Coronavirus in England: Latest updates - BBC News
Bringing you the latest news from across England about the coronavirus pandemic.
Most pupils in returning year groups still at home

The government said children in nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 6 could start going back to school from last Monday. According to the data 659,000 children did so by last Thursday. But is that a big number? We know from the data it includes thousands of vulnerable pupils as well as 284,000 children of key workers in all years, who have been allowed to go school throughout the lockdown. According to last year's school census there are more than two million children in the year groups that were eligible to return, if their schools were able to open and their families wanted to send them. So while the government data doesn't show exactly how many children were in the returning year groups, we do know that most of those pupils were still at home. About half of schools with nursery, Reception, Year 1 or Year 6 pupils were open to at least one of these year groups by last Thursday and the government expects this to increase as some schools reported they'd be able to open from yesterday.