Health News at Your Fingertips

A consortium of unions has today issued a joint call for staff at all schools, colleges and early years settings such as nurseries and daycares to be given early access to Covid-19 vaccinations by the government.

In a combined statement, the unions call for teachers, assistants, carers and other school staff to be prioritised in phase two of the national vaccination programme, following reports that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) will back aged-based eligibility for the next stage of the vaccine rollout in England.

The effort brings together the National Association of Head Teachers and the Association of School and College Leaders as well as the Association of Colleges, representing sixth form and further education colleges. The group includes Unison and the GMB representing other staff, alongside the NEU and NASUWT teaching unions.

Neil Leitch, chief executive of the Early Years Alliance, said:

With Covid cases in early years settings continuing to rise sharply, it is absolutely critical that all those working in nurseries, pre-schools and childminding settings, along with other education colleagues, are given the protection they need to continue doing their jobs as safely as possible.

Avril Chambers, national officer for the GMB, said school support staff had an “urgent” need for vaccination, “because support staff are often performing tasks that involve close contact without adequate PPE and often in poorly ventilated areas which leads to a higher risk of transmission.”

There is “compelling evidence” that the vaccination programme is starting to work, Nicola Sturgeon has said in her daily briefing, as she pointed to weekly data showing a significant decline in care home deaths, with the proportion of those dying in care homes falling from 34% at the beginning of January to 13% last week.

Despite this, she reiterated that her government’s planned route map out for easing restrictions, which will be published next week, will be “cautious”.

She told reporters: “I want this lockdown to be the last one we need.”

Sturgeon said she had always favoured an elimination strategy when dealing with the virus, “by which I mean suppressing the virus to as low a level as possible and keeping it there” and that Scotland is “on the path back” to that point.

She pointed out that this was achieved in Scotland last summer but that the virus was then re-seeded “mainly from overseas travel and travel across the UK”. “We know we can do that and we are some way off it, but we are on a path back to that suppression to very low levels. The challenge is how do you keep it there?”

She said that this would involve a combination of methods: the test and protect system (as of today, anyone who is identified as a close contact of somebody who has tested positive for coronavirus will be asked to get tested too), travel restrictions “perhaps for some time yet”, as well as continuing with restrictions like face coverings, stringent hygiene and physical distancing as the country comes out of lockdown.