Date: 05/11/2020

By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEA Trust.

After the Prime Minister’s announcement of the second national lockdown on Saturday evening, I immediately checked for the updated guidance for schools on the Department for Education (DfE) website. After all, they’ve been issuing messages to schools at weekends, early hours of the morning and during bank holidays since the first lockdown.

Many of you may not be surprised that there was no update on the expectations for schools available on Saturday, nor Sunday. Surely this would be available on Monday, so that schools could plan properly and let everyone know what was happening? Again, it is unlikely to surprise you that it was yesterday afternoon before any guidance was published. In practice, for most school leaders, this meant that we found out well after the school day had ended. As the guidance is several pages long, and has links to many other lengthy documents, this meant that it was only this morning, when lockdown had already started, that we could begin to discuss how this would impact on our schools and what we need to do in response.

I am well aware that schools aren’t unique in this respect, and many other organisations will be facing similar problems with lack of timely information on rapid changes in Government policy. However, it is yet another issue that school leaders are facing in keeping our schools open to all pupils. We are only able to do this because of the amazing commitment of our staff.

Some of the newspaper headlines at the weekend made me very angry, as they created a narrative that we want schools to close, when precisely the opposite is true.

If you would like an indication of how hard our staff are working to keep things going, here are a few examples. This week we have not closed any of our schools or campuses, despite the fact that we have been down to almost half of the total staff on some campuses. In recent weeks, a number of our staff have also volunteered to stay back after school to clean classrooms to help us deal with staff absence in our cleaning teams.

Like many other schools and organisations, although we’ve had thankfully relatively few actual Covid-19 cases amongst our community, the impact of the numbers of staff who are having to self-isolate or who have emergency childcare issues because of this is enormous.

Today (05/11/20), we had to make a decision at 10.30am whether or not to close down all of the schools on the Josephine Butler site, as we were unable to operate the kitchen due to staff absence for self-isolation. Closing would have been the much easier option, but we are always mindful of how much learning our pupils have missed and the massive inconvenience that a sudden, unexpected closure would have caused to parents and carers.

Less than two hours later, we started to serve meals to our pupils thanks to the amazing Glenton’s Bakery and staff volunteers, who in many cases gave up their own lunch break to unload, set up and serve the food. We provided sandwiches or hot bakery products, all prepared off site, to all of our pupils who use our catering facilities and including food for special dietary requirements where requested.

Catering has been incredibly difficult for all schools since full reopening. The restrictions of the ‘bubble’ system mean that the time required to serve pupils has been massively increased and as a consequence, we’ve had to reduce the usual range of choices. This is far from ideal, but given the restrictions placed on us by government guidelines and staff shortages, it is the best we can do under the circumstances. We’ve also had a significant increase in workload for catering staff in preparing food packages for pupils on free school meals who are self-isolating.

I am not telling you this for the purpose of sympathy or looking for extra praise for our staff, as I know that the same spirit of everyone rolling up their sleeves to help in a crisis is true in many organisations. However, I do think it is important for you to know that your children in all of our schools are cared for by a magnificent team of staff, who care deeply for your children and do everything they can to make each school the best it can possibly be. I am so grateful for the commitment of our staff in going the extra mile, and often much further.