The permanent secretary of the Department for Education has said she was “confident” her team would have been able to deliver mass covid testing in schools to fend off a second round of closures in January 2021, the Covid inquiry has heard today.
Susan Acland-Hood, who joined as permanent secretary at the DfE in September 2020, gave evidence to the Covid inquiry today, as it continues its focus on the impact of the pandemic on children and young people.
Acland-Hood echoed former education secretary Gavin Williamson’s frustrations that plans for a national covid testing programme in schools were scrapped in January 2021, as Downing Street decided to close schools again.
She also said it was “odd” that Williamson or other DfE figures were “not in the room” when decisions to close schools in both March 2020 and January 2021 took place.
The permanent secretary also said the DfE was being given “different messages” by Downing Street and the Treasury on its Covid recovery plan.
Here’s everything you need to know about what the inquiry heard today.
‘We would’ve executed it’
In her evidence, Acland-Hood described how plans for covid testing sites for schools in the run up to January 2021 emerged.
On December 10, 2020, the DfE and Department of Health and Social Care agreed that they would rollout a test site in every school, which would only be required for pupils and teachers who had recently tested positive.
But the DHSC wanted to push this further, and get all secondary school pupils to be tested twice in their first week back, and then once again per week.
Acland-Hood said while she was “appropriately confident that we could deliver” original plans, the new requirements would “be a huge extension” of plans.
“We were asking something that I think felt deeply unreasonable to schools,” she explained, “but we said we can do this much bigger ask and if that’s what it takes to keep schools open, we’ll do it”.
By January 4, 2021, Acland-Hood said lateral flow tests had been delivered to 97.2 per cent of schools across England. But the decision to close schools was then taken by Downing Street.
Acland-Hood said: “We were asked to do some very challenging things that changed rapidly, and people rose to that challenge absolutely magnificently.
“I feel really secure in my judgement that had that remained the plan, we would’ve executed it, and I think we could’ve executed it really well”.
Williamson told the inquiry yesterday he was also confident a national Covid testing programme in schools would mean they could stay open in January.
However the department was criticised heavily for its rollout of other key Covid interventions, such as free school meal vouchers, the national tutoring programme and laptops for pupils.
‘Odd’ that DfE wasn’t in the room
The permanent secretary also reflected Williamson’s frustrations about not being involved in key decisions that affected schools.
Although Acland-Hood told the inquiry the DfE “did have a good voice”, there were “a small number of extremely high profile decisions that directly affected children where it was odd that the department was not in the room when it was taken”, she said.
She confirmed this comment was made about the closure of schools in both March 2020 and January 2021.
Acland-Hood also reflected on how prepared the department was for rapid responses to the pandemic.
“The starting assumption was that the key people to have in the room were the owners of the presenting risk, in other words the Department of for Health because of the health risk…the DfE doesn’t hold many causes of risk, we have some, but mainly we are a department that holds really big society wide downstream impacts of those risks.”
Covid catch-up funding
The permanent secretary said the DfE was also receiving mixed messages from central government over Sir Kevan Collins’ Covid recovery plan.
Collins had proposed a package of around £10-12 billion, which the Treasury said was “not realistic”, according to Acland-Hood, while Boris Johnson purportedly said he was looking for “really big, really ambitious” proposals.
Collins eventually resigned from government after five months after the DfE was given £1.2 billion in funding.
Yesterday, the inquiry revealed an expletive-laden WhatsApp message sent by Gavin Williamson to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He told Johnson he had been “fucked over” by school closure decisions and had his “legs cut from under me” by the appointment of catch-up tsar Collins.
And last week, CEO of United Learning Trust Sir Jon Coles accused the DfE of a “dereliction of duty” in its lack of preparedness for the pandemic.
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