6 October 2025

(10.30 am)

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, can I check, please, that you can see

and hear the Inquiry room?

Lady Hallett: I can. Thank you very much, Ms Dobbin.

Good morning.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, may I call the first witness, please,

Mr Matthew Coffey.

Mr Matthew Cb

MR MATTHEW COFFEY CB (sworn).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for Module 8

Ms Dobbin: Can I ask you to give your full name to the Inquiry, please.

Mr Matthew Cb: Matthew James Coffey.

Lead 8: Mr Coffey, you ought to have in front of you a 328-page witness statement that bears the number INQ000588111.

Mr Matthew Cb: That’s correct.

Lead 8: Have you got that? And can you confirm, please, that the contents of that statement are true to the best of your knowledge and belief.

Mr Matthew Cb: I can confirm.

Lead 8: And I think it’s right, Mr Coffey, that you are the Chief Operating Officer and that you’re also the Deputy Chief Inspector of Ofsted?

Mr Matthew Cb: That’s correct.

Lead 8: And the statement you’ve provided, is that on behalf of Ofsted?

Mr Matthew Cb: It is.

Lead 8: And have you prepared it in particular with the assistance of Baroness Amanda Spielman?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: Who was the former His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education?

Mr Matthew Cb: She is.

Lead 8: I’m grateful.

Mr Coffey, can I just start, then, please, by asking you a bit about the position at the outset of 2020 and Ofsted’s overall assessment as to the standards that had been reached or were reached by most schools in England.

Mr Matthew Cb: Immediately before the pandemic, 86% of schools in England were judged to be good or better. We were seeing a trajectory of continued improvement. We were content with the quality of education.

We were concerned about a number of things that we talked about in the annual report at that time. That was particularly around those children that were starting secondary school and their prior attainment, and we were particularly concerned that those children that had lower prior attainment were likely to be from a special educational needs background or have special educational needs. So we were very clear that this was

an area of concern.

We also were concerned about the area SEND

arrangements, the system that supports.

Lead 8: I’m just going to stop you there so we can just take

there is one step at a time. So, in terms of schools,

concerned about children transferring to secondary

aged 11 who had special educational needs; correct?

Mr Matthew Cb: That’s right.

Lead 8: Then you referred just there to concerns about areas and their arrangements. Are you referring there to local authority areas? Is that what you mean?

Mr Matthew Cb: That’s what I was referring to. And we were also concerned about off-rolling: children that were leaving the school system and potentially ending up electively home educated. They were the concerns before the pandemic.

Lead 8: Can I also ask you, the Inquiry has heard a bit of evidence about the disadvantage gap as well, so children whose attainment was lower and who also came from more socioeconomic disadvantaged families as well. Was that a concern to Ofsted?

Mr Matthew Cb: It’s always been on Ofsted’s radar. It’s always been a concern. It wasn’t in a trajectory that was giving us deep concern but it was certainly something that we continued to keep a very, very close eye on.

Lead 8: And does Ofsted agree, then, that that disadvantage gap continued to exist?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: And was present at the outset of 2020?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: And then you mentioned there off-rolling. So is that – is it correct, then, off-rolling is when children leave school and Ofsted has no information as to what school they go to thereafter?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes. The definition of off-rolling is a child that is taken away from the school register but without an exclusion code or any obvious reason.

And of course, children leave schools for lots of reasons: families move – but we were particularly concerned with those children who did not appear on another school register. So we keep a very close eye on the reasons why that might be.

Lead 8: And was there concern, then – and I’m aware when I ask that question that Ofsted had done some research into this in 2018 – about some of the reasons that appeared to be given or the understanding that existed as to why children were being off-rolled?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes. We were particularly concerned that children’s families were being encouraged to exercise their legal right to electively home educate these children. And because we have no access to – there was no register, there is no register of these children, they disappear, and we were deeply concerned that, without being able to see where these children were, we were unable to assess as to whether that decision was in the best interests of those children.

Lead 8: And I think, Mr Coffey, and we’ll return to this in due course, that’s a concern that has become more pressing –

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: – is that correct?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, that’s correct.

Lead 8: Over the course of the pandemic –

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: – and since the pandemic?

Mr Matthew Cb: (Witness nodded)

Lead 8: All right. Well, we’ll come back to that.

I just want to, then, move to the period leading up to the announcement that schools would close to most children, as was made on 18 March 2020. First of all, can you explain whether or not Ofsted was in contact with government prior to that announcement being made, and providing information or intelligence to government about the sorts of difficulties that schools were encountering?

Mr Matthew Cb: No, it was the other way round. The Department for Education was talking to us, me in particular, about some of their concerns. And whilst we’ve never had access to live attendance data, nor did we have access to schools that were closing, the Department for Education was sharing that information in the period immediately prior to, but our advice was not sought about what they might want to do.

Lead 8: That’s what I was going to move on to and to ask you. I mean, presumably through its Inspectorate functions, Ofsted acquires a huge amount of knowledge about schools and local authorities, and the sorts of challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis; is that correct?

Mr Matthew Cb: It is, yes. At the time immediately prior to the pandemic, I had about 1,700 people that worked in Ofsted, and at least 750 of those were people from a professional background, as an inspector or a regulator, very likely to be a qualified teacher, probably likely to have been a previous head teacher, and, in the social care world, very likely to have a social care qualification as well.

So yes, I have a huge amount of experience at my disposal.

Lead 8: So just going back to the point that you made, did the Department for Education then come to Ofsted in the weeks leading up to the announcement to close schools to seek insight into the sorts of challenges that Ofsted thought schools might face if they had to close to most of their pupils?

Mr Matthew Cb: No, but of course, in our assessment of the state of Education, the things that we were concerned about in the immediate run-up, they were all published and freely available. But there was no specific “Can you come and help us think through this problem as it’s starting to grow.”

Lead 8: And would Ofsted have had valuable information to offer, and intelligence to offer, had government made that approach?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, is the answer to the question. And in my witness statement you’ll see that, although this is after the decision has been taken to close schools, Baroness Spielman was very clear that she was offering to take a good number of those inspectors, as many as was needed, to help think through the policy changes, but those offers were not taken up in the scale that we had offered.

Lead 8: I mean, does Ofsted have an insight into why that offer wasn’t taken up, or why the government didn’t make that sort of use of Ofsted?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think that, at that stage, and I’m talking very, very early weeks, there was concern about independence. Ofsted is independent, although we are civil servants. And so we understand very clearly what our independence is about but we did feel that actually you could mitigate that very clearly by pivoting towards a national emergency. But I think that that was probably a barrier. It eased throughout the pandemic. I’m sure we’ll come to talk about later.

Lead 8: Yes, all right. And can you help me as to when Ofsted became aware, then, that schools would close to most children?

Mr Matthew Cb: At the point that everybody else was made aware, where there was a national announcement.

Lead 8: And what would Ofsted’s assessment have been, if someone had asked, in the weeks leading up to 18 March: how ready do you think schools would be to pivot to the provision of remote education, for example, to most children of school age?

Mr Matthew Cb: Well, we weren’t asked that question ever. With the benefit of hindsight, although, probably at the time the answer would have been the same, we didn’t think that schools were prepared in any way, shape or form to be able to deal with educating children remotely.

Lead 8: All right.

I’m going to move on, then, if I may, to ask you about a specific policy that I think you’re familiar with. We called it the “vulnerable children policy”.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: But it was the policy adopted by the government in England so that certain categories of children could go to school. And you’ll be familiar, very generally, children with a social worker, children with an education, health and care plan, and then a broader discretion that schools could deem children vulnerable.

