variant, Henry Hepburn reports.
When asked about the impact on schools, Ms Sturgeon said that “a driving objective of mine - and I want to look at the camera and say this with every fibre of my being - is to avoid schools having to close again”.
She wanted to avoid “any kind of blanket closure of schools” because “children have suffered too much”.
The first minister said: “We need to keep schools open at all costs.
“And if that means adults doing more [to address the spread of Omicron], that’s what we should do.”
Ms Sturgeon was also asked if she thought that “mass closures” of classes and schools were nevertheless inevitable.
She replied: “I can’t stand here and say that no class will be disrupted, that no school may have periods of disruption. What I’m talking about here is what we had before, which is the blanket ‘schools are closed’.
“Nobody wants that. I will bust a gut and do whatever - even if people hate me for asking adults to do more than they want to do - to keep schools open, in that general sense.
“Of course, if there are outbreaks of infection in schools, there needs to be a response to that - but I’m very clear about minimising the disruption to education.”
An evidence paper published by the Scottish government has suggested cases could reach as many as 25,000 every day by 20 December, if the worst possible scenario comes to pass.
The first minister was asked if the government’s current plans for tackling the spread of Omicron could see schools being closed “by the back door”.
Ms Sturgeon responded: “If there are cases in schools, then isolating groups of children is actually about trying to keep the school open overall because if you don’t isolate the groups of children where there’s an infection, the danger is you end up with all these kids off sick anyway [and] that’s how you end up closing schools by the back door.”
Earlier today, Tes Scotland reported that new Scottish government figures on staff and pupil absence showed the number of teachers off school on Tuesday as a result of Covid-19 reaching 1,500 - the highest number since schools went back following the October school holidays.
