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Boris Johnson has rejected claims that the UK government failed to plan for mass school closures after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the former prime minister admitted children paid a “huge, huge price” during the health crisis.
Johnson told the official Covid inquiry on Tuesday he had been “determined to keep schools open” in early 2020 but that closing them was a subject that “repeatedly cropped up” at high-level Whitehall meetings.
“It looked to me as though the DfE [Department for Education] was preparing for that,” he said. “School closures were clearly going to be part of the panoply of things we could do to defeat Covid.”
But Johnson insisted that sending students home to curb the spread of the virus — a decision taken on March 18 2020, just days after the government said schools would stay open — was a “nightmare idea”.
“It felt to me as though children who are not vulnerable to Covid were paying a huge, huge price to protect the rest of society. It was an awful thing. I wish we had found another solution,” Johnson said of the policy.
The comments by Johnson, who was Conservative prime minister between 2019 and 2022, come after Jonathan Slater, then permanent secretary at the DfE, told the inquiry that “no contingency plan had been prepared” for the closure of schools.
The first request that the education department received from Downing Street to make plans for potential school closures came on March 17 2020, Slater said in written evidence, only one day before Johnson decided to close schools on March 18 “until further notice”.
Last week former education secretary Sir Gavin Williamson told the inquiry that the government had made “many mistakes” in planning for school closures and that Johnson “chose the NHS over children” at points during the pandemic.
On Tuesday, Johnson said he would have “hoped that the DfE would have picked up on the fact that work needed to be done” to make preparations after discussions took place in February.
The Covid inquiry is examining the government’s response to the virus that shut swaths of the economy, upended social life and has so far killed more than 200,000 people in Britain and infected many millions more.
In her first report published last year, inquiry chair Baroness Heather Hallett found the UK had “failed” citizens in its response to coronavirus after planning for the “wrong pandemic”, with preparations for a no-deal Brexit diverting the state’s attention from potential public health crises.
Johnson said on Tuesday that ministers had been “focused on staving off an appalling public health crisis” when Covid struck.
“I take full responsibility for all the decisions that we took and all the mistakes that were made I was accountable for. As far as we got things wrong, I apologise for them,” he added.
This is a developing story
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