School closures leave parents with a serious headache

Well, thanks a whole lot, Gavin W. The announcement that schools would close in England from Friday was pretty well inevitable when Scotland and Wales announced that this was the way they were going, but it doesn’t make the decision less tricky for parents. It’s not apparent that the move was made for reasons of clinical necessity – viz, that children were likely to cross infect each other and their teachers – so much as the reality that teachers were downing tools and simply not turning up. Certainly, that was the case with my daughter’s school, with a number of teacher no-shows, as well as pupils absences. Though it was notable in my son’s school that it was, in many, cases the older teachers who were coming to work and their younger colleagues who were absent.

Whatever.