Schools are going to rapidly lose the confidence and cooperation of parents if this continues. Our hypervigilance is underpinned entirely by the easy availability of testing. Without that, families will more and more contest our judgements due to its inordinate impact on them.

Already getting families refusing to take a test as 'its just a cough, they always get this at this time if year.' And when the alternative is 5 days self-isolating whilst waiting for test results, you can see why they might feel this way and want to question the school

It costs them money through lost work, it means their other kids have to miss school too, it means they have to quarantine... because of the judgement of school about a cough that we're programmed to be ultra-cautious about but which they simply disagree with.

And so school will have to refuse to let the child back for at least 10 days or until there is a negative result. And without easy and rapid testing, this will only get worse as winter closes in. Attendance is going to plummet.