Refusal to make contingency plans for schools during pandemic ‘unforgivable’, says report

Ministers have been accused of an “unforgivable” failure to use the experience of Covid-19’s first wave to create contingency plans for future school closures and exam disruption, which led to chaos for millions of children in the second.

The Institute for Government (IfG) claimed in a new report that the government had actively avoided creating such plans, citing a Downing Street source as saying officials were told that doing so would make schools more likely to close because administrators would “take the easy way out”.

The independent think tank further claimed, among other things, that:

• Downing Street constantly feared Gavin Williamson’s education department was on the brink of crisis early last summer, and the education secretary had been shut out of key meetings before schools closed in March that year

• Department for Education (DfE) ministers were hostile to local governments that ran schools and tried to impose “one-size-fits-all” solutions, creating mistrust. The complex, multi-layered structure of England’s school system may have contributed to this

• Mr Williamson and No 10 believed the furore over last year’s initial calculated exam results, which eventually forced one of many U-turns in this period, would be “rideable”

• The DfE initially struggled to understand the roles of local directors of public health, in part because the Department of Health did not have a list of all their names and contact details

The IfG did, however, praise ministers for ensuring vulnerable children and the offspring of key workers could attend classes in person during lockdown despite very little notice, and for providing more than a million laptops for disadvantaged children.

In response to the document, teachers have demanded a clearer approach ahead of coronavirus disruption expected later this year.

Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT union, said: “Lessons have not been learnt, as the government was late in putting in place contingency plans for this year and has not yet confirmed any mitigations to ensure that next year’s exam cohorts will be assessed fairly and not disadvantaged.”

And Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told The Independent: “We have to agree with the IfG’s conclusion that the government’s refusals to put plans in place is unforgivable, but this is scant comfort to the senior leaders who were expected to maintain learning for their students or to the young people whose educations have been badly affected.

“With further disruption in our schools and colleges almost an inevitability when the autumn term begins, the government needs to learn fast from its previous mistakes and act decisively, beginning with a commitment to make meaningful sums of money available for education recovery.”

Robert Halfon, the Conservative chair of the Commons education committee, told The Independent that failures in the government’s approach to education – which he called “a huge shambles” earlier this year – should be included in the long-awaited Covid-19 public inquiry.

He added: “The last year has been a national disaster for children, pupils and students. What is needed now, for the future, is a long-term plan for education and skills, a secure funding settlement and contingency planning to ensure that we do not close schools and colleges to our young people again. Otherwise we risk an epidemic of education underachievement.”

Meanwhile, Labour’s Kate Green denounced Mr Williamson as “failing”, and accused Boris Johnson’s Conservatives of “chaotic decision-making and systematic refusal to learn lessons from their previous mistakes”.

The shadow education secretary also demanded a guarantee of support for children receiving their exam results next week “to ensure no young person loses out on future opportunities due to [the PM’s] failed pandemic response”.

The IfG report, published a week before this year’s exam results are due out, analyses the period after English schools were closed in March last year.

All children bar the most vulnerable and those whose parents were key workers had to learn from home from mid-March until some were allowed to return to classrooms in June. Exams were cancelled and pupils graded based on an Ofqual algorithm – but Mr Williamson was forced to U-turn on this after uproar when many results were marked down.

In late August Mr Johnson pleaded with parents to send their children back to school when they reopened fully in September, though Covid-19 still caused many absences as the second wave surged and a national lockdown was imposed in October.

Eventually, schools closed in January despite Mr Williamson having insisted two weeks earlier that there was no plan for that to happen. Exams were cancelled for a second year and it took until the end of February for Ofqual to announce how pupils would be graded.

Dr Roach, of NASUWT, described the effect of the past 18 months on teachers by saying: “While schools have done a tremendous job in picking up the pieces left of the government’s last-minute decision-making, many teachers were running on empty, and teacher workload was at breaking point at the end of last term. Ministers cannot expect teachers simply to soldier on.

“Urgent lessons need to be learnt about how to secure a more resilient and sustainable qualifications system next year and for the future that will give confidence to pupils, parents and teachers.”

The DfE disputes much of the report’s contents. It insists it first published contingency plans for the academic year just ended last August, when the government set out how its lockdown tier structure would work, and it added that a separate “independent contingency framework” for education was published in November.

The department said it did everything possible to keep schools open until they closed again on 4 January. Asked to explain the chaos that took place despite the contingency plans it said it had prepared, a spokesperson said ministers had been forced to take decisions quickly due to the fast-moving nature of the pandemic. One of those interventions, mentioned prominently in the IfG’s report, included threatening legal action against schools in London that wanted to close because of rising infections.

Responding to the claim of poor communications, a DfE spokesperson said Mr Williamson had regularly met union representatives, council leaders and others, while the department made “significant” efforts to engage with people on the ground.

Regarding the suggestion by IfG sources that Mr Williamson had been shut out of high-level meetings before schools closed, the spokesperson said: “All government decisions of this nature are taken with collective cabinet responsibility.”