Commenting on the report of the Public Accounts Committee, which
finds that despite being involved in a 2016 cross-government
exercise on dealing with a pandemic, the Department for Education
(DfE) had ‘no plan’ and was ‘unprepared’ for the challenges of
Covid-19, Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of
School and College Leaders, said:
“School and college leaders have been at the coalface throughout
the pandemic and know better than anyone else where the DfE’s
failings lie.
“Leaders had to set up remote learning from scratch in an
incredibly short timeframe, without any guidance from the DfE and
without enough laptops for their pupils who didn’t have them.
This was then compounded by the painfully slow rollout of the
government’s laptop programme, which only reached its target of
distributing 1.3 million devices in the last couple of weeks –
two months after most children returned to school at the
beginning of March.
“School and colleges worked very hard to encourage attendance by
vulnerable students despite the obvious worries of their families
around doing so during the pandemic, and the DfE was found
wanting in having no joined-up plan to support them in this.
“It’s very worrying to hear the conclusion that the DfE ‘seems
surprisingly resistant’ to conducting a full review of its
response. This would obviously be a very useful and instructive
exercise, and ensure that it is much better prepared to face such
challenges in the future.
“The DfE’s focus must now be on working with schools and colleges
to ensure its education recovery programme is as responsive and
effective as possible, and it is really important that it does
this in a clear and coordinated way.”
