The government’s refusal to make contingency plans to protect schools and exams before the second lockdown was an “unforgiveable” error, a new report into the handling of the pandemic says, The Guardian reports.
The failure to act left teachers and parents in England to pick up the pieces, the report by the Institute for Government thinktank says.
The report criticises No. 10 and the DfE for insisting that schools remain open and exams go ahead even as cases were spiralling and it was obvious a second lockdown was unavoidable.
The report concludes: “What followed was easily the most disruptive period in children’s education since at least the start of the second world war … When it came to education, U-turn was to follow U-turn. Well into March 2021, and indeed beyond, pupils taking GCSEs, A-levels and BTecs remained unclear about precisely how they were to be assessed. At times it felt as though the school system was in chaos.”
The report claims that senior figures, from the prime minister down, opposed the creation of backup plans for assessing A-levels, GCSEs and other qualifications in the event of formal exams not being held, leaving them without options and forced to pass responsibility on to teachers.
Nicholas Timmins, the author of the report, said: “The biggest single failure has to be the refusal to make contingency plans over the summer and autumn of 2020, the biggest impact of which was the failure to have anything in place to handle the second cancellation of exams in 2021.”
A DfE spokesperson said that contingency plans for restriction on schools opening in 2021-22 were first published in August 2020 and plans for qualifications in 2021 “were first discussed with Ofqual in October 2020.”