At paragraph 381 of your statement, which is at page 136, Mr Coffey –

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: – do you see that you cite there a briefing paper that was prepared on 27 April, and it set out a bit about the policy, and then it set out – you might just see at the end – sorry, at the end of the middle paragraph, it said:

“In an ideal world, these decisions would be risk-based and made on a case-by-case basis, but as we know, defining a child as vulnerable is no guarantee that they will go into school.”

I wanted to try and understand, if I may, whether Ofsted’s point was that if you had the benefit of time, schools would identify children individually on a risk basis that they thought should come into school, or whether Ofsted was saying something different when it made that point.

Mr Matthew Cb: No, Ofsted’s view is clear that it’s a head teacher of a school that understands their pupils better than anybody else, understands the circumstances with which they live. They were likely to know their parents and all of those arrangements. So our position was, at that point, that that’s what we were talking about.

Lead 8: And so was the concern about the policy, that by defining certain children who would be entitled to go, but still leaving an area of discretion, as well.

Let me ask the question: was there concern about that on Ofsted’s part, or did Ofsted think that that was a balanced approach and the right approach to take?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think we didn’t have the benefit of the scientific data, the modelling, or any of the constraints that were trying to be navigated by the policy, other than a general view that, you know, schools, like everybody else would, be affected by the pandemic, and therefore, the capacity would be lower. I think that this was a pragmatic place to start, and we were relieved that at least there was that ability for a head teacher to work with local authorities to identify those additional vulnerable children.

Lead 8: May I just ask you about something you’ve just said there, which is that Ofsted didn’t have access to the scientific advice or information. Do you mean that prior to 18 March –

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: – Ofsted didn’t know what SAGE, for example, were saying about, for example, the possibility of school closures, or perhaps the sorts of – or the percentages of children who might safely be able to attend school?

Mr Matthew Cb: That’s correct. We didn’t have those data.

Lead 8: And do you think it would have been useful for Ofsted to have been provided with that sort of material at an earlier point?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think it would have been essential, had we been invited to be part of the discussion –

Lead 8: Yes.

Mr Matthew Cb: – about forming a policy that would help navigate the way through. As it turned out, because we’re not a policy-making department, we didn’t need to have that additional data because it would have had less value to us. So we weren’t being asked the question about whether the policy was right.

Lead 8: All right. So only a problem had your expertise been sought out in the first place.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: Did it become apparent to Ofsted at an early stage that vulnerable children were attending school in small numbers?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, it became apparent very quickly, as my earlier evidence suggests in our discussions with head teachers, later on, we were able to establish that. But really, from the moment that schools were closed, I had a very small cohort of school inspectors that joined us in the January of 2020, and very quickly the first decision we talked about redeploying our staff was to send those inspectors back to their schools to help, and they were talking to us very early on that these children were just not attending.

Lead 8: And does Ofsted have any particular insight as to why children weren’t attending or what it considers the most important barriers of attendance to have been during the first period of school lockdowns?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think the first thing, to be clear to the Inquiry, is that Ofsted still doesn’t have access to live attendance data.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mr Matthew Cb: We see census data once a year, but certainly during that time we didn’t understand, you know, who was attending schools. But it was very clear that there were problems, and it was one of fear and, as reported to me by my inspectors, conflicting messages that were – you know, conflicted with central government, local authority, Public Health England. People were saying they really weren’t sure and so they took the line of least resistance, which was to not attend.

Lead 8: So one of the things – I don’t think I need to take you to this – one of the things that you set out within your statement is that within each local area, schools differed considerably in the extent to which they were invited and critically encouraged pupils to attend school. This was the case both during and outside national lockdowns. I think that’s citing –

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: – one of Ofsted’s papers, but can I ask you about that, then. Is it Ofsted’s evidence that there is inconsistency of practice then across –

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, it absolutely is our evidence –

Lead 8: – England?

Mr Matthew Cb: – and I think the document, the extract you refer to, attempts to set that out really clearly.

Lead 8: And what that seems to be pinpointing was that it was up to individual schools, as it were, to be proactive about trying to get individual children into school?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: And that that’s what was producing inconsistency; is that correct?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think it’s two-way. Schools were very, very good at dealing with children that have special educational needs, and then, you know, we look at the special educational needs system and I think we’ve all concluded that this is a system in urgent need of reform.

One of the problems here in this particular issue is that we were asking school leaders to enter into part of that system, you know, engaging with local authorities, trying to get the support that they needed. So it could be a combination of the head teacher not doing that proactively enough or, indeed, the head teacher doing it proactively and not getting the response that was required from the local authority.

Lead 8: And did Ofsted develop any understanding during the pandemic, or since, as to whether or not that was a problem, in other words that there was sufficiently good interaction or work as between local authorities and schools?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think, as the pandemic progressed, we became clearer and clearer. And whilst initially that catch-all of if there is a vulnerable child that needs to be educated, get into the system, we’ve been very clear there needs to be much more guidance around that. So that the rules were very clear. There was too much left to several parts of the system to really come together to make it happen. So we’re – we’re clear, but it isn’t an area that we’ve deeply researched. I know others have.

Lead 8: All right, I think that may be the point that’s made at paragraph 681 of your statement, which is on page 291 if that helps. And this is the part of your statement that is considering child protection.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: And you set out there:

“Having said that, although no formal data on this was collated or reported, it was very clear that part of the difficulty facing child protection in the early stages of the pandemic was the significant debate and uncertainty over which children qualified as ‘vulnerable’ children who should still be attending school. From a child-protection perspective, it was not always clear which children were ‘vulnerable’.”

Is that really the point that you’re making there?

And obviously you’ve said in that part of your statement, at an early stage in the pandemic, so was that something that improved, then, over the course of time, that local authorities and schools came to have greater clarity as to who should be in school?

Mr Matthew Cb: During the pandemic, I and my colleagues in Ofsted joined the Department for Education’s – it’s called REACT team. It was a – it was the DfE’s regional directors that came together and met with mine and discussed an awful lot of data, looked at that attendance data that wasn’t ours, but started to identify those local authorities that really were displaying signs of a higher degree of risk in this area. And that allowed discussions to take place with those local authorities about what additional support the DfE might be able to get them to help. So it was never perfect but it started to improve because we were all looking at these different areas.

Lead 8: And is, then, the importance of that lesson that it was pointing out to some local authorities that they were lagging in terms of the numbers of vulnerable children that were attending school as compared to other local authorities that was helpful, or something else?

Mr Matthew Cb: No. I think it points out that it was helpful, and I think it goes to a broader picture of reflection that whilst inspection, routine inspection, was paused, we, you know, really fought hard – Amanda Spielman fought hard to get inspections started as quickly as possible, because that independent oversight and being able to report what is happening can have a really important impact, particularly in the middle of dealing with a crisis.

Lead 8: And can you help, then, in terms of what individual schools or head teachers may have done to encourage the families of vulnerable children to send them to school, can you help with what may have worked? What is good practice, generally speaking, for trying to get those children in?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think that, you know, everybody was concerned, language was being used in a different context. “Vulnerable” became something that we all became familiar with. “Clinically extremely vulnerable” versus “vulnerable” definitions here.

What really worked was where, you know, the communication between schools and parents, which is generally very good and well established, really set out very clearly expectations and support and listened carefully to parents and their anxieties. And we did a series of good practice guides, and they focus particularly on that communication and how important it is to listen to the concerns of parents.

Lead 8: And one of the points that was made by the Children’s Commissioner for England was that there was an issue around the framing of the policy, insofar it was – as it was orientated towards vulnerable children and asking some families to send their children to school, but at the other time, advising most other families that they shouldn’t. Was that something that Ofsted picked up on at all or had concerns about?

