From the article: "They made their recommendation after the JCVI - the scientific body advising the government on vaccines - said it did not recommend vaccinati

From the article: "They made their recommendation after the JCVI - the scientific body advising the government on vaccines - said it did not recommend vaccinating healthy children on health grounds alone." The JCVI are the body that normally makes these decisions and has for the pandemic so far, but they kept on repeatedly refusing to recommend vaccination for under-16s unless they had a pre-existing condition no matter how many times the government asked or how unsubtle their hints - so there was a kind of weird political fudge where the government found another body that'd approve of them, largely based on the potential to reduce disruption to kids' education. (However, that disruption was itself mostly a result of government policy decisions, and the main reason the UK actually seems to be vaccinating under-16s is because other countries have been doing it which makde it politically untenable not to do the same.)