Date: 10/12/2020

By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

When the theme of this week’s edition of Lighthouse was proposed as “joy”, I will admit that I was not in the most joyful mood! We’d just received notice via Twitter (because apparently this is how important Government decisions are now announced) that there was a change to the arrangements for the end of term.

After weeks of schools being told not to change their end of term arrangements, schools were offered the chance to close to pupils and instead, make the last day of term a training day delivered through remote learning. This forced us to make an unexpected and difficult decision about whether or not to change our plans.

This wasn’t an easy decision – for us or for schools across England. Firstly, schools agreeing to the suggested change puts them in the horrible position of telling parents about a major change at very short notice. This is never a good thing and we would always try and give as much notice as possible about changes like this, but in this case the timescale was imposed on us by the Department for Education (DfE).

Secondly, it means that schools need to put together an effective training day at very short notice and plan so that it can be delivered remotely, with all of the extra work this requires. Schools will also be expected to develop plans to show how pupils will catch up their lost learning hours as a consequence of missing a school day.

However, these problems have to be balanced with the fact that it does offer an opportunity to reduce the risk of self-isolation spoiling Christmas for some families.

As the DfE expects schools to continue to track and trace the contacts of any positive coronavirus (Covid-19) school cases for a period of six days following the final day in school, school leaders have asked many times for the government to give schools the flexibility to switch to remote learning for the final few days of term to reduce the risk of pupils and staff having to self-isolate over Christmas.

Unfortunately the DfE announcement only focused on “giving staff a break from contact tracing” and made it look like this is what school leaders had been asking for, when in fact, the impact on pupils had been given equal concern. Although staff involvement in “contact tracing” at weekends and holidays is a problem, for most schools it was not the priority. This is especially not in the case of a Church of England-led Trust, where the joy of celebrating Christmas is central to our beliefs.

In the end we concluded, after much discussion within and between schools, that it was the best option to take the training day option and close our Trust schools to pupils. While for some other schools, closing a day early may have been a decision to prioritise staff, in the case of NCEAT, the decision was based on our whole community, as it benefits pupils, staff and families.

I know that some parents will be unhappy with this decision, but it was not taken lightly and was also made after some informal sounding out of parental opinions. We know that parents would be devastated to get a phone call from school on Christmas Eve, telling them that their child needs to self-isolate. We can’t eliminate the risk of this happening before Christmas Eve, but by closing a day earlier than planned we can ensure that this won’t happen after 23rd December. We make this decision to increase the chances of our children and their families having a joyful Christmas.