Scathing report condemns government’s “unforgiveable” school Covid failures

A new report has strongly condemned the government’s handling of education and school closures during the pandemic, with “unforgiveable” errors and miscalculations by both Boris Johnson and Gavin Williams, the education secretary.

The Institute for Government (IfG) report, Schools and coronavirus: The government’s handling of education during the pandemic, examined the impact of the school shutdown and found a lack of planning by the Department for Education (DfE) to ensure that children and young people continued to receive an education in the midst of the public health crisis.

The author, Nicholas Timmins, interviewed government insiders and experts, and found that ministers and civil servants were working to an outdated plan, originally drafted in 2011 for a flu pandemic, that worked on the assumption that schools would remain open. When the Prime Minister announced a lockdown with days to spare, therefore, it left the system completely unprepared for what was to come next.

The IfG shines a light on the DfE’s efforts to appear in control of the situation and assertions by Williamson that he was working in collaboration with local authorities. “Had the promise of ‘working closely’ been fulfilled, things might well have worked better,” the report says. “Instead, Williamson was to end up threatening councils with legal action” — a reference to the threats made to the London Borough of Greenwich which had ordered to schools to close early before Christmas to try to halt rising infection rates.

The lack of trust by Ministers of local authorities and the lack of understanding of the role of directors of public health served to make the situation worse, meaning it was unclear who had responsibility for what aspect of dealing with the pandemic, the report says. The government did not even have the names and contacts of local directors.

It also strongly criticised the government’s communications with schools. “Between mid-March and the end of May 2020 no fewer than 148 new guidance documents, or updates to existing material, were issued to schools,” the report said. Much of it was published at the end of a week or late in the evening, putting schools under pressure, especially when guidance was for immediate implementation.

In addition, “when the guidance was updated, schools were not always clear what changes had been made. A further blizzard was to arrive later in the year as the decisions on school opening and closures seemed to change almost daily in December 2020 and January 2021”.

The findings of the study corroborate evidence gathered by EDUCATE Ventures during its year-long study, Shock to the System: Lessons from Covid-19, into the effects of the pandemic on the education ecosystem, which found that schools were plunged into confusion and chaos by the abundance of guidance being published by the DfE.

The IfG report said that “the most unforgivable aspect of what happened is not just the failure to make contingency plans in the summer of 2020 but the refusal to do so — when it was already obvious that fresh school closures might well be needed, and that exams might have to be cancelled again.

“Lessons were not learnt from the first lockdown, with the result that, for both school closures and exams, the story from July 2020 to January 2021 was a case of “pause, rewind, repeat”.”

However, the IfG said, the decision to define the children of key workers who could be in school during the shutdown was “commendably swift”. “The department insisted that schools remain open to vulnerable children and worked hard, with councils, to ensure, as far as possible in very challenging circumstances, that these children remained in touch with social workers and teachers,” the report says.

It also commended the distribution of laptops, albeit slowly, which “are likely to have a lasting effect on the education of the recipients”.