Commenting on newly released attendance data for education and
early years settings to 16 September, Kevin Courtney,
Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union,
said:
“1.5% of our pupils and 1% of staff were absent from school on 16
September due to Covid. The worry must be that if Covid cases
rise then the level of disruption will rise. The Government has
left schools with very few of the mitigations that were in place
during summer term and with no replacements for them - leading to
a concern that in-school transmission may increase the number of
Covid cases.
“The whole pandemic has been characterised by school and college
staff doing everything they can, but Government not doing enough.
This must change.
“We welcome Nadhim Zahawi's praise for leaders, teachers and
school staff who have done everything they can to make the new
term a success, and we recognise that he has been left with a
mess to clear up. The roll-out of CO2 monitors is proceeding
slowly and they can only identify a problem. Schools with
ventilation problems need air purifier systems. As we approach
colder weeks, vigilance and ventilation will become ever more
vital.
“On 26 August we wrote to the Secretary of State's predecessor
asking for
three sets of data to be made available on a weekly basis by
local authority throughout autumn term:
- staff and pupils absent from school because of a positive test.
- staff and pupils absent from school because of Covid symptoms
following a test
- length of absence due to Covid symptoms.
“We are yet to receive an answer. Providing these figures would
allow the public to properly assess how well Covid mitigations in
school are working. We must do everything we can collectively to
ensure that as many young people as possible continue to learn on
site and this is helped by keeping a close eye on statistics and
acting on them.”
Editor’s Note
The full text of our Joint General Secretaries’ letter to the
Secretary of State for Education, 26 August:
Dear Secretary of State
In the light of the reduced COVID-19 mitigations in schools and
colleges in place at the start of the Autumn term, we are asking
you to announce how you plan to monitor and assess the
educational impact of the reduced mitigations in schools across
the next months and to suggest that you do look at further
mitigations.
The Government has chosen to remove most requirements for safety
measures in schools and other settings, a decision which we are
concerned could lead to an increase in disruption as more
children miss school because they test positive or because they
have long Covid symptoms as well as contribute to there being
more general Covid-19 cases.
We of course acknowledge and welcome that the situation has
changed because of the successful implementation of the
vaccination programme.
However, rates of Covid-19 infection in the wider community are
higher than this time last year, and the vaccine has not yet been
offered to many pupils. We believe therefore that effective
mitigations remain important.
We welcome, as an initial step in the right direction, the
announcement that the Government has finally heeded repeated
calls from the joint unions and will be rolling out portable CO2
monitors to all state-funded schools and colleges from September
2021. Of course, carbon dioxide monitors are not a solution to
the problem of poor ventilation. They will indicate a problem but
then something has to be done to resolve that problem.
We would like to draw your attention to some recent research
(published this month) at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.17.21262169v1?s=08
which in summary says that keeping all windows open is the best
single mitigation to reduce virus dose. HEPA filters are not
quite as effective on their own, but a combination of open
windows, HEPA filters and masks is the optimum solution, reducing
viral loads by more than 30 times. The report states that these
combined interventions remained highly effective in the presence
of a super-spreader.
A combination of measures that has proven to be so effective
(including mask-wearing) must surely be difficult to argue
against when attempting to reduce the spread of the virus and
minimising educational disruption.
Notwithstanding the above, the Government decisions that have
been made need to stand up to scrutiny, and the NEU believes that
in order to be able to assess those decisions the DfE should
collect and publish data on the number of:
- staff and pupils absent from school because of a positive
test.
- staff and pupils absent from school because of Covid symptoms
following a test; and
- length of absence due to Covid symptoms.
We believe this data would be relatively easy to collect, owing
to the prevalence of electronic attendance records, and would
help to develop a detailed picture of attendance in different
parts of the country due to Covid infection rates.
We hope you will give this matter your detailed consideration.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely
KEVIN COURTNEY Joint General Secretary National Education Union
MARY BOUSTED Joint General Secretary National Education Union
