Control without closure: school-level approaches for pathogen control within and between schools

Year of award: 2024

Grantholders

  • Dr Trystan Leng

    Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Project summary

Identifying appropriate school-based non-pharmaceutical interventions to control different infectious diseases is crucial for maximising pupil health, community health, and school attendance. To achieve this requires detailed mathematical modelling of infection among school-age children and the community. However, such models require parameterisation, and our understanding of contact and transmission patterns between pupils within and outside of school is limited. In collaboration with the UK’s Department for Education, I will assess the efficacy of school-level pathogen control measures, and how their efficacy depends upon differences between pathogens and between schools, using both analytical and simulation-based modelling approaches. I will address questions of direct policy relevance, including whether alternative policies to school attendance with mild respiratory illness can reduce transmission and absences, and whether current absence guidelines for norovirus should be reduced or extended. I will collect key data on pupil interactions through bespoke in-school contact studies and analyse pupil co-location data, enabling detailed social networks to be incorporated into the models. Optimal strategies will be evaluated using a health-economic framework, capturing the impact of strategies on transmission, absences, and inequalities. This fellowship will help inform current school-level control policy and provide the framework for researchers to evaluate school-level strategies for future pandemics.