the prime minister announces britain is
moving to the next stage in the worst
public health crisis for a generation
so often the currents of this torrid
year have flowed most choppily
through schools tasked more than any
other public service with trying to be
normal when things
are anything but into this chronology of
woe has come a late effort
to arrange mass testing in schools by
the start of january
news which drops into head's inboxes on
the last day of term
many heads are incredulous we have to
get parental consent
if um young people are going to have the
testing so that's a logistical nightmare
already
if you look at school sites they're
massive
because of the zoning and the bubbles
we've actually moved to
three entrances so
we're thinking where will that testing
station go
does it go with the year 12 entrance or
with the year 7 entrance
should it go in our amazing sports hall
that actually takes away teaching space
so that's another challenge
so the logistics of trying to piece
together
where everything is going to go is
mind-blowing
i spoke to the department for education
today he said that teachers won't have
to actually be responsible for
conducting the tests themselves
right but then they're saying that
they're saying that uh an army of
volunteers
will be able to do it and support staff
how credible do you think that is
i'm gonna say i think it's nonsense this
disdain goes much wider than this corner
of north london somehow this
announcement managed to do
what almost never happens it brought all
the teachers unions and educational
employers organizations together
issuing a joint statement condemning the
government's plans as unworkable and
chaotic
further anger came today when newsnight
revealed that the department for
education was offering 1 000 pounds for
civil servants to work over the
christmas period
to help set the system up with no
equivalent for heads or teachers
but the backdrop and genesis of all this
is as follows secondary school students
have the highest infection rate of any
age group
ministers want this testing in place to
bring that down and keep schools open
others are now beginning to think that
that might not be possible
it's clear that secondary schools now
are you know places where covert is
caught and spread
and we know that secondary pupils can
transmit the virus very effectively
uh into their families and into the
community so
um if the government doesn't get a grip
and if we don't start reducing covered
levels amongst this age group
yes i think there's every possibility
that will be in another lockdown and
schools will be in that too
but government says that's precisely why
they want to bring in testing i would
imagine
well then we agree that the government
should bring in testing absolutely but
not like this
one thing's for sure relations between
school staff and the department for
education never warm
and now somewhere near sub-arctic dfe
sources
say that they're cognizant of what a
huge problem staff absence has been what
a huge
problem pupil absence has been they're
cognizant of the fact that there could
be
a spike in the early part of january and
they have this new testing capacity
so why not use it to ameliorate those
problems and that is all
laudable the problem is that it comes at
the end
of a year where the goodwill that would
be required
from within the teaching profession to
get all of this new system
up and running by the start of january
has
after this year all but evaporated
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for so many of us it's been a year to
forget but we know
in our bones we won't not least because
we know its spirit endures that january
bodes ill if its governments hope that
mass school testing
might make the coldest month more
bearable might avert lockdown
might keep the school lights on they may
need to think again lewis good all that
so what should we be anticipating in
schools and elsewhere in january
i'm joined by baroness louise casey
former government advisor on social
welfare
and sir mark walpole the former chief
scientific advisor
to the government who sits on stage so
mark let's start with you
um tonight as we go on air there are
reports
that this mutant strain of kovid 19 that
has been spreading in the south east
that it's sufficiently strong that the
government may be thinking about
bringing forward
restrictions rather more quickly what do
you know about this strain what's so
powerful about it is it so widespread
that it might change the policy well i
mean what we know
is that there are two factors that
determine the transmission of this
disease
one of these is the properties of the
virus and the other is the way people
behave and how they socially distance
and so what happens with viruses that
they do naturally mutate
all the time and the ones that are
likely to do well are the ones that
increase transmission
and so we know this is a new variant it
has been seen in other countries
but it seems to be quite widespread
which suggests that it has got a
transmission advantage
and scientists are working extremely
hard to work out
what's going on basically there are
three possibilities the first is that it
does transmit more easily
the second that it might give a
different pattern of infection
um and and and the third that it might
become resistant to a vaccine
now the latter two seem rather unlikely
at the moment
um but it does definitely seem possible
that this transmits more easily
and of course it will make the social
distancing even more critical
and and so how will it change january uh
what we face in january if this is the
case
well you know the bottom line is that
the situation is serious at the moment
it's obvious that the infection numbers
are very high indeed at the moment
it's rising quite rapidly in london in
the southeast
in the east of england and unfortunately
even in the parts of the country where
the infection is coming under control
the cases remain stubbornly high and so
the nhs
is under great pressure uh admissions
are high
and sadly admissions inevitably in a
