Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

Justin Welby could solve the government’s schools headache

Justin Welby in Downing Street (Getty images)

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.

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in