Interesting that people are proposing empty community buildings should be used to enable schools to re-open. A few problems: 1) There are 24,000 schools in England and 8.77m children in them. In groups of no more than 15, we need at least 585,000 spaces to teach them...

…. which is at least 250,000 more than we have. To give a sense of scale - there are 10,000 village halls in England. 2) To run school properly, these spaces need to include early years facilities, science labs, DT suites, art rooms etc. There may be some such spaces vacant...

… outside schools, but there won't be many. 3) In secondary schools at least, moving between specialist spaces is key to teaching the curriculum. Movement of large groups of young people between different locations in a town is presumably a huge problem for Covid transmission...

4) Most importantly, staffing is as much of a constraint as space. With at least 585,000 groups of no more than 15 and at least 10% non-contact time, we need at least 650,000 teachers. There are 450,000 people teaching in England. Some of them are clinically vulnerable...

… so we need about 250,000 extra teachers if children are to be taught in groups of no more than 15. There is no realistic way of getting that number of additional qualified people into schools.

The reality is: we will not be able to open schools fully to *all* pupils until the public health advice is that it is safe to teach in groups of up to 30. That is what schools have the space and staffing to do.

I hope we do get that advice clearly and unambiguously for September. We'll need it early enough to plan. It will need to be explained to parents and to staff working in schools. We will need a united message about safety from experts and across the political spectrum.