Mr Matthew Cb: It is, and Baroness Spielman spoke at every opportunity about these concerns, the things that were really getting in the way and the use of language and the confusion that was out there. And also, in doing so, she took every opportunity, rightly, to say, “We need to get schools open as quickly as we possibly can to more and more pupils so that we can support them, because clearly this isn’t working.”

Lead 8: And is that also an important part of it: the more that you open up schools to more children, the better you can encourage the vulnerable children to come into school; is that right?

Mr Matthew Cb: It’s the confidence that you give parents, that their nextdoor neighbour’s children are going to school. And, you know, that effect, that community effect, is really quite powerful. And it became – you know, it was forced to become very disparate and isolated, and the school’s job is being able to bring that community together, and so that’s why we wanted to open schools to more and more children earlier.

Lead 8: And one of – the other group of children who were eligible to attend school were those children who had the education, health and care plans as well. And what is set out in Ofsted’s SEND report reflecting on, I think, some of the barriers that children with those plans faced in going to school, was that the requirement that they undertake a risk assessment became a barrier. Is that correct, and is that Ofsted’s assessment?

Mr Matthew Cb: It’s correct, but I think it was just another barrier in a, you know, an area of confusion and fear. And then, you know, having to risk assess them and actually looking at the plans that you’d put in place to support those children, I feel that schools reported to us they didn’t feel supported and able to do that, and that’s possibly why many of those children did not attend schools.

Lead 8: I mean, what you have set out in your statement, I won’t take you to this, but it’s at paragraph 383, was that you set out a chart setting out the small number of children and young people who attended school from March to July 2020, and it sets out:

“Some parents, both of children with an EHC plan and those with SEND but no EHC plan, told us that their children had not been given any education at all.”

So can I just check what that means. Is that saying it’s not just that those children didn’t get to go to school, but that there was no appropriate provision for them in their homes as well, on occasions?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, that’s exactly what it’s saying.

Lead 8: And I understand this wasn’t quantitative research. I think that’s correct.

Mr Matthew Cb: That’s correct.

Lead 8: But does Ofsted or was Ofsted able to assess whether or not this was a widespread problem or whether it was a more confined problem, or is it just not able to say?

Mr Matthew Cb: Well, I’m not able to say, because routine inspections were paused, so we didn’t have the access to children, to schools in a way that we had previously done before, and that was a real problem to us. We didn’t have access to attendance data. We just didn’t have access to the information that we normally use to be able to determine the quality of provision of education. And that was taken away.

What I think is clear, and you’ve seen from the statement, that despite that, we tried all of our best endeavours to ensure that we had as much oversight as we possibly could of those children that were most vulnerable. And if I can bring to your attention that during the pandemic, very quickly we deployed 220 inspectors out to local authorities with a purpose specifically of being able to support as much as they could, but they were not inspectors at that time; they were seconded into local authorities.

Lead 8: And so is it right, then, they are seconded to help with best practice –

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: – to provide really practically advice?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, it wasn’t an accountability role that they undertook.

Lead 8: And was another part of the problem, then, at this stage that Ofsted just didn’t have that much insight into the content of remote provision and what schools were actually able to provide at an early stage in the pandemic to children who were at home?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, I mean certainly in the first lockdown, there was no access whatsoever, and as we started our monitoring visits, of course, we were visiting schools and talking about the arrangements. But at no point, until much later on, did we start to examine and think about the method that was being used to deliver remote education. And, of course, what we did say very clearly is that there were no plans in place, and it became confused very, very quickly.

Lead 8: All right. Can I just move on to ask you – this is a different question. So we’ve talked about children who have those plans, whose needs are at a higher level. Obviously children with special educational needs fell outside these – the specified categories of children who could attend school, but potentially those children could have been admitted to school under school’s discretion; is that correct?

Mr Matthew Cb: That’s correct, yes.

Lead 8: And was Ofsted able to assess or get an idea as to whether or not children with those needs were actually being able – were able to attend school during the first set of lockdowns, or was it the case that most of those children were being educated at home as well?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think the latter is true. What we didn’t have is access to a robust evidence base that would allow us to answer that question beyond the anecdote of what we were hearing from professionals. But it is fair to say that those children did not attend school in big numbers.

Lead 8: One of the Core Participants has raised the question of whether Ofsted was aware of whether local authorities and schools risk assessed children with special educational needs but who didn’t have a plan in order to determine if they should attend school. Is that something that Ofsted knows anything about?

Mr Matthew Cb: I’m not able to comment on that.

Lead 8: All right. So I’m going to move on then, if I may, to ask you some questions about remote education that – I want to be careful about language, because the Inquiry has heard some information or some evidence that remote education could mean the provision of worksheets or children being given physical work to do, as it were, at home, as opposed to being taught online.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: Is that right? Does that accord with Ofsted’s understanding as well?

Mr Matthew Cb: It does. I think there was confusion because there was a lack of guidance out there as to what remote education looked like. And actually as we – later on, in October, we were publishing – as did the DfE – some good practice guides that said, actually, you know, a good remote education experience will have a mixture of worksheets that might test understanding and assessment, but also, you know, the delivery of some lessons, et cetera. But it was very clear to say that in the outset, without any guidance, people didn’t really understand what that language meant, and there was a scrabble to try to deliver something.

Lead 8: But presumably one of the real – well, let me ask you whether or not it was Ofsted’s experience that at the start of the pandemic there were just practical obstacles because of children’s access to devices and the sorts of practical barriers there may have been to schools being able to provide online provision as opposed to physical provision?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think that was recognised very early on, and in discussions that I had with the Department for Education they were looking to deploy devices out to those that needed them.

Actually, the devices themselves were not a problem, because they were being donated by some very large corporate organisations. The issue was getting them out to children. And I did deploy one of my regional directors to a taskforce that would help to get these deployed, and he recounted to me at the time that he was very impressed by the army, that had been sat around the table, with the full logistical backing that’s at their fingertips. And he came away and said, “I feel really assured that this is going to be resolved.”

And then the army disappeared from the debate. I don’t know why. And those devices then were deployed over to local authorities, with everybody’s best efforts to get them out to children, but subsequently we’ve spoken to lots of schools and parents that said that they never did get their device that was going to be needed for them.

Lead 8: Okay. I will come back if I may, maybe, to that point and just understanding what some of the barriers were. I just wanted to start first, though, with whether or not Ofsted became concerned about research or information that children were in fact not – and this is children who were able to access online education or remote education – whether Ofsted became concerned about the amount of time that children were spending on it?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yeah, we didn’t scientifically or evidence precisely because we weren’t able to have access, but by talking to schools themselves, they were very clear that the amount of time that children were, you know, being able to be online was minimal.

We were clear, the chief inspector was clear at the time, was that whatever that time was, it really wasn’t learning in its effective sense. Again, we need to get children back into school as possible, because at the very best you need to be able to check that, you know, they are sat in front of a computer.

But we heard the same stories that others did about, you know, this was not really an experience that was appropriate for so many children. Because it’s not just about the device; it’s about the environment in which they live at.

And I was particularly delighted to see, you know, your Children[‘s] … Voices report that talked – those stories were brought to life about children actually not scrabbling for a device, scrabbling for a seat and a table to sit it on, rather than being on the floor. And that’s what people were dealing with at the time.

Lead 8: And I am going to ask you about that, and about the different barriers that children may have encountered. You have very helpfully, at paragraph 238 of your statement – and that’s at page 77 – set out a long list of sources of information about remote access.

I just want to ask you, if I can, about (i), which is on page 79, and that refers to Ofsted’s annual report that was published on 1 December 2020.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: And that sets out some of the issues.

And if you go over the page to the end of that paragraph, and just to be accurate about this, that report referred to, if we looked at the first paragraph, that research suggested that:

“… children in England were spending 13 hours per week during lockdown on home learning, but one study by the Institute of Fiscal Studies [suggested] that the figure could be as low as 5 hours.”

