Crisis was like Tour de France says education boss

North Lanarkshire Council’s Education and Families committee heard of the impact of coronavirus and the authority’s response to the crisis during a recent online meeting.

Giving a presentation on the subject while presenting his report, executive director Derek Brown said: “It has been a pretty incredible six months and an awful lot of things have been accomplished. I likened it when I was talking to head teachers last week to the Tour de France – there are some days when we climb mountains and other days where we have to do sprints, and we just have to be adaptable.”

Schools closed on March 23 and did not reopen until August 12. Key parts of the council response to the crisis included providing childcare for the children of key workers, maintaining free school meal provision, providing remote support learning, and helping the most vulnerable families.

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Providing meal vouchers through a text messaging system was one of the most challenging aspects. “We definitely had teething issues,” Mr Brown said. “In the first week we did it we had 2,000 emails where people didn’t have the right mobile phone numbers lodged with the schools, but we solved that by week three.”  The system was rebuilt to ensure all 18,000 eligible claimants received their vouchers.

Mr Brown also said relations with trade unions and other stakeholders during the crisis had been “excellent” and that the council had followed all of the government guidance.

Head teachers are also actively involved in managing the response to any outbreaks of coronavirus, including through daily meetings of a tactical response team to ensure families and vulnerable children get proper support from social work.

With regard to the efforts made by education staff,  Mr Brown added “I’ve never seen anything like it. I genuinely think in my role that it’s been hugely humbling throughout just to see the endeavour of people and the fantastic work that’s been done on behalf of children and families.”

Councillors were also similarly effusive in their praise.

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Councillor Agnes McGowan asked if any extra staff had been made available to help reduce the pressure on colleagues, and it was confirmed that 195 probationers had been offered fixed-term one year contracts.

Councillor Paul Kelly asked for reassurance on the subject of facemasks, saying the procurement should have been done on a national basis rather than at council level

He said: “What we need to avoid is a situation where some young people are maybe having to use face coverings for an extended period because of the cost Mr Brown said the council had acted early and procured one million face masks. Although current guidance called for children to wear their own masks to school there was also a requirement for more stock

“When we did the numbers we have about 20,000 pupils in secondary schools who are either nearly 12 or over 12 wearing a mask every day plus over fives on buses need to come with a mask and we reckon that’s about 7,000.”

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He further said that this many pupils  would get through five million masks in one year if they were replaced every day but it was established that the vast majority of pupils were coming to school with their own masks, but it was important to ensure this high level of compliance was maintained in the longer term.

The committee unanimously agreed to note the contents of the report, the response to the Covid-19 emergency, the approach to service recovery, current guidance, the pan-Lanarkshire schools agreement and endorse the excellent work of staff.

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