It will not have come as a great surprise to the government when Britain’s biggest teaching union told ministers to “review and, if necessary, adjust” plans to reopen schools in the light of new lockdown measures. Throughout the pandemic, teaching unions have resisted efforts to get their members back into the classroom. Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, can expect a steady drumbeat of warnings from those unions, from now until the start of the academic year. He should not march to it.
The harms of closing schools have been too many to count. The most obvious is to children’s education. Four in ten pupils in England were not in regular contact with their teachers, according to a study published last week, and one in five