That’s at (i).

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: Then that report went on to cite a number of studies. That’s at the very end of the paragraph on page 80.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: And it’s in parenthesis:

“(The studies cited are: (i) ‘Children doing 2.5 hours schoolwork a day on average’ …”

That was a study by University College London.

“… Office for National Statistics, [dated] July 2020 …”

And the Institute of Fiscal Studies as well.

So were those all sources that had been gathered and published at an earlier stage, then, that shone some light, albeit they seemed to say perhaps slightly different things about the amount of time that children were spending on education.

Mr Matthew Cb: In the absence of the evidence that we would generally collect from our inspection programme, we were leaning into these research documents that were published by others to build the picture of concern that continued to draw attention to the need to get children back into education face-to-face as soon as possible.

Lead 8: So although those studies may give different figures, was the general consensus – was it Ofsted’s general assessment, then, that these supported, as you’ve put it, a picture of concern that children were not engaging in remote education in a way that they would have needed to in order to be able to either maintain or, I suppose, attain more in terms of their education?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes. The chief inspector and I at the time, we gave evidence to the Education Select Committee to that effect, and the chief inspector gave several interviews talking about remote education at the very best being a sticking plaster –

Lead 8: Yes.

Mr Matthew Cb: – and needing to get back.

Lead 8: I’m just going to, if I may, just come on to some of those broad observations. Before I do, though, I just wanted to come to another one of the bits of research that were done in and around the same time. This is INQ000623810. So this is the National Foundation for Educational Research, and if we could just go to page 3.

This set out the findings that had been made about education that was being provided in April. Can you see the “Key findings”? It may have come up on the screen in front of you.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: And if you just cast your eye over that, you’ll see it states:

“… almost half of exam-year pupils in Years 11 and 13 were not provided with work …”

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: And then:

“Just over half of all pupils taught remotely did not usually have any online lessons, defined as live or real-time lessons. Offline provision, such as worksheets or … video, was much more common …”

And then if we could just skip down, that there was a division, I think, is that right, between secondary and primary pupils?

And then that there was, I think, a gap as well, as I understand what that research is saying, between pupils from higher income households as well spending more time on education, but that – and I think it’s the next bullet point:

“… parents from the lowest-income households spent the most amount of time supporting their child with school work.

And if we could just go over the page, please. This research was also – if we see the first bullet on the page that:

“… five per cent of pupils lived with an adult who is at very high risk ([so] clinically extremely vulnerable) … [and that] A further 19 per cent live with an adult who is at high risk …”

Then I think it makes the point underneath it that those pupils who were from a black, Asian and minority ethnic background were more likely to live with an at-risk adult.

Thank you, that can come down.

May I ask, does that research – again, does that generally accord with what Ofsted’s understanding of the position would have been at around the time this was published –

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, it does.

Lead 8: – in summer 2020?

And that research was obviously specifically pointing to the fact that there was potentially large numbers of children who were living in clinically vulnerable or clinically extremely vulnerable households.

Was that an issue that was on Ofsted’s radar as a matter of concern, or as group of children who might need to be given distinct consideration?

Mr Matthew Cb: I mean, throughout and in my witness statement, you know, we were concerned about these children all the through. Our role during the pandemic was to be the critical friend to the policymakers to say, “But what about these children?” I worked very closely with my social care colleagues in Ofsted who spent an awful lot of time saying, “But what about the clinically extremely vulnerable children?”

And we were concerned that, you know, there was not enough thought going into, you know, children within those families, and that was the role that we played.

Lead 8: All right. And maybe was that a concern that came – that became more prominent when children were going back to school in September, or was that just a general concern –

Mr Matthew Cb: A general continuation. We talked about it right from the outset. We were most worried about these children in these circumstances, but of course, as the infection itself, you know, changed and new strains and whatever, it again became an ongoing problem about these children.

Lead 8: We’ll maybe touch on that again later, but just staying with the provision of remote education, I think what you’ve suggested, just a few moments ago, was that the overall assessment was – it served as a sticking plaster. Was that Ofsted’s overall assessment as to what remote education could achieve during periods of school closure?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, that’s true. There is no replacement for face-to-face interaction between a teacher and a child. But we accepted that in the circumstances that we were in, you know, it was a sticking plaster response.

Lead 8: And again, I don’t think I need to take you to it, but in the remote education research paper that Ofsted produced, it highlighted that there was an issue of assessing remote attendance as opposed to remote learning and the distinction between those two things. Can I just ask you to explain that, please.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, I think as I referred a moment or two ago, at the very best, you know, we were checking the children were there and were sat in front of a computer. But, you know, the interaction, the engagement that particularly younger children would get from being in a school setting was not there, and actually, you know, being able to check that, you know, learning has been understood and giving children the opportunity to ask questions, and as a teacher, being able to assess all of those things have happened before you’ve moved on was not possible through a remote learning package.

So, you know, that’s exactly what I meant by it.

Lead 8: One of the issues that your evidence highlights, and this came, I think, as I understand your evidence from parents, was that they identified quite early on that motivation was a problem; trying to get children to stay engaged.

Did Ofsted – did it develop an understanding as to what helped children to stay engaged online or what helped to produce the best engagement with remote learning?

Mr Matthew Cb: We did – both the Department for Education and Ofsted later produced good practice guides based on what we had seen and how it had worked very, very well in the past, but we didn’t – definitely didn’t have a template of how you go and do it. And I know that the Department for Education has since sent out more guidance, non-statutory guidance, that, you know, shows the available resources to schools to be able to pull together the Ark Academy, et cetera – the Oak Academy, I’m sorry, and, you know, being able to pull together a package that was better than what happened in the first wave of the pandemic.

Lead 8: Yes, because I think that’s an important point to ask you, is whether or not Ofsted considered that provision improved in the second set of school closures, and whether that – whether it knows whether that led to better engagement on the part of more children.

Mr Matthew Cb: I think, on the point of better engagement, that was always very difficult because we didn’t have access to any data that would be helpful to assess that point. But definitely through our monitoring visits, where we engaged with teachers, and people were becoming, you know, much better informed about what was working from their perspective, and of course, they were talking to their children as well. They were all able to articulate that we’ve moved on an awful long distance in a very short space of time, but that’s not surprising because the school education sector are very flexible and fleet of foot, and here was a really good example of how they started from zero and very quickly started to develop things that were working well. Better.

Lead 8: You’ve mentioned the Children and Young People’s Voices report, and that obviously provides an insight into children, I think, finding it difficult to engage and there being lots of other interesting things on the Internet or games to play whenever you should be, you know, in theory, attending online school.

Are those sorts of voices and is that sort of information gathered by Ofsted or available to policymakers in order to be able to really challenge the sorts of things that you’d actually have to grapple with if you want children to learn online?

Mr Matthew Cb: As an inspector myself, my career has been about engaging with pupils and young adults about their experiences of their education. So that’s a key, you know, plank of what inspection does.

I think a lesson learnt for Ofsted, you know, through the pandemic is looking to find ways to better engage with those pupils, those service users. And we’re soon to be – we’ve been doing some work to look at that, but we haven’t got a body of evidence other than through the great work of the product that we just talked about there.

Lead 8: All right. I’m going to move on, if I may, to deal, then, with a different issue, which is about children’s differential experiences, which I think is something that you just touched upon a little while ago.

So we’ve – you, in the course of your evidence, have mentioned access to devices as one issue; engagement as another. But I think what you were about to touch on but I stopped you was that children’s home environments as well also, I think, play an important part, is what you suggest in your evidence, in their ability to engage with education at home, too.

