In August 2020, as schools prepared for the return of pupils – many for the first time in six months – No. 10 performed a succession of U-turns on the wearing of masks in schools.
The initial advice was that “masks could impede communication between teachers and staff and have little health benefit”, but with teaching unions piling on pressure and the Scottish government deciding to recommend masks in their classrooms, the advice changed at the end of August. Masks became recommended in communal areas but not in classrooms because, in the words of then PM, Boris Johnson, “that is clearly nonsensical – you can’t teach with face coverings; you can’t expect people to learn with face-coverings.”
By March 2021, though, the Department for Education had recommended that all secondary school pupils wear a mask in class. As Matt Hancock (then Health Secretary) later pointed out when justifying his own infringements of Covid regulations, this was guidance not law, but most schools understood it to be a requirement and headteachers refusing to comply with the ‘guidance’ were pressured to conform. Consequently for most students the implementation occurred as if it were a legal requirement.
Astonishingly for someone who professed to ‘follow the science’ at all times, Matt Hancock has now suggested in his serialised diary extracts that the introduction of masks in classrooms was driven exclusively by crude political considerations, and to have had no grounding in assessments of risk, efficacy or safety.
Nicola Sturgeon blindsided us by suddenly announcing that when schools in Scotland reopen, all secondary school pupils will have to wear masks in classrooms. In one of her most egregious attempts at one-upmanship to date, she didn’t consult us. The problem is that our original guidance on face coverings specifically excluded schools. Cue much tortured debate between myself, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson and No. 10 about how to respond. Much as Sturgeon would relish it, nobody here wants a big spat with the Scots. So, U-turn it is.
Given the scale and speed of this U-turn, and in view of the Government’s dogmatic insistence on following the science, one might reasonably assume that once forced into this decision there would have been a concerted effort to establish the evidence and to assess the science-based health risk.
UsForThem asked repeatedly through this period for the DfE to confirm the evidence basis for its policies on masks in schools, and latterly for the Department to produce any evidence that it had carried out a risk assessment prior to those decisions, or for confirmation simply that someone somewhere in Government had evaluated the harms and benefits of the policy for the millions of children it had impacted. Our requests were variously ignored or avoided.
In October of 2022, however, after repeated FOI challenges by our team and after the DfE had claimed that its paper trail could not be disclosed because to do so would constrain future policymaking processes, DfE officials have now finally provided access to some of their paperwork. Despite heavy redactions across the documents revealed by the DfE, the picture that emerges, and seemingly now confirmed by Matt Hancock’s diaries, is both astounding and deeply concerning.
The first notable revelation is that the first time an evaluation of the masks in class policy was provided to the Education Minister, at that time Nadhim Zahawi, appears to have been on December 30th 2021. That is seventeen months after schools had first been advised by his department to require children to wear masks in schools. There was no assessment of harms for masks in schools under Gavin Williamson.
The second notable revelation is that more than one third of the DfE’s evaluation document supporting its briefing to the Minister was given over to concerns about the risk of teaching unions encouraging their teachers to walk out of schools on the insidious grounds that schools had become dangerous places to work. Those concerns were given materially greater airtime in that December 2021 briefing document than the few paragraphs devoted to the risks of harm for schoolchildren.
It is evident that the adversarial approach of teaching unions had a material influence on the DfE’s advice to the Minister. The evaluation document notes that mandating the wearing of masks in school “could help reduce the risk of some teachers invoking section 44 of the Employment Rights Act” (a statutory provision that allows employees, exceptionally, to decline to work in materially unsafe conditions), a provision the NEU and Unison had apparently flagged to their members in January 2021. It also cited surveys recording that 71% of Unison members had reported in March 2021 that masks in class were thought to be “an important safety measure”, and 79% of respondents to a private schools survey around the same time had “noted benefits of wearing face coverings in the classroom”.
