Schools and the Government must show far more drive to get kids back to school

Schools’ shame

SOME schools have shamefully betrayed their pupils during lockdown.

It is sickening that 2.3million have barely done a scrap of homework — that it has not been set nor marked.

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What are those schools playing at, aside from backing the unions’ destructive campaign to keep them shut?

And why are most secondary pupils now being fobbed off with a single short meeting with their teacher before summer, and only then “where possible”?

That is shockingly unambitious on the part of Education Secretary Gavin Williamson.

Some schools have, in fairness, performed admirably, setting several hours’ daily work online. Why weren’t they all ordered to do so?

Yes, a minority of disadvantaged kids have no computer access. That should have been the priority of both their schools and the Government.

Abandoning them has widened disastrously the gap between them and other pupils and between the state and private systems.

The Government must show far more drive, first by facing down the unions who used children as cannon fodder.

Second, by scrapping the 15-per-class limit and halving the crippling, unscientific two-metre rule. There is so little evidence either is necessary.

Get our kids back to school.

Build harmony

INSTEAD of smashing ancient statues and igniting a vicious culture war, let’s build new ones of more BAME achievers.

It’s not our idea. It’s Boris Johnson’s. And we heartily agree. Let’s honour the first BAME holders of our great offices of State. The greatest BAME sportsmen and women — or scientists, academics or medics. The first black US President.

That is a far more powerful statement about black lives mattering than toppling long-forgotten slavers or daubing brainless abuse on Churchill.

Meanwhile, let us take heart from the new poll that shows Britain is far more welcoming to different ethnicities than even just ten years ago.

Of course we can do more — and the PM’s new racial inequality commission aims to pinpoint exactly what.

What a pity the Left can only sneer at it.

Woe on jobs

FOR the first time in a decade we dread today’s unemployment figures.

They will be the first real evidence of the mountainous task facing the Chancellor as he creates the low-tax conditions for a new jobs boom. We’ll need it.

We congratulate those who queued for hours to shop yesterday, though.

Every purchase helps save someone’s job. Too many seem to think we can cower in our homes shopping online until Covid burns out or is nullified by a vaccine.

Do that and we will emerge to find only ghost towns and millions on handouts.