Mr Matthew Cb: Well, there’s two elements to that, that I think come across in the statement. There’s the ability to engage in education, but I think, you know, very quickly, many more people than the likes of us that work in Ofsted recognise the valuably important role that schools play as part of the keeping children safe, you know, arrangements, being able to report on what they’re seeing because they see these children every day was taken away. So I think there are a number of factors to this, but most definitely preventing them from being able to come to school or having access to devices was dependent on a huge range of factors.

Lead 8: But just focusing, if I may, on being educated in the home and the sorts of barriers that children may have faced at home in accessing – sorry, accessing education, what was Ofsted’s assessment as to the things that were important in that respect?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, space and support and lack of distraction. You’ve mentioned the fact that we gave – we scrabbled to give electronic devices to children for a particular purpose, but as your own research, you know, demonstrates, children very easily get distracted into doing other things with them.

But space – you know, a lot of us would conceive our living arrangements as being in a number of rooms and how many bedrooms or whatever. We’re talking about a lot of children here with – you know, living in very close confined space, so absolutely no space, and no ability to concentrate on what one was listening to, because the household continues.

Lead 8: One of the things that we haven’t touched on yet with any witness, but maybe you might know something about this, Mr Coffey, is one of the things highlighted is parental support as well, and the availability of parental support to help children with retrospection. Was that something that Ofsted considered was also a factor?

Mr Matthew Cb: I think it was a huge factor, particularly for younger children that needed that parental support and engagement. I’m sure we all saw the same news, you know, bulletins with people exhausted, having spent time what they would consider teaching their children.

So there needed to be that support in order to help those children. So the differentials would come on that level.

Older children were a bit more motivated, maybe needed a bit less supervision, but maybe more easily distracted onto things other than their education.

Lead 8: I want to move on then, if I may, just to ask you about some of the consequences or the impacts that school closures had for children. And I wanted to ask you, really – I’ll come to long-term impacts, but if I can start maybe with the picture that started to emerge in the autumn of 2020, what groups of children were Ofsted most concerned about after that period of disruption?

Mr Matthew Cb: The children that we knew we were worried about, clearly the vulnerable children, those with special educational needs and education, health and care plans for sure, but also the children that we didn’t know we were worried about, because they weren’t, you know, in view of – nobody had eyes on – we use the term “eyes on” a lot to really define – is there a professional agency or body that is able to see these children? And that was something that we were deeply concerned about, hence the wanting to deploy our own staff to do as much as we possibly could, without, you know, knocking on doors of children, but supporting those whose job it might be to go and do that.

Lead 8: And what about the children who had missed the transition period, so children who might have transitioned to primary school and children who might have transitioned to secondary school? Did they emerge as cohorts of particular concern?

Mr Matthew Cb: Well, they did at the time, but maybe that became more obvious to us as children started to come back to school. You know, when schools were reopening. Particularly at those transition points they were – you know, they had missed out on that really important preparation stage, and there they were. And maybe – you know, maybe that has led into greater anxiety about engaging back into education. But you asked me about the, kind of, first phases of the pandemic response.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mr Matthew Cb: So yes, they were all areas of great concern to us. But some of them did reveal themselves a little bit later on.

Lead 8: And just – this is a very general question, but in terms of when schools went back in September, what was Ofsted’s index of concern about the extent to which there had been learning loss during that period between March and September 2020?

Mr Matthew Cb: Well, I mean, it was huge, our index of concern. We were just, you know, really worried about how that lost learning would manifest itself, how schools would start to understand that better. We were concerned that we might take a whole-school, whole-class approach to lost learning, when actually what was really needed was the individual assessment of what children had lost – for the reasons that we’ve just talked about and everyone’s circumstance being different.

So they’re the things that we were worried about as children started to come back. But would they come back was probably, you know, a bigger question.

Lead 8: And was Ofsted involved in helping the government or providing support to the government in terms of the reopening of school in September 2020?

Mr Matthew Cb: I do remember that, in a meeting that I had with colleagues across government, the Department for Education was starting to articulate its plans for the reopening, and I offered that Ofsted would critique those for them as a critical friend. And we did that. And I believe that that’s in the witness evidence.

It would – we didn’t pull any punches. We said: we don’t think that this really focuses officially on all of those children we really should be worried about. You know, no one is talking about transport. Transport, taxis, for children with special educational needs, are just not running.

You know, so we were worried about a whole number of things, and I was delighted that they invited us to give that assessment.

Lead 8: And was Ofsted then – having been invited to the table, was it content, then, that its concerns or that its insights had been listened to, and that they were acted on in advance of schools opening?

Mr Matthew Cb: Well, we were delighted to have been invited, because that’s something that we were pushing. We started this session talking about how we could use our expertise, and “Here’s a really good example of where we did that”. We’re not the policymakers, that’s the Department for Education, and we sent it in, and they acknowledged with great thanks. I’m sure it went through lots of other iterations, but we didn’t keep a daily record or a log of what was happening with it.

Lead 8: All right. Let me – I want to move on, if I may, just to talk about – or to ask you about what Ofsted assesses the long-term impacts of the pandemic to have been on children and young people, and I wonder if I could just take each of the headlines, really, from your statement, and ask you about them.

So I think the first headline is attendance; is that correct?

Mr Matthew Cb: That’s correct.

Lead 8: And what’s Ofsted’s assessment as to the impact on attendance?

Mr Matthew Cb: So we’re deeply concerned about the persistent absence, so those children that don’t – repeatedly don’t attend. And when you start to examine the DfE’s data in that way, you start to identify that, you know, it is children with special educational needs that are, you know, much more likely to fail to attend and persistently fail to attend.

It’s a relatively small number, but a huge problem. And I think, you know, we’re very, very worried about that. Our new inspection framework, therefore, for that reason, focuses an awful lot more on attendance issues, but it is very clear to see that there are a smaller number of, you know, persistent absences that we need to be concerned about why that might be.

Lead 8: And is that an issue that Ofsted links to the pandemic, or not?

Mr Matthew Cb: I don’t – I don’t think that we’ve got fulsome evidence to support it, but I – as an inspector, I – and given all that we’ve examined and all of the anxiety that sits around that particular group of children, I think it’s likely that there is a clear link.

Lead 8: And is that linked to your evidence about the pandemic having in some way changed the relationship between families and schools –

Mr Matthew Cb: I think –

Lead 8: – or changed – or that something has shifted in the culture that sits between schools and families?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yeah, I think – I think that’s right. That social contract. And, you know, certainly as long as I was ever at school, and working life, it’s just a foundation of everything that you do that children go to school. That’s it. It’s compulsory education. We talk about those terms an awful lot.

I think that’s been challenged since the pandemic. I think there’s less of an adherence to that fundamental. So I think when people talk about the breakdown of the social contract, that’s what they talk about.

I’ve certainly observed it from our point of view, because people can complain to Ofsted about schools, and I’ve seen an increase in the complaints that come to Ofsted. I think, you know, we were talking about 15,000 complaints a year that have gradually gone up, and were about 17,500 since the pandemic. They’re complaints to Ofsted about an individual school each year. Now, we don’t rush off and go and inspect the school on that behalf. Very small numbers that we’d actually inspect as a result of that. But I think it demonstrates that, you know, people are much more likely to challenge because of the fear and anxiety that they have themselves. And so that’s how I would conclude the challenges that we’re seeing.

Lead 8: Another point that you draw out in your statement is the increase in the number of children who are now electively home educated since the pandemic. And I think – I’m not going to turn it up, but I think your evidence is that the numbers have doubled; is that correct?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, it’s – I’d need to be careful about a direct correlation of doubling. I think this is an area that we’ve been really, really concerned about for a good number of years, and I think our concerns have been listened to in a number of ways. There is a bill going through, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, through Parliament at the moment, that says that there will be a register of these children. This is very, very welcome.