The deeply troubling implication of this limited and largely redacted paper trail is that policymaking within the DfE was led not by a rational evaluation of scientific evidence or after a weighing-up of actual and potential risks and harms for children against known or perceived benefits. Rather, the motivation for the August 2020 policy appears to have been a direct response to union-led pressures, and perhaps also to incitements from some elements of the mainstream media, who seemed intent on shutting down schools in order to ‘protect’ teachers and other adults. Any harms to children appear to have been of subsidiary importance to making adults feel safe.
Also notable from DfE’s disclosures is the imbalance in the scant and woefully tardy risk-benefit analysis that had been done, and despite which the Minister had been encouraged to press ahead with the masking of schoolchildren.
The evidence provided in DfE’s briefing papers for the efficacy of masks is shallow, inconclusive and tardy – heavily caveated with benefits expressed in ‘can’, ‘potentially’, ‘tentatively’ and ‘may’ terms, rather than ‘will’. And the most substantial pieces of evidence referenced in support of masking children were an observational study of 123 schools carried out by the DfE over a period of 2-3 weeks in Autumn 2021 (a year after masks had first been imposed on schoolchildren), and a study carried out in the U.S. in Spring 2021, from which had been extrapolated a tentative prediction that between 26,000 and 210,000 children might have been saved from missing school if they had been masked.
At the same time, however, the DfE’s document acknowledges that its study had not established a causative connection between masking in classrooms and a reduction of missed school days; nor could that study do anything to take account of the impact of other society-wide interventions, including interventions applied to the broader adult population, which had been implemented over the same observational period.
In any event, and crucially, none of the reports or studies relied on for Nadhim Zahawi’s briefing in December 2021 had been carried out in August 2020 when DfE made its first U-turn policy decision to introduce masks in classrooms in England and Wales. So the DfE appears to have been flying blind from August 2020 until late 2021 – with no idea about the risks and harms to which it was exposing kids by introducing what amounted to a nationwide mandate for masking schoolchildren for up to eight hours a day; something, incidentally, that the Government never ultimately demanded of the general population, or indeed of its own ministerial teams.
In contrast, the evidence on ‘downsides’ (i.e., harms) of masking pupils in the DfE document is couched in definitive terms, referencing impacts on communication, cognition, educational performance, confidence; and the fact that “masks will become highly contaminated with upper respiratory tract and skin micro-organisms”, such that used masks could become a source of viral transmission. Even at the start of 2021, it was already clear and indeed had been referenced by the Prime Minister and later union leaders that wearing masks in class would impact communication. DfE surveys carried out in March 2021 and cited in the newly-revealed December 2021 briefing for Nadhim Zahawi had confirmed that 94% of teachers believed communication would be harder with a mask, emphatically reinforcing what everyone, including the Prime Minister and the Education Minister, already knew. DfE also noted at that time that children from ethnic minorities and in deprived areas were expected to struggle most with masks – adding to the stress of pandemic strictures for those children.
Of the gravest concern then, and potentially of legal significance, the evidence revealed in these briefing documents lays bare that DfE officials, and latterly the Minister, knew that wearing masks in class would impact children’s educational performance, cognitive abilities and attention as well as communication.
The evidence cited in December 2021 also raised concerns about the safety and hygiene for children of wearing masks, the need to dispose of them safely, and that children would need to be able to increase their hygiene if they were to avoid increasing the risk of transmission via masks. Or to put it another way, DfE officials had evidence that mandating masks in class could in certain circumstances increase transmission rates in school settings if at the same time hand-washing and other associated sanitary measures could not be guaranteed. Yet they appeared rather more concerned by the belligerence of teaching unions. This by itself is quite an astonishing revelation.
On the basis of the documents now revealed by the DfE, buttressed by Matt Hancock’s more recent disclosures, it appears that science played no meaningful part in this pernicious episode of policy-making, and that no health risk analysis was carried out before the DfE required schoolchildren to wear masks for up to eight hours a day. Of grave concern for parents, this implies that masking schoolchildren was a politically-driven decision reacting to pressure from teaching unions and mainstream media, and seeking to avoid unhelpful comparisons to the earlier decision of the Scottish Government to mask schoolchildren in Scotland.
