No more massive class closures?
It is in any case towards this objective that the Ministry of National Education wants to strive.
Jean-Michel Blanquer announced this Tuesday on Franceinfo the experimentation of a new health protocol in primary schools "from the beginning of next week" to ensure educational continuity including in the event of detection of one or more cases of Covid-19 in a classroom.
Sanitary protocol in schools: "We will launch an experiment in ten departments. Each time there is a positive case, we will test the whole class, and the positive cases will go home", indicates Jean-Michel Blanquer pic.twitter.com/wVr5XsixgY
- franceinfo (@franceinfo) September 28, 2021
This experiment is similar to the recommendations of the Scientific Council, which recommends systematizing screening and sending home only children who test positive and which until then differed from the strategy adopted by the Ministry of National Education since the start of the school year.
"We are obviously very attentive to the opinions of the scientific council and we will take this advice into account by launching the experiment in ten departments, announces this Tuesday Jean-Michel Blanquer.
We'll see if that really changes the game.
"
Objective: test 200,000 students per week.
According to the minister, the epidemic is receding in schools.
“She's really on a downtrend.
(…) We went below 2000 closed classes.
(…) We remain cautious and above all very attentive.
"
About ten departments acting as laboratories
For the time being, and as has been the case since the start of the school year, primary schools close classes when a case is detected there.
Before the All Saints holidays which will start on November 1, some schools will carry out this experiment and continue face-to-face teaching, including if one or more cases of Covid-19 appear.
"We do it in various departments to be able to compare" the evolution of each situation, explains the minister.
For government spokesman Gabriel Attal, the "rule of closure from the first case leads to a fairly low number of class closures".
Despite this, "we are going to try another solution which is to test the whole class rather than close," he announced this Tuesday morning on France Inter.