Lack of school closure plan ‘an extraordinary dereliction of duty’, Covid inquiry told

The leader of one of the largest academy trusts in England has described the Department for Education’s failure to do any planning for school closures before lockdown in March 2020 as “an extraordinary dereliction of duty”.

Jon Coles, the chief executive of United Learning, told the UK Covid-19 inquiry he nearly fell off his chair when he read a statement from Gavin Williamson, the education secretary at the time, in which he said there was zero planning for closures because the priority was keeping schools open.

Coles, who was a senior civil servant for 15 years in the DfE where he was the director general for schools and education standards, was giving evidence as part of module eight of the inquiry, which is focusing on the impact of the pandemic on children and young people.

“I’ve read in Gavin Williamson’s statement that he says that the department had not done any planning by this point for school closure because their priority was keeping schools open,” Coles said when giving evidence to the inquiry on Monday.

“I almost fell off my chair when I read that. I think that’s an extraordinary dereliction of duty by the leadership of the department – both political and civil service. It was perfectly clear to me as just somebody who was running schools that there was a high likelihood that schools would have to close and we were planning for that, whilst also of course doing everything we could to keep schools open.”

Coles told the inquiry that from early March 2020 he and his team were beginning to meet and discuss the challenges Covid was likely to present. “From 10 March onwards we were starting to communicate, really on a daily basis, about what we could see coming down the track,” he said. “And on 10/11 March we were saying to schools: ‘We can see that schools are going to close in the near future.’ I don’t think that was based on anything other than common sense.”

In the absence of any direction from the DfE, the trust began running webinars for its schools on how to provide remote education, as well as offering advice on safeguarding – which was to become a key challenge – as children and staff increasingly had to isolate as the virus spread.

The trust also pushed the DfE on what might happen to children on free school meals, who would miss out if schools closed, suggesting vouchers as an alternative. “All of that was self-initiated,” Coles said. “We had received no direction as apparently the DfE was waiting for a direction from No 10 before it started its planning work. We had received no direction and we got on with planning, because that’s obviously the right thing to do in the circumstances.”

In a statement to the inquiry in 2023, Williamson said he had not asked DfE officials to prepare an assessment on the impact of school closures in early 2020 because the advice at the time “was not recommending closures” and No 10 had not commissioned it.

He described a “discombobulating 24-hour sea change”, with opinion moving from keeping schools open on 16 March to talking about closing them on 17 March, and an announcement to shut them was made the following day.

With exams cancelled, Coles had repeatedly raised unheeded concerns over plans to award GCSE and A-level grades using an algorithm based on past school performance, the inquiry heard. He described it as a “slow-motion car crash”.

The inquiry continues on Tuesday, with module eight scheduled to last four weeks.