I have been carrying a massive weight of guilt around with for almost year and I am so grateful to the wonderful level of investigative journalism and the brave whistle blowing of doctors and scientists for calling me out, shaming me and making me admit the wrong-doings of me and the education sector on the whole. I have to admit, this blog will hopefully help me own my mistakes on move on.
Firstly, we have been lying. Children do not spread Coronavirus, it is something that we have made up as a profession, because quite honestly we quite like doing nothing and remote learning is really much easier to do than being at school, in front of children we quite frankly do not like or care about. I was ashamed when Dr Hillary, the eminent doctor who is top of his game, quite literally called this lie out. He told the public that children do not pass this disease to adults and that the evidence points to it only being the adults who work in schools who take it in to schools. I am sorry to say, this is true and we knew this all along, but tried to pull the "It's unsafe" card because we could not be bothered to go into work. Great work Dr Hillary, you have really helped the public understand what the real issues are in this pandemic.
As a profession we need to stand up and say sorry to the thousands of children and their family who have been infected because of us. All of these bubble closures and community transmission has come from us - there is not one shred of evidence that the children have brought this in to schools from their families. We, the education profession, have to take the blame here. We have been attending these illegal raves every weekend, socialising out of school, paying no attention to the rules and been spreading it amongst ourselves so that we can take it back into school. This is not good enough.
Here some live footage of teachers at this weekend's illegal rave.
Absolutely shocking behaviour!
We also need to apologise for our behaviour in school. We are really making an environment like a petri dish for germ breeding. We have not written any risk assessments, and the ones we have written aren't followed. The staffrooms are cesspits of crowded, hedonistic party animals who do not know how to socially distance. This is an actual photo of a school staffroom shared with me last week. They are quite clearly not following any social distancing, probably have not washed their hands and there is not one mask in sight. Awful!
I would also like to say sorry to Professor Van Tam (affectionately know as JVT to his mates) for me even having to gall to question his science. All politicians and lots scientists are saying schools are safe. When JVT (I feel I can call him that now I am owning up to the error of my ways) stated in a briefing that the virus likes to spread in confined, poorly ventilated crowded spaces, who was I to suggest that this sounded like a classroom? Of course they didn't mean classrooms, and I should have known that. Schools are safe remember. So JVT, once again, I am sorry for trying to twist your words to suit my agenda.
We are also very sorry for being so self-important that we are demanding to have the vaccine before everybody else. We know we are the most important people in society and should be treated as such, but since Andrew Neil called us out today, we had better withdraw from this position and at least allow the top four groups to be vaccinated before us. We are sorry for our selfish behaviour and are quite rightly ashamed of ourselves.
Finally, we are sorry to our communities for us closing the schools and keeping them closed, even though they are evidently safe. We have made this decision, as I said for our own selfish reasons and because we honestly enjoy causing pain and grief for others. However, our MPs with a social conscience, such as Esther McVey and Steve Baker, have embarrassed us into admitting our deliberate lies with their demands for schools to be open. These have been ably backed up by the inspirational group of parents, UsForThem, who have been knowledgeable, know the science and quite frankly should be in charge of schools as we clearly are not up to the task.
Now that we have admitted to all of our lies and deceptions, I hope that we can move on from this sorry episode, stop infecting the country and bring and end to this pandemic.