Primary schools in a London borough where Covid-19 cases are soaring have been added to the government’s closures list after an “utter shambles” meant the area was originally left off.
On Wednesday, education secretary Gavin Williamson announced a delay to school pupils in England returning to their classrooms after Christmas.
Williamson said students in exam years will return to secondary schools a week later than planned, from January 11, while other secondary and college students will go back full-time on January 18.
Primary schools where Covid-19 infection rates are the highest will not reopen for face-to-face teaching to all pupils as planned next week, following warnings from experts over the danger of the new coronavirus variant.
The initial list of affected local authorities omitted the London borough of Redbridge – despite having the seventh highest Covid-19 case rate in England, with 3,311 new cases recorded in the seven days to December 26, or the equivalent of 1,084.8 cases per 100,000 people.
Reports suggested the Department for Education was blaming the Department for Health and Social Care for the mistake.
Redbridge Council leader Jas Athwal confirmed that the borough had been excluded from the list by mistake.
He tweeted: “It appears excluding Redbridge from the list was yet another in a long list of recent mistakes made by our government.
“Redbridge primary schools will not open on Monday 4th January.”
Ilford North MP and Labour’s shadow minister for schools Wes Streeting hit out at the “utter shambles”.
A spokesperson for the Department for Education told claimed that Redbridge Council had been aware it was supposed to be on the closure list and its name was added to the public version “at the earliest opportunity”.
Redbridge was one of four councils in the capital involved in a row with Williamson over closing schools earlier this month.
The Labour-run Greenwich and Islington councils rowed back on their advice for pupils to be taught online in the last few days of term before Christmas amid rising Covid-19 cases in the capital.
Waltham Forest Council, also under Labour control, said schools in the North London borough had been threatened with potential legal action by the government if they followed the council’s advice to shift learning online.
Redbridge, a fourth Labour-run council, said it would support a switch to online learning as schools faced “huge strain” due to the impact of local coronavirus cases.
Greenwich and Islington – as well as Hackney and Haringey – have been omitted from the government’s list of authorities instructed to keep schools shut.
Danny Thorpe, leader of the Royal Borough of Greenwich, said the authority was “deeply concerned” that it was not included in the list of areas where it is expected that some primary schools will not open as planned next week to all pupils.
Thorpe said: “In a case-by-case comparison, there appears to be no logic to how this list was brought together.
“Kensington and Chelsea has one of the lowest infection rates for the whole of the capital, yet their children and young people are being afforded the extra protection that apparently Royal Greenwich students don’t need.
“While we are very glad that they will benefit from these extra precautions, we can only speculate why this borough was included, yet with an infection rate more than 200 cases higher per 100,000, Royal Greenwich was not.
“We are writing to the Secretary of State tonight to ask for clarification of the selection criteria, but understand one of these might be hospital pressures. With the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich having declared an internal incident this week, and also serving neighbouring borough Bexley, which is on the list, we need to understand why Royal Greenwich is being treated differently to other boroughs who appear to be in much stronger positions.”
It came as official figures showed that the UK had recorded 50,023 new cases of Covid-19 on Wednesday.
And a further 981 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19, the Department for Health and Social Care also confirmed.