A Government scientist today said even closing schools won't be enough, on its own, to control the spread of coronavirus.
The comments come as children across the UK return to school for the first time since the Christmas break.
Many schools have remained closed - with remote teaching now in place for the first few weeks of term.
And there are growing calls for schools across the country to close in a bid to shut down the virus.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has agreed that tougher measures may be needed and Health Secretary Matt Hancock today refused to rule out another national lockdown.
Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of the SPI-M modelling group which advises the Government on the spread of coronavirus, warned that closing schools would not be enough to get the virus under control without increased public adherence to existing rules.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that keeping pupils away from class might not get the R number – the reproduction rate of the virus – below one.
Dr Tildesley, from Warwick University, said the Government needs a clearer message: “The communication has not been quite so good in recent months, some of the changes in policy have been a little bit vague.”
He added: “It’s not clear, actually, with the work that we’ve been looking at, that closing the schools, for example, may be sufficient to bring the R number below one with the levels of adherence we’ve got now.
“So they do need to think of alternative measures to get people back on side and get those levels of compliance we had before.”
He added that “we can’t have a situation where schools are closed for months” so that would need to be done “in tandem with something else, which is trying to ramp up adherence to control measures, making these subtle changes to try to bring incidence down, and, ultimately, hopefully long term, allowing children to go back to school safely”.
