AT THE behest of the Ministry of Education, school officials are busy at work conceptualising the return to school of students at both the primary and secondary levels. These are students who have been out of school for almost two years.

Understandably, there is a mixture of anxiety and trepidation on the minds of school officials given the continued constant rise in the number of covid19 daily infections, a factor that is weighing heavily on the minds of teachers and school officials.

While the Government has expressed its intention to create quasi-safe zones by ensuring that all its employees are fully vaccinated, there has been no word about all children attending school being fully vaccinated.

Surely similar concerns must be uppermost in the minds of parents, many of whom have already indicated their intention to withhold their children's attendance from school. This is already the case among the current cohort of students attending school, with varying school types recording differing attendance rates.

There is no doubt that the learning loss has been significant, and predictably so among students who come from socially and economically impoverished backgrounds, with the prospects for a variation in this trend looking bleak.

While school authorities have been granted the flexibility to develop rotational arrangements for student attendance based on their school's peculiar circumstances, it is obvious that any such arrangement will result in the need for an increase in the timeframe for the coverage of the syllabuses, with consequential implications for examination preparations.

It must also be clearly understood that rotational arrangements for students notwithstanding, teachers will essentially be forced to teach lessons at least twice, depending on class sizes, since there will be no more formalised virtual engagement.

While a few schools may have the technical capabilities to allow teachers to simultaneously teach face-to-face with a group of students at school and virtually to those at home, the reality is that virtual engagement would essentially be out of the question once there is a full resumption of school.

Besides the insistence on strict adherence to existing health and safety protocols for student attendance, there have not been any other indication of standardisation of these rotational arrangements. In devising these plans, there seems to have been covert attempts to alter the terms and conditions of teachers' job descriptions, a temptation that TTUTA would vehemently warn against.

TTUTA will not tolerate any unilateral variation to the terms and conditions of employment of teachers and will repel any attempts by the authorities in that regard. Many have been taking the goodwill of teachers for granted.

All teachers who engaged in virtual teaching over the past 18 months have not been compensated for their internet and telephone costs, nor has there been the courtesy of such acknowledgement by the authorities. Most of them used their own devices. Many engaged students