Masks in schools: how convincing is the government’s evidence?

Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced last month, there was no requirement. But that has changed.

Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was asked why on Monday. He replied that ‘we conducted a small observational study with 123 schools who had followed mask-wearing in classrooms before and saw that they made a difference’. He suggested it was quite a significant study. ‘If you just think it through, with a respiratory disease that is aerosol-transmitted, if you are asymptomatic but wearing a mask, you’re much, much less likely to infect other people.’

The government has now published an ‘Evidence Summary’ for the use of face coverings in education settings. The study compared schools where pupils wore masks with those that did not, and found a difference in Covid absences: of just 0.6 percentage points. Even the official report accepts that this is not a statistically significant difference.