Mask Wearing for Children Was Not Risk-Assessed for 17 Months in the UK: FOI

Year 10 students wear masks as they take part in a science class at Park Lane Academy in Halifax, northwest England, on Jan. 4, 2022. Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images

Masking children was a “political decision” despite a risk of harm and limited benefits, claims the children’s campaign group UsForThem.

Set up in May 2020, UsForThem have campaigned for the UK government to discontinue the use of masks for children and adults in school settings and evidenced the harm of lockdowns on kids.

In a recent Substack, UsForThem posted that it requested the Department for Education (DfE) several times to confirm the evidence basis for its policies on the use of masks in schools and for it to produce any evidence that it had carried out a risk assessment prior to that decision.

After receiving and reviewing some of the paperwork, UsForThem claimed that “science played no meaningful part in this pernicious episode of policy-making, and that no health risk analysis was carried out before the DfE required schoolchildren to wear masks for up to eight hours a day.”

Political and Union Pressures

The group pointed to political and union pressures as to why the government kept masking schoolchildren.

The initial advice under then Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2020 was that “masks could impede communication between teachers and staff and have little health benefit.”

Though in August of that year guidance required to wear face coverings was brought in for children aged 11 and above.

The government stressed that these were recommendations, rather than statutory ones. However, UsForThem said that “consequently for most students the implementation occurred as if it were a legal requirement.”

The UK Health and Security Agency published a review of the effectiveness of face coverings to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 in community settings in November 2021.

They found that face coverings “are likely to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in the community through source control, wearer protection, and universal masking.”

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson attends a Cabinet meeting of senior government ministers at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London, on Sept. 1, 2020. Toby Melville - WPA Pool / Getty Images

But according to the DfE evaluation document released under a Freedom Of Information Request (FOI), the first time an evaluation of the masks in-class policy was provided to the Education Minister, at that time Nadhim Zahawi, was on Dec. 30, 2021, seventeen months after schools had first been advised by DfE to require children to wear masks in schools.

Under the evidence in the “downsides to face coverings” section, it pointed out that face coverings impact communication by increasing effort and reducing cognition on the part of the listener.

It added that research found that concealing a speaker’s lips led to lower performance,  lower confidence scores, and increased perceived effort on the part of the listener and that meta-cognitive monitoring was worse when listening in these conditions compared with listening to an unmasked talker.

It also said that kids from poorer as well as ethnic minority backgrounds would struggle with mask rules.

Britain's Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock leaves 10 Downing Street after attending a Cabinet meeting in London on April 23, 2019. Isabel Infantes / AFP via Getty Images

Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi brought back mask guidance in schools on January 2022 as “additional, temporary measures that will help achieve this in light of the omicron surge.”

Before all masks in schools were eventually scrapped on Jan. 27, the UK government admitted that scientific evidence on the impact of using masks in schools was “not conclusive.”

“It is shocking that it is a political decision which is what people thought, and shocking that once having made the political decision, there was no analysis of it,”  UsForThem Director Arabella Skinner told The Epoch Times.

“And that it just became a standard thing that if there is ever an issue, we will just shove in masks, and no one thought what the implications were for children,” she added.

“Nadhim Zahawi became Education Minister in September 2021 [replacing Sir Gavin Williamson] and it appears he didn’t really want to put masks back, but he put them back in January 2022 as he said we need to get kids back into school, but he’s obviously asked for risk assessment which we have got hold of,” she said.

Driven By Politics

Former health minister Matt Hancock also suggested in his new serialised diary that the introduction of masks in classrooms was driven by politics.

He wrote that the government was not initially intending to do that, but they ended up U-Turning because of Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

“Nicola Sturgeon blindsided us by suddenly announcing that when schools in Scotland reopen, all secondary school pupils will have to wear masks in classrooms,” wrote Hancock in ‘Pandemic Diaries: The inside story of Britain’s battle against Covid.’

“In one of her most egregious attempts at one-upmanship to date, she didn’t consult us. The problem is that our original guidance on face coverings specifically excluded schools. Cue much-tortured debate between myself, education secretary Gavin Williamson and No 10 about how to respond. Much as Sturgeon would relish it, nobody here wants a big spat with the Scots. So, U-turn it is,” he added.

Teaching Unions

“From a pure politicians point, one of the challenges they had was teachers were really scared and unions were definitely upping the ante on it and pushing the masks,” said Skinner.

The December 2021 evaluation document also found that the “adversarial approach” of teaching unions had a material influence on the DfE’s advice to the Minister.

The evaluation document noted that mandating the wearing of masks in school “could help reduce the risk of some teachers invoking sec[tion] 44 of [the] Employment Rights Act” (a statutory provision that allows employees, exceptionally, to decline to work in materially unsafe conditions), a provision the NEU and Unison had flagged to their members in January 2021.

It said that further measures “would likely boost confidence in the sector ahead of return and might make any use of s44. less likely.”

The document added that “we know that most unions do not believe our current measures go far enough, in particular on ventilation and face coverings (specifically their use in classrooms).”

Skinner said that one of the reasons UsForThem came into existence was that there was “no one ever championing children, ever.”

“In the education sector, there were the unions championing teachers and teachers’ rights, but no one at this point went ‘what is the value for children and the importance for children,’” she added.

A DfE spokesman told The Epoch Times by email: “Decisions about face coverings in secondary schools were informed by advice from United Kingdom Health Security Agency based on public health advice at the time given the risk from COVID-19.”

“Decisions were based on a range of evidence, including feedback from schools and pupils, community-based randomised control trials and contact tracing studies, and evidence from observational studies including in schools and summer camp settings,” he added.