It is hard not to draw the conclusion from this wafer-thin paper trail that DfE’s decision to mask children in classrooms was yet another instance during the pandemic when the best interests of children were subordinated or ignored for the appearance of safety for adults, or worse still for reasons of political expediency and in particular to avoid the embarrassment of a walkout by teaching staff at the behest of union leaders.
The U.K. Covid Inquiry has an opportunity to review the adequacy of the Government’s risk assessment activity for pandemic intervention measures, and more broadly the governance processes around significant decision-points such as occurred in relation to masks in class in August 2020. It should not be controversial now for the Inquiry to probe why the only risk assessment for what has been one of the most significant interventions in the educational life and health and wellbeing of our nation’s schoolchildren appears to have been prepared an astonishing 17 months after masks were first recommended, and to ask how public health policy-making of this magnitude could have been better informed and more impervious to inappropriate politicised influences.
Though it is not yet a matter of investigation within the domain of the Covid Inquiry, if in time serious health or developmental impacts are revealed in the generation of young children most affected by the masks in class policy such that questions of legal accountability may need to be assessed, we hope that the information revealed by our FOI team’s efforts will provide a basis for evidencing what DfE, union officials and crucially the ministers who made the key decisions knew of the risk of harms and the limited benefits of masking schoolchildren, and of their motives for imposing this damaging intervention on our children.
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I was listening to some chat about the Canadian approach, and the word (from someone very close to the process), was that Trudeau went with whatever the public opinion polls said at the time. Sounds like we were about the same. The Teaching Unions insisted on masks, in large part because ‘independent Sage’ were promoting it. There was no pushback from official Sage nor the Chief Medical Officer, so masks it was.
Seems like the case with pretty much everything now; the Twitter/Reddit/online-sphere screams and shouts about something irrational and the career “leaders” sway like grass to appease them. No backbone, no pointing to rationale. Then again, I’m not sure that the social-media mess would listen even if they did.
I’ve said for a while now, social media is to blame for most of the world’s social issues and has been for years. Giving too much voice to people who shouldn’t have any at all and relying pretty much entirely on snap emotional response. Baaaaa-stards.
“the Twitter/Reddit/online-sphere screams and shouts”
Indeed. They are not overly representative of the general population, and we know that the bosses and the employees of those firms are overwhelmingly leftists.
Redaction of official documents may be justified when concerned with national defence or perhaps when they mention specific individuals and their person affairs or in the very short term where disclosure may prejudice some ongoing legal case or be price sensitive. Hard to believe it’s necessary for documents discussion masks in schools, unless the intention is to cover up incompetence or lies.
Precisely so.
Just as it is hard to believe that redaction of documents is necessary when providing evidence relating to the details of correspondence between Ursula Von der Leyen and Albert Bourla in her securing of vaccine contracts from Pfizer. The documents that came back prompted by an FOI (or its EU equivalent) from a concerned MEP, supposedly containing details of text messages exchanged between the two, resembled the Black hole of Calcutta!
What a surprise. Many of us took the view that they were a daft idea, but those who promoted their use in “education” appear to have been deluded, and delivering false information to those who they are supposed to be delivering education to. I do know one or two primary school teachers, and to some extent they have been victims of scaremongering, via which they were sucked into it. Not necessarily a valid excuse for being on the wrong side, though.
So, ignorant cretins in the unions causing as much damage to education services as they do to the health service. At least what they do in the health service is to protect their fiefdoms so in a way is understandable though not excusable. What they’ve done with masking in education seems to have no reason or reasoning whatsoever.
And to think how many parents send their children into that environment, day in, day out…
The only reason is for the union to demonstrate its power to disrupt. Plus ça change.
Everything about the Fakedemic and Government policy was about politics and wider agenda of power and control, just like the climate change cult and Net Zero lunacy.
They reacted to polls of screaming bedwetters and then made up any justifications on the fly.
As and when these inevitably imploded and their non-effectiveness and harms became visible, they reacted by doubling down on them, to save their skin.
The story of our times.