proportion of cases turn into deaths
so we're going into january in quite a
serious situation
where we do need quite strong measures
to socially distance
and if the virus is uh changing then
that makes it even more imperative
and before we bring louise casey on this
issue of uh schools testing how
realistic is that
as a strategy that's going to work well
i mean it's firstly it's an enormous
logistic challenge
and if you like one of the really
serious capacity issues is staff in the
nhs and teachers in schools
and we know that they're under immense
pressure
the second thing about the testing is
that it's not a complete magic bullet
so the sensitivity of the lateral flow
test that's being used
means that they only pick up somewhere
between maybe 50
percent and maybe 65 of the people that
are most
infectious so it will miss cases but on
the other hand it will discover cases
that haven't been found by other means
but it's not
the complete answer okay louise casey so
even if testing
has its challenges is the answer to
delay the return to school
even further well i'm not an educational
specialist but just listening to that um
you know
the bottom line is that we have to keep
the schools open as best we can
that we know that the um impact on
particularly kids from disadvantaged
backgrounds
is really really profound so you know
i'm up for testing and i'm up for
testing from day one
what i'm not up for is how late in the
day this decision was made
as um just being said but marcus just
said the the huge logistical
implications for schools
not helped today tonight by the
department of education
uh offering a thousand pound bonus to
civil servants that are prepared
to work on the on the project over
christmas but that same
offer not being made to colleagues who
who are in you know in the teaching
profession so
i think the government just wobbles all
the time around making strategic
decisions and seeing them through
williams wants to bring in the army
centralize the issue get it sorted
yes well um i think somebody today said
that it
often feels a bit more like dad's army
than it does about the army and i think
i'll leave it at that well okay let's
talk
in your specialist area the social
consequences of a possible third
lockdown i mean it's been
uh terrible for obviously for incomes
for poverty
what the consequences of a third
lockdown well i mean the starting point
here is this
that pre the pandemic we had
high numbers of people in poverty very
high numbers of people now homeless
um and people living in temporary
accommodation families essentially
locked up
in single rooms with all of their family
and if they're lucky in microwave
like it wasn't great before the pandemic
what the pandemic has done and
particularly
lockdown is it's just pushed what we
already knew was a problem
into a really really difficult and
horrific place so we've got something
like almost
400 000 redundancies additional
redundancies between march and october
we've almost doubled the number of
people on universal credit
the stretch between the house and the
haves not is now way too stretched and
so when you go into the new year
i think what the government needs to
think about is how do we get a
reset particularly for families that are
struggling
um and they're vast numbers now it's
like these are ordinary people
you're working on the ground in uh
trying to feed people essentially
well yeah who thought that i would be
having had a long career in public
service i'm now
uh working in food banks and helping
people who are queueing for food in
the in the united kingdom it's like one
of the legacies from this pandemic
cannot be
that we quadruple the number of soup
kitchens and food banks that would be a
disgrace
and i think what i'm trying to get
across here is i met a woman
who was coming out of a food bank i
helped carrier shopping to her friend's
car clearly she can't afford to get to
and from the food bank
her and her partner had both been
furloughed they couldn't afford that 20
drop now she is on universal credit
she waited two and a half months for
that universal credit to come through
uh she i can't tell you how how awful
her life was
and she literally uh has been surviving
simply on that food bank i saw another
woman walk in
and was so so hungry and she was a very
thin woman
and she stuffed a cake directly into her
mouth because she was that hungry the
government would argue that they've
extended the fellow scheme at 80 percent
through till the end of april now it's
more than a year of
of those subsidies um good good
they should they should but but other
support packages for commercial firms
so the issue here is that in the
preceding decade to this pandemic the
amount of
cut austerity brought to public services
and to individual incomes of people on
welfare support
literally have we're all in this storm
right called this pandemic
some of us are in yachts and some of us
on rafts
that are that are literally sinking we
knew before the pandemic that if you
live in a deprived area and you're a
woman
you'll have eight less years of your
life than a woman who lives in a
non-deprived area
same statistics what the pandemic has
done is
pulled that even further and further
apart let me just bring in
sir mark so i mean obviously very costly
in terms of the social
infrastructure the idea of an extra
lockdown i mean but you know neil
ferguson your colleague or former
colleague on stage
says that a we have to be even tougher
now than we were in november
do you agree with that yeah well i mean
the point is i think louise
but of course the other issue is that
it's that it's those socially deprived
and disadvantaged people who are the
most severely hit
by coronavirus as well and so if you
want to see an illustration of the
social determinants of disease
coronavirus is it and so uh it is a
terrible situation but
lisa's point is absolutely correct and
of course the people that find it
hardest
under many circles do the social
distancing are the people who are
socially deprived because of the nature
of
work they do and the conditions in which
they live