The government may have resigned itself to keeping schools closed for the majority of pupils until September but there’s a simple solution to the classroom capacity problem sitting at the heart of every town and village in Britain.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has been busy speaking out about everything from future government austerity to historic racism in the Church of England in recent weeks, while a dozen of his bishops publicly denounced Boris Johnson’s decision to keep Dominic Cummings in post.
All the while, the Church of England is residing over a huge pile of sizeable real estate that could enable schools to scale up in the same way as the NHS did with their Nightingale hospitals at the start of the pandemic.
Nearly every community in the country has a spacious parish church in the centre of it that is currently sitting empty. Instead of issuing political soundbites, perhaps Welby could put his words into action and open up church buildings for use as extra classroom space. I can’t think of a better piece of PR to counter the talk of dwindling congregations and warring bishops.
Welby clearly has an interest in politics. Indeed he has been the most political Archbishop of recent times. He’s keen to use his position to influence government policy. But what better way to enter the political fray than to co-opt the church into getting the nation back on its feet after the pandemic?
On Tuesday he spoke at length on social media about his ‘privilege’ and ‘place of power as a white person in this country’, before suggesting that his response to the events of the past week should be to emulate Jesus and ‘take action against injustice’.
Well, there is a huge and growing injustice staring him right in the face: millions of underprivileged school children are foregoing six months or more of their education while the government scratches its head about how to get them back into school safely with a finite amount of space for social distancing in schools.
To his credit, Welby has taken a hands-on approach to the pandemic so far. He is volunteering as a hospital chaplain in St Thomas’ hospital and has even opened up the private gardens of Lambeth Palace for the hospital’s key workers to use during their breaks.
But this is a chance for him to translate this personal sense of duty into a church-wide act of national service. It could transform the fortunes of thousands of disadvantaged school children and give the government a way out of the current gridlock. The nation would be forever grateful. In every crisis there’s an opportunity and it’s time Justin Welby seized his.
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