A leading social scientist said the new strain of Covid-19 has “changed the game” of getting children back to school.

Dr Zubaida Haque, former deputy director of race equality think tank the Runnymeade Trust, told Good Morning Britain: “Children need to be in school but they need to be in a safe school.

“We have a new variant now and, just as we’ve got a vaccine coming around the corner, this variant has changed the game; not only is it 70% more transmissible but, with children, it explains why infection rates were so high just before Christmas.

“With children, we think (the new strain) makes them more infectious. Now, that’s a huge problem because schools are little children mixing factories – there are lots of children in small buildings, in small classes.”

Andrew Hayward, professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at University College London, said the rise in cases was “very largely driven” by the new, more infectious variant of coronavirus, and suggested that allowing pupils to return to schools would mean stricter restrictions in other areas of society.

He told Today: “We’ve had control measures that were previously controlling the old variant are not enough for this variant.

“And so if we want to control the new variant we are going to need much tighter restrictions.”

Prof Hayward said he thought schools would have to return “maybe a little bit later” but that it would mean “we’re going to have to have increased, strict restrictions in other areas of society to pay for that”.

“We need to be more or less in a similar sort of messages of stay at home unless you really, really have to, so there’s that combined with incentivisation of testing, incentivisation of isolation – those sorts of things that will carry us through the next few months while we get as many people as possible vaccinated.”