Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 02 March 2021
All the developments that I narrated earlier on and which have just been reiterated are very welcome. I do not want to overstate this, because I do not think that doing so is fair to people—I have tried not to give people false promises—but I think that we have every reason now to believe that the exit from lockdown might be quicker and might come sooner than we believed would be the case just a few weeks ago. However, we know that the worst thing that we could do and what would make that less likely would be moving too quickly right now and jeopardising the situation that is now beginning to emerge in such a positive way. That is why we need to be careful. That caution, as well as the determination to get children back to normal, lies behind the decisions on schools that I have outlined today.
We continue to work with schools to ensure that, although it is not possible to have all young people back to school as normal, there is good provision of remote learning for the period between now and Easter. There will be a blended learning approach for secondary schools, and we continue to work with schools and local authorities to ensure that that is of the quality that young people and their parents expect.
We have given local authorities significant funding to help with practical arrangements in schools. In my opening remarks, I mentioned ventilation. That funding will cover a range of other things.
The key to this, as it was last August, when we managed to support the full-time return to school for all pupils and to keep schools open virtually for the remainder of last year, is to get the prevalence of the virus as low as possible so that as much normality in schools becomes possible and some of the restrictions can be eased to allow normality to open up. The additional factor that we have now that we did not have last August, of course, is what we hope will be the suppressive effect of the vaccine.
We monitor these things on an on-going basis, and we take advice and work with local authorities and schools to facilitate things. I hope that, by the time we come out of the Easter break, we will have made further progress that will allow much greater normality in our schools than has been possible up until now.