Common sense is important – but the government should demonstrate some if it expects the public to do likewise

Editorial: The reopening of schools is the latest move to suffer from mixed messages from ministers. The public needs clarity about the way forward

Boris Johnson has to make sure the message from government is clear (AFP/Getty)

It is all very well for the prime minister to call for a common-sense approach to reopening the economy, but it would be a good start were his minsters able to demonstrate that quality in their own actions and advice.

There have been a string of examples where government policy during this coronavirus crisis has not passed the “is this common sense?” test. They include the confusion over the quarantine that visitors to this country, including returning residents, will be required to impose on themselves. One day people coming back from France will be excluded from this requirement. Then a few days later that decision is reversed.

Maybe it took a stiff reminder from the European Commission that the UK was still subject to EU laws to have caused this shift, but the plan made little sense anyway. France has suffered an extremely serious outbreak of Covid-19, more serious than, for example, Germany. So why should people from France come in freely and not those from Germany? The probable answer (though no one could possibly say this) is that more Britons have holiday homes in Provence than in Bavaria. That is not a great basis for protecting the nation’s health.

There has been similar confusion over testing. Numbers have been trotted out at successive press conferences about the levels of testing being planned and achieved. Then it transpires that these numbers are not quite what they seem. Tell civil servants that they have to achieve a target and they will achieve it. Carrying out 100,000 tests a day for the infection by the end of April was a good example of that. They were said to have hit the numbers for one day, albeit with a bit of fuzziness around the detail. But then they fell back again.

There is nothing wrong with having stretch targets, for this is a device businesses use all the time. But they have to be applied with common sense. Now Boris Johnson has set down a target of 200,000 a day. We will see what happens to that.

However, the most serious current example of a lack of common sense is in the ways in which schools can safely be reopened. This has become a political matter, with teaching unions urging caution and the government seeking to push ahead.

Yes, it is important that children return to their education, but the nurture and support children receive in schools should be balanced against their safety, the safety of their teachers, and the safety of the community as a whole.

The common-sense approach would be to start by looking around the world at the ways in which other countries are managing the return to school, and seeking to learn from them. It may well be that different parts of the country should adopt a different timescale for the very different needs of younger and older pupils.

Maybe the regions should follow different patterns and procedures. These could include different school hours for different ages, or a part-home-working, part-school timetable. Teachers need to be involved in these plans, for without their support the return to school will at best be a mess and at worst a disaster.

Above all, the government needs to acknowledge that it is on a learning path. There are no model answers to this and the other decisions it faces because there are no precedents. It has made mistakes. This will likely have contributed to a recent fall in confidence in the government’s handling of the crisis, according to recent polling.

Mistakes are forgivable given the nature of what we are facing. What is not forgivable is a refusal to learn from those mistakes. Learning from mistakes, after all, is what good teachers tell their students to do.