Acting Chief Medical Officer Dr Ronan Glynn has said that NPHET expects and hopes, from a public health perspective, that the vast majority of older children in primary schools should be maintaining a distance of one metre between each other.
He was responding to a question from Sinn Féin's Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire at today's Covid-19 committee hearing as to whether it was safe for a school to reopen if it cannot achieve social distancing.
Dr Glynn said it was accepted internationally that social distancing for younger children was impracticable, and so its absence should not prevent a school from reopening.
However, he said that the situation was different for older children in primary school, and for those in secondary school.
A Limerick primary school will reopen tomorrow with no social distancing in the classroom for the majority of its students.
Because of the small size of classrooms in its more than 100 year old building, St Patrick's Girls primary school can only achieve one-metre social distancing for fifth class students.
Other schools say they are in a similar position.
Dr Glynn said that the vast majority of older children in national schools should be maintaining a distance of one metre between each other, and that "all children" in secondary school should be maintaining that distance.
Updates as students begin returning to schools around country
Speaking at the committee, Professor Phillip Nolan of NPHET reiterated previous advice that it is "very unlikely that if a child were to bring the virus into a school that they would spread it to another child, and unlikely again that that child would bring it home and spread it in their home".
He said the reopening of schools was "a carefully judged prioritisation".
Prof Nolan reiterated that it was inevitable that cases of Covid-19 would arise in schools. He said it was really important not to overreact when this happens, and to give public health personnel the space and respect to allow them to manage any given school cluster or outbreak differently.
"The appropriate response to an outbreak in a school depends on the nature of the outbreak and the setting, and we have to trust public health colleagues to properly manage those outbreaks rather than ask them for a specific and precise protocol" he said.
Elsewhere, the Principal of Dominican College in Taylors Hill, Galway said it will be next week, when there are 700 people back in the school building, that they will have a true sense of what works and what needs to be amended to facilitate Covid-19 requirements.
Alan Kinsella told RTÉ's Drivetime that they have converted a school hall into three classrooms, using dividers rather than full partitions and they employed an acoustic engineer to determine the best layout so that the sound would not travel between the rooms.
The Principal of Mercy Secondary School, Inchicore said their school staff came back last Friday and met a therapist to express their concerns and fears around returning to school.
Speaking to the same programme, Michelle O'Kelly said they went through exactly what the school would do in the event of a Covid-19 scare at the school.
Ms O'Kelly added that because they only have 160 pupils, the lunch company will continue to provide students with lunches, which will be delivered to their classrooms, where they will be eaten and then the students will go outside.
