Something’s gotta give: Back to school and our Covid testing fiasco

As someone who has been lucky enough to have had a full-time WFH job throughout the Covid-19 pandemic with a supportive and considerate employer, my experience of lockdown was a lot easier than it was for many people.

My two boys were off school from March until early September, which was a delight for most of the time and at the same time often very challenging. So when it became time for them to go back to school, the only question was whether we would get them back in without too many tears and protests.

This was especially crucial for my oldest son, who is autistic and was moving up from infants to junior school. Because of his hyper-sensitivity to sounds, he was incredibly anxious about the bell at his new school. Luckily, because of the staggered timetables being used right now, the bell is currently out of action.

Unfortunately, also out of action are our two boys. After just two days they both came down with what are almost certainly colds. This isn’t hugely surprising after six months mostly at home, heading back into the germ-infested world of 5 and 8 year olds was always likely to result in colds being passed around.

But this is school in the time of Covid. My 5 year old’s high temperature meant that we needed to inform the school and get him tested. We didn’t think it was Coronavirus, but it’s important for all of us to be wary of spreading it, so we self-isolated and went online to book a test.

Testing times

This is where the problems really started. According to the system (this was on Tuesday) the only testing centres available to us were in Oldham, Yorkshire and Sunderland. We live in Trafford, so Oldham would have been do-able, if quite a bit further than we’d expected given the centres we know of that are closer.

But, despite claiming there were 54 slots available in the next five days (the all-important time where you need to get tested after developing symptoms), there actually weren’t any. I clicked through day after day after day after week and there were no slots. Not at Oldham, nor Yorkshire, nor Sunderland.

Luckily, his school had got back to us and had a test I could go and pick up. After doing our best to get a poorly 5 year old boy to let us prod his tonsils and nostril with a stick and combating the confounding instructions for sealing the biohazard bag and cardboard box, we sent it off as quick as we could.

According to the Royal Mail tracking service, it got to the testing centre in Scotland at 7.30 am on Tuesday. In theory we should have heard something the next day. In theory.

I’m writing this on Saturday morning and we’ve heard nothing. I’ve rung up the helpline and spent an hour to get through to someone who could only take my details and promise that someone would get back to me. Nobody has.

My son completely recovered from any kind of symptoms of even a mild cold by Wednesday. Both he and his brother have now missed four of their first six days back at school, denying them very important settling-in time, and we still can’t tell them when they’ll be going back again.

If the test is negative, it’ll be next week. If it’s positive it won’t be for another week after that. If it’s been lost by them, it’ll still be another week because it’s now too late for him to take another test, so we’d have been isolating for two weeks with no idea if he even had Covid in the first place.

Why this matters

This is a whinge, I know that. We’re incredibly lucky in that none of this affects my ability to work. We have a comfortable house and a garden and have family and online shopping to help us keep stocked up with essentials.

But this situation is playing out all over Greater Manchester and presumably beyond. There’s more than 60 schools in the region where there have been positive cases of Covid, with thousands of kids having to be pulled back out of the schools they’ve only just returned to.

Having been told in the spring that our kids needed to get back to school ASAP because this disruption was so damaging to them, there’s been complete silence about the impact this new disruption is having.

On Friday we saw on Facebook a photo of my oldest son’s class having a virtual assembly with the rest of the school. He’s missed out on that and a lot more, as has his brother. Seemingly this doesn’t matter as long as the big picture is that ‘schools are back, the kids are alright’.

For an autistic child who faced so many fears by just going back to school in the first place, being dragged back out again after two days is definitely impacting him. Emotionally, he’s all over the place right now, getting into so many more screaming arguments with his brother over tiny little things.

It’s not fair on him, because he needs the certainty that we can’t offer him because have no idea what’s going on either. He could be back in school on Monday if we hear something before then. That’s his birthday.

The disruption takes lots of forms too. My brother-in-law is in our support bubble, so he’s having to isolate too. A colleague from work has had to change her working patterns so she can go back to homeschooling again for a fortnight.

Meanwhile, the testing chaos continues. There’s stories of people driving hundreds of miles to testing centres only to be turned away. Even Jacob Rees-Mogg has had to wait longer than 24 hours to find out his child’s test result.

We’re in a fortunate situation, but this is still HARD and incredibly frustrating. And the danger is that putting people through this will have a similar impact to the Dominic Cummings situation.

So far we have followed all of the rules. We’re in a local lockdown in Trafford- apart from a 12 hour window while the Government did a U-turn — and haven’t broken it at all.

But if the boys go back to school next week or the week after and come down with another cold, the temptation will be there to keep it quiet and not get them tested, because we don’t want to go through all this again. And we won’t be the only ones feeling this way.

That’s a dangerous situation for the country to be in at a time when infection rates are going up. It’s so crucial that something is done to improve how we test our children so that we can keep them in school, otherwise even more kids are going to suffer from disruption to their education in an already disrupted year.