Full Text of Response Sent to Derby Telegraph 19/03/20

The Derby Telegraph asked us for our views on the situation around school closures today, and quoted some of my response on the website. I thought it would be helpful to share the full text, please find below.

Thanks

Kieran

This is a difficult situation for everyone in the country and the Department for Education’s announcement, while a welcome development in terms of public healthcare and hopefully beginning to slow the spread of the virus, will definitely present challenges to schools as well as to parents and carers.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 spread to the UK, many of us in the union and more widely have been looking at what the WHO and epidemiologists have been advising elsewhere in the world and we fully expected school closures as part of a sensible social distancing policy to slow its spread.

Gavin Williamson’s announcement yesterday did leave a lot of important questions unanswered and we as a union and our members in schools will want to work with all staff to ensure that those students who are in school are safe and cared for. We have also asked questions of the LA on behalf of our members and hope to receive answers soon. One key question is whether a small number of schools are to remain open - ‘hub’ schools for key workers and children with social workers attached to them – or all schools to remain open for the members of their student body who fit these categories. Currently we don’t know the answer to this fairly crucial question. We also know that with the economic crisis and the need for extra childcare that the closure will bring, many more families will be struggling. We want the government to be offering more support on this wider issue – more clear announcements on mortgage and rent suspension, debt relief, access to food distribution, more rapid processing of ESA and Universal Credit claims and a boost to free childcare would bring immediate benefits to millions of people.

At the moment our priorities are:

1. Ensure that the government rapidly makes good on its promise to make sure that all children of families in poverty are given access to healthy and nutritious food. This group of students is wider than those on Free School Meals and will involve social services as well as schools.
2. To ensure that where schools are open there is appropriate staffing for vulnerable children to be safe as well as the children of key workers.
3. Ensure that staff and students in schools, where they are open, have access to Covid-19 testing. This will help cut down on those who need to self-isolate and help with tracking and tracing infection in accordance with WHO guidelines.
4. Make sure that schools have robust systems to track and report on students who develop Covid-19 symptoms or are self-isolating.
5. Ensure that work set during the shutdown is appropriate and accessible for students and manageable for staff – many of us have children or live with people we care for, and if we are at home we need to balance those responsibilities and our responsibilities to the students.
6. Ensure that schools have a plan in place for regular deep cleaning to minimise risk of spread of infection.
7. Make sure that staff at all levels are informed of and involved in decision making as the crisis develops further.
8. Work out ways to cope with the inevitable ups and downs of staffing levels in schools as staff get ill or need to self-isolate, and make sure that work is shared as equally as possible.
9. Gavin Williamson yesterday said that schools will need to remain open over Easter for students who are children of key workers. At the same time we have supply teachers concerned that they will get no work because of the shutdown. It seems obvious that schools should book supply teachers for this period. The government’s recent budget allocated £27 billion for roads. Supply costs would be a tiny fraction of this amount and contribute much less to climate change.

You are right that academisation has made co-ordination of efforts more complicated. Academies and Multi-Academy Trusts were set up explicitly to provide competition rather than co-operation in education, and the added bureaucracy needed to co-ordinate between the management structures of all these different organisations is indeed a big waste of public resources. However, whether they work in LA schools or Academies, the staff in Derby schools want what is best for the children we teach and support, their families and our colleagues. This is a time when our professions – whether teacher or support staff – will want to pull together and we have every hope that the Council and local head teachers will be able to co-ordinate a response to support us in this unprecedented situation.

On the question of exams, firstly our members have every sympathy for children who have bee preparing long and hard for their GCSEs, A Levels and SATs. Up until now, students have been told that these exams are highly important to their futures and the school league table system, Ofsted and academisation has all been about pushing this agenda ever further into the minds of both students and teachers. Exam and test data has been the only thing upon which schools are judged and so our schools have worked tirelessly to try to produce good results. In some areas this has led to a narrower range of subjects being offered so that more time can be given to ‘important’ subjects that in practice only some students will develop a strong interest in, and practices like off-rolling, where students unlikely to get good results are encouraged to be home-educated rather than sit exams and make the school’s results look bad. Equally, the focus on squeezing the absolutely highest possible grade out of each student has contributed in no small way to a growing mental health crisis amongst our young people.

The truth is that in many countries, high-stakes testing is not considered the be-all and end-all of education. SATs in particular are of very limited use to teachers in secondary schools, because the intensive training of students that some schools use and the more humane approach, used by others, means that the data is inherently unreliable – many secondary schools do not use it for practical purposes. This is widely acknowledged within education, but ignored by governments until now. The government has not yet made clear what it intends to do regarding students’ final results. However, as teachers we know our students and have been preparing them for the assessments they were due to sit for a long time. We believe that moderated teacher assessment will allow an accurate judgement to be made about students’ progress and look forward to working out the details of this approach with government and school leaders. Of course, if the government had acted sooner to slow the spread of Covid-19 we may well have had more developed plans in place by now, and it is hard not to feel frustrated that so many warnings that school shutdown would have to take place were apparently ignored by the government.