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The staggered reopening of schools in January is expected to go ahead as planned, Michael Gove said Monday.
The Cabinet Office minister confirmed that the Year 11 and 13 high school students, as well as the children of key workers, will return on 4 January.
All the primary school children will also resume classes, while other students will return a week later.
Gove told Sky News: “We always keep things under review, but the teachers and principals have been working incredibly hard over the Christmas period since the schools split up to prepare for a new testing regimen, community testing, to make sure that children and all of us are safer.
“We keep things under review, but that’s the plan.”
His comments came when a report in Politico claimed that government scientists had urged Boris Johnson to keep schools closed, and potentially order stricter national lockdown measures, to combat the rise in coronavirus infections across the country.
Downing Street officials and the Department of Education will debate the issue on Monday amid concerns about the spread of a new strain of coronavirus.
Earlier this month, the government said that exam year students would return to school normally after the Christmas break, but most high school students would start the period online to allow principals to implement massive tests of children and staff.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, a member of the Government’s Emergency Scientific Advisory Group, has said the arguments for reopening schools in January were “very well balanced.”
The Wellcome Trust director told BBC Radio 4’s Today show: “I think the next few weeks until January will be extremely difficult across the country.”
“Certainly my own opinion is that opening schools is an absolute priority. But society, and eventually this is a political decision, will have to balance keeping schools open, if possible, with closing other parts of the world. the society.
“It’s going to be an exchange between one or the other. You can’t have everything. You can’t have the opening of the whole society, and the schools that open and more education and universities, and keep R below 1 with this variant .
“I think there are some very, very difficult options. We will see these continuing pressures for at least the next two or three months.”
