Schools would not have been closed during the Covid pandemic if the Government had all the information it does now, an education minister admitted on Thursday.
Will Quince said ministers had to act on scientific advice but “mistakes were made” when sanctioning lockdown restrictions recommended by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
Schools were closed from mid-March 2020 until June the same year to all but vulnerable children and those of key workers. Teachers switched to online learning again in winter 2020/21 when a second wave of the virus swept across the UK.
“The government had to act on the information they had at the time,” Mr Quince told LBC.
“So things like closing schools, with the information we now have, would we do it again? No, I don't think we would.
“But based on the information, acting in good faith on the advice of Sage and the scientific and medical experts, that decision was taken.
“But it was a once in 100 year event. [If] such a pandemic happens again, certainly in our lifetime, we will be more prepared.
“We have more knowledge, we will have more information, we'll know not to make the same mistakes that were made throughout the pandemic.”
The Association of School and College Leaders have warned that GCSE results, being picked up by thousands of students on Thursday, will be uneven across the country due to the varying impact of the pandemic and the Government’s “lacklustre and chaotic” Covid recovery programme.
It comes as Tory leadership contender Rishi Sunak says he “wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off” of lockdowns during earlier phases of the pandemic, criticising Government public health interventions and scientific advisors.
Mr Sunak said one of the Government’s biggest mistakes was giving too much power to scientists and claimed Sage edited its minutes to hide dissenting opinions.
“We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,” he told the Spectator magazine.
“And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place. We’d probably have made different decisions on things like schools.”
Mr Sunak claimed Sage removed some opinions from its final minutes, but said a Treasury official would listen to the meetings and brief him on the omissions.
“The Sage people didn’t realise for a very long time that there was a Treasury person on all their calls,” he said.
A No10 spokesman said: “Throughout the pandemic, public health, education, and the economy were central to the difficult decisions made on covid restrictions to protect the British public from an unprecedented novel virus.
“At every point, ministers made collective decisions which considered a wide range of expert advice available at the time in order to protect public health.”
Liberal Democrat spokesman for Cabinet Office Christine Jardine said: “The arrogance from the Conservative leadership candidates is frankly insulting. On the one hand Rishi Sunak is now claiming to know more about Covid than Chris Whitty, and on the other Liz Truss thinks she can solve the cost of living crisis without scrapping the energy rise.”
It comes as Mr Sunak prepares to go head-to-head with Liz Truss once again in the penultimate hustings of the Tory leadership race on Thursday.
Ahead of the Norwich hustings Ms Truss put her focus tax cuts, supply-side reform, better regulation and targeted investment zones in the East Anglian area.
Ms Truss also pledged to tackle trade union strike action, such as that at the Port of Felixstowe this week.
