Date: 13/01/22
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

At last there is some hope from scientists that we can see some better days ahead, but the next few weeks will see continued challenges for our schools. The impact of absence is felt across all schools, but the issues are more severe in some than others. I’m very proud of how hard our staff have worked to keep all of our schools open so far but we are at the edge of our capacity in some schools where there are 25% of staff absent, overwhelmingly linked to Covid-19.

While I hope that we can continue to keep all schools fully open, we have very coherent contingency plans if we have to partially close. In context, recent rates of Covid-19 in Northumberland have reached over 2200 per 100,000. By comparison, the national figure at the start of the last lockdown in January 2021 was around 400 cases per 100,000. As a result, during the last 3 months we have experienced more Covid-19 staff absence than at any point in the pandemic, probably more than the previous 18 months combined.

You may have read about the difficulties in getting supply staff to cover staff absences. This a national problem and Northumberland is in the same position as the rest of the country, with high demand and limited supply. The Government’s call for retired teachers to return to the profession has had a minimal impact so far. As is often the case, those in government failed to appreciate the practical difficulties in making an idea reality, not least the long delays in obtaining Disclosure and Barring Service clearance for staff to be able to return to the classroom. Ironically this is another government department that is slowing down the Department for Education’s scheme.

Today’s announcement that from Monday, Covid-19 self-isolation will be cut to five days with two negative lateral flow tests should help reduce the impact of staff absence. However even under this week’s change to seven days with two negative tests, we have staff who are still testing positive on day 10 who then can’t cut their isolation period.

Thankfully pupil attendance hasn’t been significantly impacted so far, which is really important as the last thing pupils need is to miss more time in school. This isn’t just to catch up academically but also for the impact it has on their wellbeing.

I began by talking about better days ahead and I believe that although we seem to be at the peak of the wave of the Omicron variant, there is genuine hope that it may mean that we move from Covid-19 as a pandemic to where it becomes endemic. In simple terms, this means that it will become more like flu; it will still pose a significant health problem periodically but we will learn to live with, probably through annual vaccinations as with flu.

This offers the hope that we will have a return to a ‘normal’ education provision by the summer term, which would be of massive benefit to our pupils. I put normal in inverted commas as there is no doubt that some of the changes we’ve made to deal with Covid-19 have changed the way we will work in the long term and hopefully have improved our provision for the better, such as the increase in capacity to use laptops to support learning.

Let’s hope that the scientists are correct and we are about to finally turn a corner, as that really would make 2022 a much better year than the previous two.