Boris Johnson cancels exams and announces national lockdown for England

Boris Johnson has cancelled exams in England for the second year and announced a national lockdown for the country.

Schools and colleges across England must close, apart from for the children of key workers and vulnerable children, and people in England must stay at home.

Wales announced a national lockdown before Christmas and announced today that schools should move to remote learning until 18 January. They had also previously moved to non-examination assessment.

Boris Johnson added that the NHS in England hoped to vaccinate the most vulnerable groups by the middle of February and that the lockdown might be relaxed by then.

“We are entering the last phase of this struggle,” he said. “Thanks to the miracle of science not only is the end in sight but we know exactly how we will get there.”

People should stay home unless it was for specific reasons, including essential shopping, to work, if you cannot work from home, to exercise, to seek medical help, to escape domestic abuse.

Boris Johnson had said that the new more transmissible variant of Covid-19 meant that the previous tiered lockdown in England wasn’t enough.