The other thing that’s happened is that the Department for Education now mandates the collection of that data, whereas previously it wasn’t mandated and it was collected by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, but there is 100,000 children today that are – or in the last briefing from the DfE at census day who were being electively home educated.

And I’ve got to say right from the outset, some of those children will be in a brilliant environment, being exceptionally well educated. Our concern is for those that don’t fit into that category. And we’re really worried about them.

And I would really recommend the Inquiry consider that, you know, as that passage of the legislation through Parliament emerges, where it’s the local authority will have to maintain that register, I’m keen to know how regulators like me will have access to it.

Lead 8: Right. So I think is that the issue, then, that’s perhaps of concern, that this information may be collected, but there’s an issue as to who will have access to it?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes. Because we are so worried about, you know, off-rolling and all of those issues, you know, people are not often well equipped to be able to educate their children at home, as we found out through the pandemic. And so if that is seen as being a viable option that we encourage, then we really need to be able to look into this in a great deal more depth.

Lead 8: And I just want to touch, if I may, please, on two of your other headlines.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes.

Lead 8: I think the other headline is the disadvantage gap, and where it now stands post-pandemic. Is that the other headline point?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes. And the disadvantage gap, you know, is starting to – or is continuing to increase. It’s something that we need to keep a really close eye on. It will be linked, I’m sure, to attendance issues that we’ve just talked about.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mr Matthew Cb: But we’ve got to keep a really, you know, close eye on it. And again, our new framework for inspection in schools really focuses on inclusion and the principle that we spoke about earlier that the head teacher is really the person that knows very well who their vulnerable children are.

Lead 8: Then I think the other issue that you’ve highlighted of particular concern is the position of children with special educational needs as well; is that correct?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, yes, and I think that’s a theme that has run through the witness statement and this module within the Inquiry.

Lead 8: And may I ask you, Mr Coffey, one of the issues posited in your statement is the concern that some of the children who are now being described as having special educational needs, that that might be, as it were, a leftover from the pandemic, that they are behind in their education but have been said to have special educational needs.

Is that a concern that has persisted, or is that something that Ofsted has more insight into now?

Mr Matthew Cb: We don’t have the insight. We don’t have the evidence for that. And the former Chief Inspector, Baroness Spielman, cautioned that, as we came out of the pandemic, on a road to recovery, that we must give time for, you know, the catch-up to happen before jumping to establishing that a child has got special educational needs, because actually they just might have lost learning and need to be caught up. So there was a caution there.

And there was also a caution that she offered that actually because of the system, the special educational needs system, being frustrating for a lot of parents that enter into it, she was concerned that they would reach a point of frustration that they would choose to go and electively home educate their children.

So there’s some cautionary notes about them, but they are very, very important topics that we need to continue to focus.

Lead 8: And just very shortly, is one of the issues that Ofsted is concerned about the impact that it had on children not being access services or therapies or special provision during the period of the pandemic?

Mr Matthew Cb: Absolutely. And I think that vicious circle of, you know, being at home but having those additional needs that weren’t being met by those services, and then that adding to a concern, you know, about going back into school being further behind than your peers. So, you know, it really is a difficult situation.

Lead 8: Can I just ask, did Ofsted have any role during the pandemic in monitoring, for example, what local authorities were doing with the relaxations that had been provided to them in terms of their statutory duties? For example, the statutory duty to meet the requirements of an education, health and care plan.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, we did fulfil that role through monitoring. We didn’t audit the requirements that were placed, but actually on that particular issue about the expectation of being able to provide education, we did look at those, and I would – Dorset was – is a good example of a monitoring visit that we undertook that explored those very themes, and, you know, we did that throughout.

Lead 8: And can I just check, was that monitoring, then, through those inspections rather than being charged with a role to monitor what every local authority was doing?

Mr Matthew Cb: That’s right. It was through those inspection visits.

Lead 8: I’m grateful. I’m going to move on, if I may, just to check, please, just some of the evidence that you have provided about safeguarding whenever schools returned, or the issue of safeguarding over the duration of the pandemic.

And I think that what you’ve said, and it’s at paragraph 428 if you need it, is about the experience of schools whenever schools returned. Were you able to find that in your statement?

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes, I’ve got that.

Lead 8: That’s at page 158. The experience of schools whenever they went back, in terms of having an increased rate of children reporting about things that had happened at home, and I just wondered if I could ask you a bit about that.

That seems to suggest that there was an increase in children reporting to schools that they had experienced potentially harmful experiences at home but particularly domestic abuse. And I just wondered if I could ask you a bit more about Ofsted’s assessment of that.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yeah, I think we’d see – we assess this in a number of different ways.

In my evidence, I’ve presented that, you know, we were concerned about the number of serious incident briefings that we were seeing that were briefings undertaken by the local authority. This is generally to the very youngest children. So we had some safeguarding concerns there.

We constantly expressed our concern that we weren’t seeing children, but clearly, at that paragraph, when children did start to come back to school, that was the moment when, you know, the teachers were able to have some independent eyes and refer children back through into the system.

Throughout the evidence, we did actually anticipate that being a higher number, but you might hypothesise that, you know, those children that were, you know, in the worst positions possible might have been kept away for even longer. So we were concerned that there needed to be a continued effort to ensure that those children that were not appearing on the school roll, we needed to make sure that we were getting out to see them and that schools were getting out to see them.

Lead 8: Then just picking up your statement at paragraph 670(c), so deep into your statement. You also set out some concerns that Ofsted had – let me find the page for you, Mr Coffey – some concerns that Ofsted had about local authority strategy in general, coming into the autumn of 2020, as well. Is that correct? You should have that at page 285.

Mr Matthew Cb: Could you give me the paragraph number again, please.

Lead 8: Yes, it’s 670(c), and it was picking up on your briefing from the autumn of 2020. And I think you’ve set out there from (a) to (e) some of the issues that local authorities were experiencing.

Mr Matthew Cb: Yes. I think it talks to an awful lot – whilst we might have looked at this from social care lens, it does talk to an awful lot of the evidence that we have discussed already. Those services that children in school that would normally receive as part of their special educational needs provision, and that may well be child and adolescent mental health services, but particularly prevalent for this group of looked-after children, those services were not as readily available and have continued to be challenged since the pandemic. But it was particularly an issue for these children that were looked after that those services weren’t available to them.

Ms Dobbin: All right, Mr Coffey. If I can just ask you to wait there, please.

My Lady, I think there’s a question from a Core Participant.

Lady Hallett: There is. Mr Broach.

Questions From Mr Broach KC

Mr Broach: My Lady, thank you.

Mr Coffey, I represent the Children’s Rights Organisations. And in your evidence earlier, you said that independent oversight can have a really important impact, particularly in the middle of dealing with a crisis. However, in March 2020, inspections of secure training centres, or STCs, was suspended. For youth offending institutes, some oversight continued in the form of short scrutiny visits, but from March 2020 until September 2020, there was a complete lack of oversight over the treatment conditions and rights of children in STCs.

At the time, there were two STCs, Oakhill and Rainsbrook. When Ofsted carried out monitoring visits to Rainsbrook STC in October and December 2020, you found that children were still being locked in their cells for 23.5 hours a day and invoked the urgent notification process.

Did Ofsted consider the impact of suspending visits on these vulnerable children at a time they faced unprecedented restrictions on their rights?

Mr Matthew Cb: My Lady, I think the question almost answers itself in that the urgent notification process had never previously been administered for this particular group of children. So whilst I accept that the normal inspection arrangements were suspended, what we were able to put in place, which was inspectors going on the ground to be able to see what was happening to children, had not diminished our ability to be able to express in the starkest terms our dissatisfaction, our shock, actually, about what was happening to those children in that particular establishment.

