IS your child’s school built with 40-year-old concrete on the verge of collapse? Please wait for a letter from your school’s headteacher to confirm.
Will your child be returning to school after six weeks of summer holidays, or will they be staying at home for lessons via Zoom while you scramble to arrange some form of childcare that isn’t losing your job? Again, wait to be notified.
Do we know which schools have the light, airy crumbling concrete? We know 156 of them. We’re doing surveys on the others. Whether your specific school falls down on your specific child is very much up in the air.
Why aren’t we revealing which schools are affected? Quite simply, we’re trying to avoid any negative publicity as education is one of the few areas we’ve not had catastrophic errors in recently.
But doesn’t that mean every parent in England is worried, rather than the relatively small number actually affected? Mm. Actually perhaps we’ve not thought this through.
And wouldn’t the ideal time to address this be at the beginning of a six-week summer holiday, rather than the end? Look, we can all be Captain Hindsight. We’ve only known about this since 1994. We’ve sent out questionnaires. We’ve not been idle.
So can your child safely return to school? Maybe. Probably. Wait for the school to tell you, if and when they find out. Isn’t this fun?