Last March it was probably acceptable that schools had to invent their immediate responses to lockdown. After all, we were all facing situations we hadn’t expected. Much like the sudden collapse of the Allied armies in France in 1940, when faced with the Panzer Divisions assault, we muddled through and achieved more than might have been expected.
As I wrote on the 29th February in a blog post. ‘We are better equipped to deal with unforeseen events these days, whether fire, floods or pestilence; but only if we plan for them.’ I also pointed out that ‘In 1939 the country managed a mass evacuation of children from our cities under a Conservative Government.’ And I asked, ‘Does the civil service have the mentality to handle arrangements on such a scale today? After decades of a philosophy of private choice rather than public good, it may need a rethink, and quickly.’
In April, I mused that ‘Strategic thinking is still in short supply. There are group of Year 13 students, now to be assessed on their work before the outbreak that could form a useful coordinated volunteer force organised by their Sixth Form Tutor and reporting to the local hubs.
Apart from the obvious use of their talents to produce PPE on the schools’ 3D printers; sowing machines and other D&T resources they could be reducing the traffic jam of delivery vehicles clogging up suburban streets by trialling last mile cycle delivery from trans-shipment points to see how this would work. If petrol pumps are a transfer risk for the virus, we could use some as pump attendants, at least for vulnerable customers so that they could avoid touching the pumps and know that only the person serving them had handled the filling mechanism.’
Fast forward to January and we have the same level of chaos and muddle that professionals in education were faced with in March. The only change seems to be that the DfE guidance is clearer than it was in the spring.
Why did the government not use the time between March and December to plan for another lockdown. To move from the ‘make it up as you go along’ evacuation of Dunkirk to the meticulously planned D-Day assault on the Normandy beaches, backed by the deception exercise around Operation Fortitude.
Take provision of laptops and tablets. This system hasn’t worked. But nobody seems to have thought of all the reconditioned tablets sitting in small shops around the country. Even if they only lasted for a year, they might see some schools through the pandemic. Yes, I would like top of the line new equipment for those that haven’t access to any IT, but something now to start with is better than nothing until some uncertain date in the future.
Remote learning has been mostly un-coordinated and largely left to schools. This is an area where schools should have pooled knowledge and effort. It is as if no Minister has ever read Adam Smith and understood the principles of mass production over cottage-based industries. Expecting each school to reinvent the wheel is silly.
To continue the military analogy, it is as if infantry destined for the D-Day beaches were told, design your own training, and just get off the beach. The lack of a coherent middle tier that could pull MATs, diocese and local authority schools together to provide effective remote learning has frustrated both parents and young people with an outcome that hasn’t been as good as it could have been, and through no fault of teachers and school leaders.
Re-reading the ONS Report of May about risk to teachers from Covid, it was obvious, as I pointed out at the time in my blog that staff in schools, and especially in secondary schools, were classified as
‘… a group with a high possible exposure to any disease, presumably as they work close to large groups of children. In that respect, secondary school teachers interacting with many different pupils in the course of a day might been thought to have a higher potential risk factor than primary school teachers who are largely interacting with a smaller group of children each day. Of course, this is too simplistic, as it ignores the many other settings in schools from playgrounds, assemblies and meal times where all teachers can interact with large numbers of children. Primary teachers, and especially school leaders may have the added factor of interaction with parents that bring children to school and cluster at the school gate at the end of the day.’
This risk should have been monitored through the autumn and especially since the new variant was detected, as it was a vital piece of information in the analysis of whether schools could continue to open on site or switch to remote learning. That it has taken FOI requests and other tactics for the professional associations to secure the data is not acceptable.
The lack of either strategic planning or operational excellence in terms of the school system is a disappointment, and will no doubt eventually have political repercussions. After all, schools impact widely on all families.
update 1230 6th January. According to The Guardian the government has designated all pupils without laptops as vulnerable pupils and thus able to access schools. Well, that’s one way of solving the problem.
John Howson 