And then they stabbed them.
Bastards.
You know, some of this evidence really should feature in a court trial for that former health secretary’s crimes against humanity.
This is very welcome analysis but feels generous to me. Masks were introduced all over the world as the visual branding of a fake pandemic. This was a global crime carried out by organised criminals, who wished to impose their own biosecurity control grid on all of humanity. Let’s try to focus on these criminals, not their hapless local enforcers (the UK government).
I teach in Vietnam, where around 1/3 of students still wear masks all day in school for nebulous reasons I’m currently investigating. The reach and scale of this crime is almost unfathomable, but it is essentially a crime against humanity and we should all be focused on how we make those responsible pay.
Unions constantly driving for more lockdowns, restrictions, school
closures snd measures is precisely why I don’t support any of their demands or strike action. I’d cheerfully level the state and all its quangos.
None of the ludicrous “rules” and restrictions imposed on the country had any genuine scientific evidence to support them. They wrecked the economy and ruined millions of lives without any justification whatsoever.
I will never forget and never forgive them.
Nine children in the UK have now tragically died from Strep A infections – and the Government has admitted that the lockdowns are at least partly to cause since children were unable to interact and their immune systems were not primed to resist infections.
It would be very interesting to know if these nine children were jabbed against Covid because these jabs suppress the natural immune system.
But there is no way they will ever let us know that. Move along …..
It is not just mask-wearing in schools that was teaching-union driven. The entire lockdown policy was forced on the government by public sector unions. Up to the 10th March 2020 the government was pursuing a sensible herd immunity policy. On that day, medical GMB members threatened mutiny, citing inadequate PPE for NHS workers. Other unions waded in. The RMT threatened a rail strike, UCU threatened university closures. The NEU waved the threat of national withdrawal of labour in schools. Faced with a multiple mutiny of public-sector unions, Boris and Co began frantically seeking for pretexts on which to abandon herd immunity. At the 16-Mar-20 press conference, Ferguson’s preposterous forecasts were wheeled out, perhaps with government-requested spicing – ‘schools may need to close’. On 18-Mar-20, Boris caved in to NEU strike threats by agreeing schools would close. This was the decisive step. Parents cannot go to work if their kids are off school. On 20-Mar-20, the whole economy went into lockdown. On 04-Jan-21 the same thing happened again. The NEU held a zoom meeting with 400,000 of its members at which the decision was taken not to return to work after the Christmas holidays. The government caved in again and declared lockdown 3, which lasted 6 months. The entire panics, both times, had been union-driven and totally unnecessary.
I saw a clip from Ireland AM on One Live (Dublin) in December 2021 where female presenters were demonstrating on a doll the best way to get a “nice tight fit” on a baby’s masked face. They recommended getting small children to assist with this in order to “normalise and demystify face coverings”. I sent details to my MP…. The Republic of Ireland is at the vanguard of the Great Reset or whatever other names that goes by. This global attempt to blank out faces and therefore the individuality of people is deeply sinister. I will not be surprised that instead of linking Strep Throat with the use of masks, where germs breed in ideal conditions for them, the infection will be used as a reason to reintroduce them. It is the youngsters they want to train to be compliant.
How have children been so tragically under-represented throughout this whole saga? What have all those children’s rights charities and organizations been doing for the past three years?
Are children considered the lowest-hanging fruit in a campaign to soften up tomorrow’s generations for ultimate compliance? If these youngsters have been trained not to complain about wearing masks 8 hours per day without any evaluation or supporting evidence, what might they acquiesce to as future adults without question or objection? And might they be further programmed to instinctively shame those do not?
They’ve already tried to “nudge” us into this type of behaviour. If this state of affairs persists in schools, in future we will need no nudging. I think this is the general flavour of what is going on.
To all those rebellious adolescents who just won’t fall in line: I salute you!
The evidence from Matt Hancock is that, “Gosh, the leftwing fanatics in Scotland covering 8% of the UK’s population have imposed masks on schoolchildren, so we must do it.” The logic of this argument defeats me.