So we maintained oversight of these children, albeit under a slightly different title, but it was very clearly holding to account, and I know my inspectors were very shocked about what they were seeing here, and I am equally proud of the work that they did throughout this very difficult period.

Mr Broach: My Lady, may I ask a short follow-up?

Lady Hallett: You may.

Mr Broach: I’m grateful.

Mr Coffey, our understanding is that there was no oversight in STCs for the period from March 2020 until September 2020. There was some oversight in YOIs, but nothing in STCs. Is that right, and if so, do you accept that some alternative approach which allowed for some oversight ought to have continued?

Mr Matthew Cb: My Lady, if I could come back to the Inquiry on the specific dates of that period that was referenced. It’s absolutely right that we didn’t monitor until September, and we very quickly went out to where we were, but I’d really like to be able to set out what we did do during that period to continually assure ourselves as best as we possibly could in the circumstances.

Mr Broach: I’m grateful, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Mr Broach.

Mr Coffey, thank you very much. By the sounds of it, you’ve still got a little bit more help to give us because you’ve just volunteered to provide a bit more information, but thank you for the help you’ve given to date and for the help that your colleagues have provided to the Inquiry.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Very well. I shall break now, and I shall return at midday.

Ms Dobbin: Grateful, my Lady.

(11.45 am)

(A short break)

(12.00 pm)

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, the next witness is Sir Jon Coles.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Dobbin.

Sir Jon Coles

SIR JON COLES (sworn).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for Module 8

Ms Dobbin: Can I ask you to give your full name to the Inquiry, please.

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah, Jon Coles.

Lead 8: Sir Jon, I think you have in front of you a statement which bears the number INQ000651602.

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right.

Lead 8: And it’s a statement that comprises 83 pages.

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: And can you confirm that the contents of that statement are true to the best of your knowledge and belief.

Sir Jon Coles: They are.

Lead 8: Sir Jon, I think it’s right that you’ve been the Chief Executive of United Learning since January 2012.

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right.

Lead 8: And that’s a large multi-academy trust, isn’t it?

Sir Jon Coles: It is, yeah, and we also run independent schools, so we’re unusual in that way.

Lead 8: I’m going to come back to how unusual you are, but if I just deal with some basics. Prior to you becoming chief executive, I think it’s correct that you in fact worked at the Department for Education for a considerable period of time.

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right, for about 15 years.

Lead 8: And I think it’s also right that during the last four years of your Civil Service career, you were in fact a member of the Department for Education board; is that right?

Sir Jon Coles: I was, yes.

Lead 8: And does that denote that you were a very senior civil servant then?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes. I was Director General for Schools and then Education Standards.

Lead 8: And just then coming to the role that you played during the pandemic, so asides being the Chief Executive of United Learning, I think that it’s correct that from April 2020 until March 2022, you were a member of the Department for Education’s Recovery Advisory Group; is that correct?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right.

Lead 8: I’ll come back to that. And we’ll also see that in your role as the Chief Executive of United Learning, but also, I think, on behalf of the Confederation of School Trusts, you also made representations to the Department for Education and Ofqual about the way that children should be assessed because examinations couldn’t take place.

Sir Jon Coles: Yes.

Lead 8: And you were also involved in the Oak National Academy as well –

Sir Jon Coles: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: – but principally because United Learning were a, I think, very significant contributor to the work of Oak; is that right?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right. We produced a large number of lessons for Oak. I was also then on the oversight board of Oak.

Lead 8: All right. And then just going back, if I may, to your academy trust, does that comprise about 87 different schools?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes. So we’re over 100 now, but at the time, around that number, yes.

Lead 8: And I think those schools are in fact dotted across the country, apart from the northeast, at the time of the pandemic; is that right?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right. So we run the length of the country, so from Carlisle in the north right down to the south coast, not further east than Cambridge, not in the far northeast, not at the time really in the south-west, but a very national picture. And in terms of the main regions of the country, I think it was only the northeast that we weren’t in at that time.

Lead 8: And I think – are most of those schools non-selective schools?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right. So typically, they are schools which we’ve taken on because they got into difficulty and are often in areas of deprivation, not exclusively, but mostly in areas of deprivation, having a history of not having been successful, and almost all are non-selective schools.

Lead 8: But on the other hand, you also have some independent schools within your group, as well.

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right. So that was our historic foundation back from the 19th century, we were founded as a group of schools for girls at a time when it was understood that – finally that the lack of education for girls and young women was a serious social problem, so that was our original foundation. We still have around a dozen of those independent schools in the group.

Lead 8: All right. I’ll come back to the oversight that afforded you as to the challenges in different parts of the school system, but just bringing this to a close in terms of the composition of your schools. I think that in total at the time of the pandemic, that meant you had just about 57,500 children in the schools; is that right?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right.

Lead 8: And in fact, in terms of eligibility for free school meals, that stood at about 24% of your children.

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right, yes.

Lead 8: And I think that’s slightly higher than the national figure at that time.

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right, yes.

Lead 8: And I think, in terms of children with special educational needs, that stood at around 16% of your children.

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right.

Lead 8: And then about 28% of your children had English as an additional language –

Sir Jon Coles: Yes.

Lead 8: – is that also right?

The Inquiry will hear evidence this week from some head teachers or school leaders from schools that aren’t in multi-academy trusts from different parts of the United Kingdom. Could you just explain to the chair, during the pandemic, the benefits that being in a big trust afforded the schools in your group.

Sir Jon Coles: Yes. So I’d probably say there are three types of benefit, really. One is capability, one is capacity, and one is the network. So as a large multi-academy trust, we have a central office, and having a central office means that we’ve got some more specialist skills than a single school could have afforded. So for example, we have a safeguarding lead who is, you know, a fully professional safeguarding lead and has no other role, and a small safeguarding team. We have a health and safety lead who is a fully professional health and safety expert, and so on. So we have these people with particular skill sets – obviously, I could go on – which aren’t typically found to that level in individual schools.

That meant that, for example, as we headed towards closure in the week of, you know, the 13th and onwards of October, we were issuing quite specialist guidance to schools about handling health and safety, about handling safeguarding incidents, about their responsibilities through what was heading our way, about HR as well, for example, and about continuity of learning. So, you know, we had specialists who were able to give that kind of advice.

Lead 8: I’m just going to stop you there. You said from 13 October. I think you probably meant 13th March?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, I’m sorry I keep doing this. 13 March, thank you, 2020.

Lead 8: So that’s one of the economies of scale, is concentration of specialists at this centre.

Sir Jon Coles: Yes.

Lead 8: And what’s the – you said there were three.

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, so the second is sort of capacity. So we had more ability, I think, just in terms of volume of skills and specialists at the centre, to take on a range of issues, get ahead of them, provide advice to schools, make sure that – you know, the heads were simply told “If you do it this way, it’ll be fine.” And so heads didn’t have to think about all those kinds of issues.

And then the network benefit, I think, is another example. So again, taking you back to that week of 13 March 2020, you know, we were able not only to say to schools “Right, we want your closure plans submitted to us by 13th”, you know, for whenever that comes. We were able to give them an awful lot of specialist support, but also to give them examples from other schools of “Here’s a plan that somebody else has produced. Here’s the best example of this issue being tackled well in schools.”

And so that benefit of being a big network of 10,000 adults and 50,000-odd children and young people meant that we could rapidly share learning across the trust. So I think if you took those benefits together of capacity, capability, and the wider network, it meant that we were just able to provide much faster, much more comprehensive, much more expert support to our schools than we were seeing happen in much of the rest of the country, where schools might be in a very small trust, where, you know, they were collaborating well but they just didn’t have central capacity in that way. Or in local authority-maintained schools, in an awful lot of local authorities where the ability of that authority to support schools had declined very sharply over the previous sort of ten years, partly because lots of schools had left local authorities and joined trusts, but partly also because of budget cuts to local authorities and so on.

