Read on Twitter
Having now had experience of responding to a positive Covid case, the contradictions in the current arrangements have become clearer to me. It seems that they serve neither health nor education particularly well, especially in a secondary setting.
Focus is v much on seating plans and isolating those who have been within 2m of infected person for sustained period. This gives more respect to 2m figure than I think scientific evidence justifies and ignores the fact that airflow could make someone further away more vulnerable.
It also largely ignores contacts outside of lesson time and outside school altogether, relying on the honesty and memory of the infected person to reveal those they have been close to in these categories. It potentially leaves a lot of people in school who may well be infected.
Of course, the alternative is to send home entire bubbles (although I had thought that was a major reason for having them in the first place and why schools were asked to have class bubbles rather than year group ones where possible). Sending home a class or year group seems...
...bad for education on the surface, but I'm not convinced. Doing so would mean a pure diet of remote learning for a couple of weeks for the class or year group, and teachers would be able to devote all their efforts to doing it well, using what they learned in lockdown.
On the other hand, current arrangements mean most students in school with a few at home getting remote learning. With the best will in the world this means either trying to adapt work to set for isolating students or trying to adapt the lesson in school so it can be filmed.
Both of these options seems to compromise either the remote learning or the lesson in school, or both. I wonder if we would be doing a better job of keeping everyone safe and teaching by sending entire bubbles home, at least when it is older students who can be home alone.
