IT’S rare that I get really angry, but the current government initiative to suggest that a proportion of our children people should be sent back to their classrooms in June, is really provocative.

As a former primary school senior teacher with over 40 years of experience in education, I can safely say that the social and gregarious nature of children - especially of those under the age of eight - precludes any chance of a continued social distancing within a classroom.

The concept of nursery, reception and key stage one children not sharing equipment and themselves with each other and staff, but maintaining two-metre distancing is frankly ridiculous.

Even if class sizes of 30 were halved, it would be impossible to guarantee a continued safe distancing.

At the same time, what sort of message would be relayed to children where such isolation and non-contact were then seen to be the new norm?

Classrooms are social, inter-active spaces for human habitation, and most are physically not designed for anti coronavirus measures.

The suggestion that children are possibly unlikely to be virus carriers or easily infected themselves can hardly fill conscientious staff - let alone parents and grandparents - with confidence.

Where’s the evidence for this and the guarantees?

Our young people are so precious. What parent or guardian is going to risk their children’s health, let alone their own, by taking the advice of government ministers who are pressured to urge children to return to their education?

It is surely intolerable that governors, headteachers and their staff should be put in the farcical position of trying to physically organise spaces within their schools, plus timetables and educational programmes just so children can be shoe-horned back into a questionable form of learning.

I appreciate that there is an economic element in all of this, but the health of our children - and ourselves - cannot be bartered in such a cavalier manner.

Next month is too soon for a return to school for whatever proportion of children envisaged, and is wrong.

Nigel Spencer MBE

Dovercourt