Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 16 March 2021
There will be a gradual return of students to further and higher education and we will use lateral flow testing as appropriate and in a targeted way to support that. The increase in students on campus that I set out today for the early stage, from the early part of April, will be focused not exclusively but largely on further education, because that is where there is a greater need for students to get some face-to-face learning on campus if they are to complete their courses.
On case numbers, we have seen an increase in the past week. As the chief medical officer said yesterday, there is a small number of cases among people who gathered as part of the football incident last weekend. Given the incubation period of the virus, we might see more of that; it will not have fully worked its way through yet.
We need to be open eyed about this. After a year of the virus, I think that we have learned that any time that we open up and people start to come together, there is a greater opportunity for transmission. Schools have returned, and in that regard the worry is not as much about transmission in schools as it is about the activity that happens around the return of schools. I am probably one of the last people to be complacent about any increase in cases, but if I cast my mind back two or three weeks, I think that we worried then that the increase in cases that we would see after the beginning of the return of schools would be bigger than it is right now. We will monitor that very carefully. The mitigations in schools are important to try to reduce transmission among the younger age groups as much as possible.
This is always going to be a balancing act. Any relaxation of restrictions is not neutral, because it increases the risk of transmission, so we have to get all the pieces as much in balance as we can. We have a significant additional piece now with vaccination, which will help to substitute for some of the lockdown restrictions. However, it remains absolutely essential that we navigate the easing of restrictions really carefully, based on all the experience that we have had over the past year.