Department for Education Is “Surprisingly Resistant” to Investigating the Failures in Its Covid Response, Says New Report
The Department for Education’s (DfE) lack of planning for how to deal with a pandemic, along with its failure to set standards for remote learning when lockdowns struck, resulted in children receiving “unequal [educational] experiences” over the past year, according to a new report. This report also says that the department has been “surprisingly resistant” to investigating the shortfalls in its Covid response. The Guardian has the story.
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) also said there was evidence that the Government’s £1.7 billion catch-up programme – designed to restore the learning lost during school closures – may not be connecting with many of the most disadvantaged children. The committee’s report describes the DfE as having “worthy aspirations but little specific detail”.
Meg Hillier, Chair of the PAC, said: “The pandemic has further exposed a very ugly truth about the children living in poverty and disadvantage, who have been hit particularly hard.
“Online learning was inaccessible to many children even in later lockdowns and there is no commitment to ongoing additional funding for IT. Schools will be expected to fund laptops out of their existing, and already squeezed, budgets.”
Hillier said the DfE “appears uninterested in learning lessons from earlier in the pandemic”, preferring to wait for later public inquiries.
“It shows little energy and determination to ensure that its catch-up offer is sufficient to undo the damage of the past 14 months,” Hillier said.
The report, after hearings conducted by the bipartisan committee, was deeply critical of the DfE’s failings towards children with special educational needs and disabilities, many of who struggled with remote learning, and over the future of the more than one million digital devices it had distributed to schools at a cost of £400 million.
The DfE told the committee that the laptops and tablets were now owned by schools and local authorities, which would have to maintain and update them using existing budgets.
The committee accused the DfE of being “unprepared” for the disruption despite taking part in the Government’s 2016 cross-departmental exercise to test the U.K.’s response to a pandemic, called Operation Cygnus. The MPs also found that the DfE was “surprisingly resistant” to investigating its response since March 2020.
Numerous studies have highlighted that pupils made little to no progress while learning from home – so why the reluctance from the DfE to investigate its errors in fixing this?
The Guardian report is worth reading in full.
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an investigation might discover how rubbish so many teachers are, and how does that get reported without lots of dummies getting spat out
I know a few teachers who were all unimpressed with having to teach via laptops, knowing fine well that it was nowhere near as effective as face to face. They all said that they working way more hours to prepare, deliver, mark & give feedback & provide support to the children who became more disengaged.
They were also very aware of the psychological impacts on children. It was the spineless DofE caving in to the unions which killed the return to schools. The majority of teachers just wanted to teach.
#DFE not the fab DofE awards
‘I know a few teachers…’
there are a few very good teachers
Don’t rabbit nonsense – even if you (obviously) had some poor ones.
Ey-up leftie Rick, were you one of those useless teachers that ruined their pupils Life chances but blamed you’re incompetence any anybody or anything else?
Failed to get the difference between contractions and possessive pronouns across to your pupils, for example?
How could the unions push to keep schools closed without the support of a majority of their members?
I note the use of the past tense in your comment but, in reality, the nonsense continues. A teacher friend of mine is back to teaching online after one of her class failed one of the huge number of Lateral Flow Tests that they have to do. No mention of the student experiencing any symptoms or even a follow up “gold-standard” PCR test!
Yes. The failure was that shown by the majority of the population, and the Tory Party in particular.
Yes, it is inexcusable that they weren’t prepared for a planned pandemic.
/sarc
Sadly again while I am sure the DFE is guilty of many things this is yet another distraction from the real business of establishing that closing schools was not necessary and should never have been done. Instead it will turn out to be about how to close schools more efficiently, next time.
Schools should never have been closed and should never close again.
Teachers should resign from the Teaching Unions that is only interested in political standing.
They used to have the option of joining the Professional Association of Teachers (aka “Voice”), whose core belief was that the educational needs of the students trumped all other considerations. However, I’ve just checked and it’s been merged into the more traditional Community union, so I guess that the idea of a non-political teachers’ union just didn’t work.
Unions are political – just like the Queen 🙂
No. They should eject the clique who were responsible.
You took the words out of my mouth. The problem with concentrating on the lack of technology and engagement among the most disadvantaged is that it is a distraction from the main issue that schools should never have been closed to most and that the assumption should be that they never close again.
Single mother with three children just told me that her elder daughter (think she is about 15) is so far behind at school and is really struggling at this stage – as we know the older school children have been denied access to school much longer than the younger kids.
Another missed opportunity to give a child a chance in life…….
“The committee accused the DfE of being “unprepared” for the disruption despite taking part in the Government’s 2016 cross-departmental exercise to test the U.K.’s response to a pandemic, called Operation Cygnus.”
In fairness, lockdowns were never previously viewed as an option, so the government is actually responsible since they threw away the plan that had been prepared for.
‘The Department for Education’s (DfE) lack of planning for how to deal with a pandemic, along with its failure to set standards for remote learning when lockdowns etc’
A little unfair. There was a plan and Education had fed into it. Lockdowns were not part of the plan
How could the Education Dept know in advance that the one night the mad monk and his mates would rip up the plan without consulting anyone
What does the Grauniad want?lA better concentration camp next time round.
“Meg Hillier, Chair of the PAC, said: “The pandemic has further exposed a very ugly truth about the children living in poverty and disadvantage, who have been hit particularly hard.”
[Hillier was educated at Portsmouth High School, a private school for girls in Southsea, Hampshire, followed by St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford, where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics.]
Another f.ing Blair Babe. How did you vote when the chance came to call Mr Toad to account?
“Meg Hillier, Chair of the PAC, said: “The pandemic has further exposed a very ugly truth about the children living in poverty and disadvantage, who have been hit particularly hard.”
[Hillier was educated at Portsmouth High School, a private school for girls in Southsea, Hampshire, followed by St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford, where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics….In 2004, Hillier was selected as the Labour candidate to contest the Hackney South and Shoreditch through an all-women shortlist] (Wikipedia)
A typical Blairite of the noughties who hasn’t voted against the imposition of what causes this exacerbation of deprivation.
What’s with the censorship re. Meg Hillier’s hypocrisy? Do tell.