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Rules requiring secondary school pupils in England to wear face masks are to be scrapped, the education secretary has said, despite pleas by teaching unions and others for them to remain compulsory for longer.
Gavin Williamson confirmed the government was planning to remove the measure at step three of its roadmap out of lockdown, which will be no earlier than 17 May.
Scientists, public health experts parents and teaching unions had written to him earlier this week to warn that current rates of vaccination were not yet sufficient to fully mitigate the impact of transmission among children on infection rates in the community.
But Williamson told the Daily Telegraph: “As infection rates continue to decline and our vaccination programme rolls out successfully, we plan to remove the requirement for face coverings in the classroom at step three of the road map.”
Boris Johnson is expected to make the announcement as early as Monday, according to the newspaper.
Williamson added: “Removing face masks will hugely improve interactions between teachers and students, while all other school safety measures will remain in place to help keep the virus out of classrooms.”
The letter urging Williamson to keep the requirement for masks in place until at least 21 June had been signed by leading scientists and public health experts from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter and UCL, among others. They joined forces with five unions representing teachers and other school staff and parents.
It pointed out that after schools fully reopened in England on 8 March, the number of children testing positive for Covid-19 increased, so that by the start of the Easter break the prevalence of infection was higher in school-age children than in any other age group.
Figures published by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday showed school infection rates down, with about 0.33% of pupils and 0.32% of staff in secondary schools testing positive for Covid-19 from mid to late March, compared with 1.22% and 1.64% in December.
Dr Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer in machine learning at Queen Mary University of London, who was among the signatories to the letter, reacted to news of plans to lift the rules on masks by warning about the spread of a Covid-19 variant from India.
“So the govt appears to be scrapping masks in secondaries – while delaying releasing information about B.1.617.2, which has been spreading in secondary schools + outbreak involving 100 children in Derbyshire … Data not dates?” she tweeted.
A Department for Education spokesperson said virus transmission in schools was continuing to drop and that new data showed a significant decrease in students and staff testing positive. Positive cases were isolating quickly thanks to a twice-weekly rapid testing programme, they added.
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