

A father today hit out at the Governmentâs school testing rules saying they âlack common senseâ after his daughter was sent home over a âfalse positiveâ result.
Stephen Richardson, 40, said it was âsuper annoyingâ that his 11-year-old daughter Siena was sent home from middle school on Monday after two positive lateral flow tests in school.
Mr Richardson and his wife Andrea immediately took Siena and her 14-year-old brother Brandon to a walk-in test centre where all four of them had PCR tests which came back negative.
PCR tests are assessed in a lab and the results are considered more accurate.
However, according to the Governmentâs rules, if a child tests positive with a lateral flow test taken at school, they must isolate at home even if a subsequent PCR test gives a negative result.
Confusingly, under the rules, if a child tests positive after a lateral flow test taken at home, they can return to school if a PCR test comes back negative.

Mr Richardson, a tech worker from Central Bedfordshire, said his family were all now self-isolating for ten days.
He added: âAll of Sienaâs pod â about 30 in her class â all got sent home to self-isolate. So they reverted to remote learning and thatâs going the same as last week.
âMy son, because itâs a household, has been denied going back to a different school. All of his friends are back at school and heâs not. So heâs pretty annoyed.â
Mr Richardson said the whole family tested positive for Covid in December and recovered within a few days, adding: âWe are full of anti-bodies.â
He added: âI think itâs just lacking some common sense really. Number one, does she need to have a test when sheâs had Covid before within 90 days?
âNumber two, I appreciate theyâve got this messaging around you should not talk about [tests] being ineffective but when there is evidence they are ineffective and they are producing these false positives. If that could be an exception to the rule almost - so we could get kids back in school - that would be brilliant.
âItâs super annoying. Itâs one of those things where common sense should prevail but itâs not.â
Dr Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor and author, also took to Twitter to vent her frustration. She wrote: âYou really, really couldn't make this up.
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âAfter one day of school, my son and 30 other pupils are self-isolating at home for 10 days after one child had a positive school lateral flow test. Even though the subsequent gold standard PCR test was negative.
âThat's 31 children denied face-to-face education for 10 whole days.â
She called it âsheer, bureaucratic, unscientific madnessâ.
It comes after education unions warned the system could produce thousands of âfalse positiveâ results wrongly showing a child to have asymptomatic coronavirus.
When the Standard interviewed Schools Minister Nick Gibb on Monday he said tests at schools are conducted in a âcontrolled environmentâ, whereas âall kinds of things might go wrong at home.â
The Prime Ministerâs official spokesman also explained earlier this week that PCR tests are not needed after school tests because they are done "under supervision in a controlled environment".
The Standard contacted the Department for Education for comment.
DfE pointed towards a blog on their website which said: âWhere a pupilâs test has been taken on site under supervision, the chance of it being incorrect is minimal so there is no need for a further test to confirm the result.â