Majid and Malek Moustafa have one hope for the coming school year – that they will not have to go back into lockdown.
“I hope that we this year can just go along with school and do my soccer and stuff and all that just pretty normally,” Majid, 13, says. He does not want a repeat of his first two years at Keilor Downs college in Melbourne’s north-western suburbs, “having lockdowns and having to keep going in and out and having to worry about spreading Covid or getting Covid.”
Malek, aged eight, has had his first vaccination appointment and is due to start playing soccer again next month. Majid is already back at soccer training three days a week. “It’s a really good thing for us because we don’t stay on the technology like we did in lockdown,” Malek says.
The school year in Victoria is scheduled to begin in the week of 31 January. In every state except Western Australia, students and teachers will return to in-classroom lessons against a backdrop of thousands of new Covid-19 cases per day. Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, says the “trade-off” for returning to school will be an increase in Covid transmission, but claims Australia’s already struggling health system will be able to cope.
“All my colleagues in the states and territories agree that the most important thing is to get schools back,” Kelly says.
Most teachers, parents, and students agree – remote learning is not a long-term solution. But some are frustrated that schools are still not set up to minimise the risk of airborne viruses, and angry that teachers have been told not to isolate if they are a close contact.
Others are and concerned that the rollout of vaccines in children aged five to 12 was so delayed that kids are only just getting their first dose. As of Friday, 75.5% of kids aged 12-15 have had two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, and 24% of kids aged five to 12 have had one dose. The interval between doses for younger children is eight weeks.
Prof Fiona Russell, a senior principal research fellow at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and the University of Melbourne, says many children in Melbourne and Sydney will already have contracted the virus before school begins.
Russell says there is limited child-specific data on the effectiveness of the vaccine against Omicron, but there is evidence that a single dose will provide protection against severe disease. Attending school is not necessarily any higher risk than mixing in any other setting, she says.
“The highest risk is really in the home,” she says. “With Omicron everywhere that is a substantial way that everyone is getting it right now, in the household. There definitely will be school outbreaks and infections in schools, but that is why it is absolutely important that parents, grandparents, and teachers are all fully vaccinated and have had their boosters.”
Circulating in schools
Russell says that Covid is likely to circulate in schools for at least the next 12 months, so it is critical that schools have plans to provide a relief workforce for teachers who are sick or isolating.
“There will be teachers who test positive and some of them will be symptomatic,” she says. “There has to be a plan for that.”
Some teachers told Guardian Australia they have quit over concerns about how the outbreak was being managed. Karen Armstrong left her teaching job at a Sydney school in June 2021, at the start of the Delta outbreak in New South Wales. Her husband, also a teacher, decided to retire early.
“I didn’t feel that it was being taken seriously,” Armstrong says. “The government wasn’t setting guidelines that were in any way adequate to keep the teachers safe, to keep the students safe … I was made to feel quite uncomfortable where I was challenging things. It was just easier to leave.”
Armstrong is one of the founding members of advocacy group Covid-Safe Schools. It is calling on state governments to put C02 filters and air filters in all rooms of all schools.
“We want the schools to remain open,” Armstrong says. “I don’t want my children to have a weird little life wrapped up at home in cotton wool, but at the same token I expect that when they go to school they are going to be kept safe.”
She plans to keep her youngest child, aged six, at home until two weeks after their first vaccine appointment. Her eldest child, who starts high school this year and is double-vaccinated, will be back on day one.
Armstrong says the debate around schools has become defined in “black and white terms”, as if the only options are to open up or shut down, when the focus should be on reducing the risk of transmission.
“We have known the virus is airborne for more than a year … there’s no reason that teachers should have to go off into an unsafe workplace,” she says. “It’s just unacceptable, it’s egregious.”
The Victorian department of education says it will have installed 51,000 air purifiers in all government and low-fee independent schools by the start of term one. The NSW department of education did not answer a question from Guardian Australia on its use of air filters, instead providing a general statement saying the Covid-19 settings for schools were yet to be finalised. “Schools will be made Covid-safe through a combination of physical distancing, mask wearing, strict hygiene practices and frequent cleaning of schools,” the department said.
Covid-safe at school
States and territories are expected to released their plans for the return to school this week.
Dr Nusrat Homaira, a senior lecturer and paediatric respiratory epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales, said ventilation policies and rapid antigen tests should form part of schools’ Covid-safe plans. But she says the rollout of ventilation guidelines in NSW has “not been very homogenous”.
“We cannot underscore the importance of the return to schools enough. The benefits of that far outweigh the risks,” she says.
Homaira says weekly surveillance testing of students and staff, at least during the heat of an outbreak, could be useful.
Ines, a maths teacher from south-western Sydney who asked that her full name not be used, says she is frustrated that the plan is being announced so close to the start of term. It is as if governments have forgotten that teachers use the school holidays to prepare.
“We’ve got one week left before we start … and at the moment I have been preparing for face-to-face teaching,” she says. “But if we have to pivot to online that is a completely different set of resources.”
Ines, who is also a parent to two school-aged children, says she wants to go back to teaching in person. But she is worried about high levels of absences.
“Especially in maths, but it’s in every [key learning area], the continuity of learning – or lack of – means that students will have gaps in their knowledge that will haunt them for years,” she says. “We can’t pretend that everything is alright and continue everything face-to-face that a high number of students are not there.”
She is concerned that the decision to make teachers keep working even if they are a household contact of a Covid case will cause the virus to rip through the school. “That was the moment that my husband suggested that I quit my job,” she says.
“It’s health behind the economy … our health doesn’t matter because we are not generating any GDP.”
She says prime minister Scott Morrison’s decision to frame schools as a place where children go so their parents can go to work and power the economy was insulting.
“They think that we are babysitters and anyone can do this job,” she says.
Lorna, a mother of two from Wollongong, who asked that her name be changed because she is a public servant, is also frustrated at the slow government response. She is worried it could mean a return to remote schooling.
“I could not handle a return to remote schooling, and the person who would suffer is my child,” she says. Supporting a primary-school aged child with remote learning is too much to manage while also working full time. “What ends up happening is that you give up and your child gives up.”
