Mask-wearing for students could return to schools under contingency plans to keep Covid at bay in the classroom over winter.

Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi said he did not want to see the return of bubbles, where whole classes or year groups could be sent home after a positive Covid test.

But he said that it was right to have plans in place to tackle the pandemic in schools.

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Mr Zahawi was speaking as Labour’s shadow education secretary, Kate Green, told Tes that it was “inexplicable” that stricter guidance on mask-wearing in schools was not in place this term, given the rate of Covid cases.

The latest figures showed that more than 200,000 pupils were off last week because of Covid - an increase of 67 per cent compared with two weeks earlier.

Covid restrictions have been largely relaxed in schools this term, with mask-wearing, social distancing, bubbles and the need for Covid contacts to self-isolate not being required. 

But the union the Association of School and College Leaders has called on Mr Zahawi to set out what action he will take to tackle what it described as “grim” Covid figures.

And the NAHT school leaders’ union has said the majority of its members want Covid guidelines tightening so that a child who has a Covid case in their family at home is asked to self-isolate.

Covid: Masks ‘part of contingency plan for schools’

Tes revealed last week that the effort of keeping schools safe in Covid hotspots was keeping heads “awake at night”, as decisions are taken locally on whether to increase the amount of restrictions in place in schools.  Local public health teams can make recommendations to introduce restrictions at school level but any introduction of measures across an entire authority area needs to be approved by the government.

Speaking this morning, Mr Zahawi also defended the pace of the rollout of carbon-dioxide monitors, which were first promised by the Department for Education in August.

Speaking to Sky News, Mr Zahawi said he was concerned about the impact that Covid-19 measures had on attendance.

He said: “The good news is that - and thanks to the brilliant teachers and support staff and parents and children - 99 per cent of schools are open.

“Attendance has gone up. The last set of figures I looked at was about 90 per cent, which obviously will fluctuate depending on infection rates.

“But my priority is to protect education, keep those schools open.”

But he said he was not looking to return to the bubble system to do so, “because actually, you saw the fall off in attendance, which really does harm mental wellbeing, mental health of children”.

Mr Zahawi did not, however, rule out the return of the wearing of masks in the classroom in England.

He said: “We’ve got a contingency plan, as you would expect me to do…it contains lots of contingencies, including masks, absolutely.”

The mandatory wearing of face coverings in schools and colleges was scrapped in May, but government guidance says that directors of public health could advise schools to reintroduce them if cases spike.

And Mr Zahawi also said that schools would be able to access technology to improve ventilation.

The DfE announced in August that 300,000 carbon-dioxide monitors to help staff tackle poor ventilation and reduce the spread of Covid-19 would be rolled out across all state-funded education settings from September.

Asked on Sky News if there had been any progress on this, Mr Zahawi said: “They’re going out by the end of this month. We will have the real uplift in those numbers into schools, really important.

“We’re also looking at ventilation, and how we make sure that schools have access to ventilation.”

He said there was “lots of technology” surrounding ventilation and that the government was looking to invest in this but also “create a market that schools can access if they need”.

He said supply had been an issue in getting carbon-dioxide monitors to schools.

Speaking on BBC One’s Breakfast, Mr Zahawi said: “So we’ve had several thousand delivered. By the end of this month we’ll be touching sort of 80,000 to 90,000, and then through November, we scale up to all 300,000 will be delivered.”

Asked why the delivery had taken so long, Mr Zahawi said: “I think it’s - obviously I’ve only been in department for two weeks - but I think it’s a combination of supply and making sure we’ve got supply, and then working with schools to see how many they need in each school. But we are ramping up through this month and next month.”

The latest government figures showed that the number of children out of school for Covid-19 related reasons in England increased by two-thirds in a fortnight.

The DfE estimates that 2.5 per cent of all pupils - more than 204,000 children - were not in class for reasons connected to the coronavirus on Thursday last week.

This was up from 122,300 children - or 1.5 per cent of all pupils - on 16 September, so it represented a 67 per cent rise from two weeks ago.

In Wales, secondary school and college students will be advised to take daily lateral flow tests for seven days if someone in their household tests positive for Covid, the Welsh government has announced.

In Scotland, an advisory group on education met on Tuesday to discuss the possible removal of face coverings in classrooms.