slipping through the net if they are not able to go to school and have day—to—day contact with their teachers. and face coverings are one mitigation that the government is taking to reduce the risk of transmission, and ideally to reduce pupil and teacher absence from school, and that's important because we saw those absence rates increase quite significantly in december, as the new variant began to take hold. yeah, we don't know how much the christmas holidays will have acted as a firebreak, given how transmissible omicron is, but obviously most schools, if they are getting their pupils and on the first couple of days of term to do lateral flow tests in school, will hopefully be able to establish who is negative, who is positive, and therefore to try to curb cases rising right from the outset. how