\n<\/p>\n
The leader of one of the largest academy trusts in England has described the Department for Education\u2019s failure to do any planning for school closures before lockdown in March 2020 as \u201can extraordinary dereliction of duty\u201d.<\/p>\n
Jon Coles, the chief executive of United Learning, told the UK Covid-19 inquiry he nearly fell off his chair when he read a statement from Gavin Williamson, the education secretary at the time, in which he said there was zero planning for closures because the priority was keeping schools open.<\/p>\n
Coles, who was a senior civil servant for 15 years in the DfE where he was the director general for schools and education standards, was giving evidence as part of module eight of the inquiry, which is focusing on the impact of the pandemic on children and young people.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve read in Gavin Williamson\u2019s statement that he says that the department had not done any planning by this point for school closure because their priority was keeping schools open,\u201d Coles said when giving evidence to the inquiry on Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI almost fell off my chair when I read that. I think that\u2019s an extraordinary dereliction of duty by the leadership of the department \u2013 both political and civil service. It was perfectly clear to me as just somebody who was running schools that there was a high likelihood that schools would have to close and we were planning for that, whilst also of course doing everything we could to keep schools open.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coles told the inquiry that from early March 2020 he and his team were beginning to meet and discuss the challenges Covid was likely to present. \u201cFrom 10 March onwards we were starting to communicate, really on a daily basis, about what we could see coming down the track,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd on 10\/11 March we were saying to schools: \u2018We can see that schools are going to close in the near future.\u2019 I don\u2019t think that was based on anything other than common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the absence of any direction from the DfE, the trust began running webinars for its schools on how to provide remote education, as well as offering advice on safeguarding \u2013 which was to become a key challenge \u2013 as children and staff increasingly had to isolate as the virus spread.<\/p>\n
The trust also pushed the DfE on what might happen to children on free school meals, who would miss out if schools closed, suggesting vouchers as an alternative. \u201cAll of that was self-initiated,\u201d Coles said. \u201cWe had received no direction as apparently the DfE was waiting for a direction from No 10 before it started its planning work. We had received no direction and we got on with planning, because that\u2019s obviously the right thing to do in the circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement to the inquiry in 2023, Williamson said he had not asked DfE officials to prepare an assessment on the impact of school closures in early 2020 because the advice at the time \u201cwas not recommending closures\u201d and No 10 had not commissioned it.<\/p>\n
He described a \u201cdiscombobulating 24-hour sea change\u201d, with opinion moving from keeping schools open on 16 March to talking about closing them on 17 March, and an announcement to shut them was made the following day.<\/p>\n
With exams cancelled, Coles had repeatedly raised unheeded concerns over plans to award GCSE and A-level grades using an algorithm based on past school performance, the inquiry heard. He described it as a \u201cslow-motion car crash\u201d.<\/p>\n
The inquiry continues on Tuesday, with module eight scheduled to last four weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The leader of one of the largest academy trusts in England has described the Department for Education\u2019s failure to do any planning for school closures before lockdown in March 2020 as \u201can extraordinary dereliction of duty\u201d. Jon Coles, the chief executive of United Learning, told the UK Covid-19 inquiry he nearly fell off his chair<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26287,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[1794,8614,5333,15801,15800,5424,14072,1039,357,1436,334,272],"class_list":{"0":"post-26286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-academy","9":"tag-closures","10":"tag-covid","11":"tag-dereliction","12":"tag-dfe","13":"tag-duty","14":"tag-extraordinary","15":"tag-failure","16":"tag-inquiry","17":"tag-plan","18":"tag-school","19":"tag-tells"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}