Northampton school hails daily Covid testing as a 'move forward'

Caroline Chisholm School (CCS) has hailed lateral flow testing (LFT) as a 'move forward, without a shadow of a doubt'.

CCS, like all schools across the country, started LFT when students returned to class after the Christmas holidays on January 5.

LFT allows users to test for Covid and receive a result back within 30 minutes. The tests are used for asymptomatic people who don’t have symptoms but may be infectious.

CCS has only been testing on secondary school students - at the moment only key worker and vulnerable children are attending school - of which there have been around 70 pupils out of 1,600 who have attended over this lockdown.

Vice principal Gary Wakefield said: "We have set up a fairly robust system at CCS. The testing has given staff, students and parents greater confidence in being in school. It is enabling key worker children to be here and for parents to stay at work. Although it does not remove the importance of social distancing.

"Testing has become an integral part of our school day – students and staff understand that this is a part of our new normal. Hopefully not for much longer.

Mr Wakefield said a major benefit of LFT is its ability to test daily on staff and students who came into close contact with an infected person.

He said: "We identify close contacts, send them home for that day, after that they come back the next morning to have a test and wait for 30 minutes until they get the results. If it is a negative result they can come in, if they are positive they go home.

"It allows staff and students who were close contacts to remain in school as we were conducting daily tests on them."

The team running the test centres inside CCS are made up of part-time workers at the school which includes admin staff and exam invigilators.

In total, Mr Wakefield said, CCS has carried out approximately 500 tests, recording no void results and only two positive cases.

One parent, who got in touch with this newspaper, said: "As a parent this gives me a lot of reassurance that my daughters will be in as safe an environment as possible when they go back to school."

According to the government, 1 in 3 people are asymptomatic when infected with Covid.