So it became very obvious to us at the centre, and particularly to our heads, that they were just getting a very different level of support from United Learning than their neighbouring schools and colleagues were getting. And often, you know, our heads, and we, generally, were trying to be as generous as possible in sharing advice and making sure that, you know, templates or, you know, detailed advice about how to do things was just being shared with other people who wanted it, but obviously communicating constantly with our heads.

Lead 8: I’m sure we’ll come back to this, but you’ve – in the course of that answer, you’ve talked about what you were providing to schools in the lead-up to 18 March. Were you doing that because you had been given information by government or given a steer by government that you should be doing that? Or was that something you initiated yourself?

Sir Jon Coles: No, that was something we initiated ourselves. So from, you know, early March, we were starting to meet and discuss Covid as a specific, big discrete issue, starting to communicate in a dedicated way with our schools about Covid and the handling of it. From 10 March onwards, we were starting to communicate really on a daily basis about what things we could see coming down the track, and, you know, on 10th, 11 March, we were saying to schools that “Look, we can see that schools are going to close in the near future”, and I don’t think that was based on anything other than common sense, really, and appreciation of what was coming.

Lead 8: Forgive me for interrupting you. I think you may be speaking a little too fast.

Sir Jon Coles: I apologise.

Lead 8: I think, in fact, you’ve slowed down slightly, but maybe if we can just keep an eye on that.

I think you’re in the middle of a very important point, so I’m sorry to have interrupted you.

Sir Jon Coles: No, no.

Lead 8: But I think what you’re saying is, it was apparent to you schools would close –

Sir Jon Coles: Yes.

Lead 8: – so you, as it were, got on with providing.

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right. And we could see that there were some issues that schools were starting to face. Children, you know, increasingly having to self-isolate in a couple of cases, numbers of staff having to self-isolate. And so we were giving HR advice to schools about how to handle the things that were coming, and we were giving safeguarding advice because we could see that the question of how to handle safeguarding issues was going to be different in the future. We started giving continuity of learning advice, and in that week, we started running webinars for our schools on how to provide remote education.

We went back to the department in that week on about children on free school meals? And will it be okay for – you know, will you be supporting people to provide vouchers in place of the free school meals?” Because that seems like the obvious solution to that problem.

And yes, all of that was self-initiated. It wasn’t directed from outside the department – from outside the organisation by the department, and it was obviously, in part, us also listening carefully to heads and hearing their questions. And as we asked them to plan, looking to support their planning but also looking to make sure we were responding to issues as they were coming up from

schools. And I guess we’d just, as I think was correct,

considered it to be our job to plan for something that

looked to be a likely risk.

Lead 8: And was there any sort of steer like that coming from

government that you were aware of being provided to

local authorities, for example, or any sort of steer

“This is what schools should be doing now”, or …?

Sir Jon Coles: No. So in terms of preparation for closure, I mean, to

be honest, I’ve read in Gavin Williamson’s statement

that he says that the department hadn’t done any

planning by this point for school closure because their

priority was keeping schools open. I almost fell off my March and asked the question “What will you be doing 13 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.

But we had received no direction, as apparently the

Department for Education was waiting for a direction

from Number 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.

Lead 8: Sir Jon, I’m going to move on, then, to ask you some questions about examinations. I’m going to come at the end of your evidence to ask you more about what happened in your schools, but I want to start with asking you about your insight into government decision making and then return, perhaps, to the more granular picture.

I think it’s right that when the closure of schools was announced on 18 March. It was also announced that secondary school examinations wouldn’t be going ahead. And I assume to you it became apparent at that point that some sort of equivalent approach to assessment would have to be taken?

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah. So I was surprised, and I expressed that surprise to our heads on the 18th when exams were cancelled. And although we’d been preparing for schools to close, there’d been strong messaging about exams carrying on right up until that point. And obviously, the decision to cancel exams strongly signalled to us that the period of school closure was likely to be long.

So from the 18th onwards, I started to express some concern about what the department was doing. By the 20th, I said to our heads I wasn’t reassured by what I was hearing about how this was going to be done. And on the 22nd I said I thought it sounded unsatisfactory, and I contacted Andrew McCully, the Director General of Schools, effectively my successor in the department, to say – you know, to offer support in thinking about exams.

So very early that became a worry.

Lead 8: And I think it’s right, before I go any further, that you do have experience in the field of examinations, it is something that you know something about?

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah. So – and I’ll try not to be too technical. I’m conscious that it’s very easy to plunge into lots of details in this. But yes, I was the director responsible for qualifications in the department for three years. So I had oversight of GCSE and A-levels in that time. I was responsible for our relationship with the then QCA and, you know, my team and I were responsible for setting up Ofqual and taking it out of QCA whilst I was in that role, so I think that’s –

Lead 8: Sorry, forgive me, I didn’t mean to cut across you. I just wanted to ask you to pause.

So you weren’t coming at this issue just from the perspective of a concerned chief executive of a big trust; is that correct?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s correct. And I think it was – I mean, all the people in the department and Ofqual were fully aware of that background as well. So when I was talking to them, obviously I was talking to them in a professional capacity in my current role, but also as somebody who had done these jobs in the past and worked with a number of them on these issues.

Lead 8: And I think what happened was that there was a consultation about the potential way forward for replacing examination grades, and a model was proposed as to how an assessment would be arrived at for children who couldn’t sit their GCSEs or A-level examinations; is that right?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right, yes.

Lead 8: And when you saw that model, and I think this was in and around 28 April 2020, did you have concerns about it?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes. So I had concerns, actually, before the guidance was – the draft guidance for consultation was published. So I attended a meeting on 27 March on behalf of the Confederation of School Trusts with Ofqual, which was a stakeholder meeting they were having, and probed a little bit what they were thinking and expressed some concern back to colleagues in CST about what they were proposing. And when the Ofqual consultation document was produced on 3 April, I quite quickly felt that what they were proposing was, you know, just what I was worried about, really, and – yes, and so started writing a paper then by mid-April to respond to that consultation on behalf of the wider group of trusts.

Lead 8: And I’m going to ask you, please, if you can explain in language that people who are not experts in this field, which obviously includes me, will understand about what the concern – what your concern was about the model that was being proposed as to how these children would be assessed.

Sir Jon Coles: I’ll do my best.

So, sort of taking a step back, the big issue, I think, is that it didn’t take sufficient account of fairness to individual young people. That’s the core issue. It prioritised the need to avoid grade inflation at a national level, which is, in any normal year, a hugely important thing, in my view. And obviously, having been involved in setting up Ofqual, I would think that, for a range of reasons we can obviously discuss.

In this year, though, the position we’d put forward as a CST was: there has to be some leniency, you have to allow there to be some grade inflation in this year in order to avoid unfairness to individual young people. And fundamentally, the reason for that is completely non-technical. It is that we’re in March and April 2020. They’ve stopped going to school in March 2020. Exams don’t happen until May and June 2020 and the future is not fixed. We can’t know how well each individual child is going to do. If they work really hard between March and May and if they get a paper that falls well for them, they’ll do better than if they don’t work very hard in the next two weeks and the paper doesn’t fall well for them.

So it’s reasonable for teachers to think: well, this child would get a B on a good day but might only get a C on a less good day, might even only get a D if it went badly.

So that’s the sort of fundamental point. Lots of young people would be uncertain in this sort of wide range, sometimes wide range, and yet this is a hugely consequential thing for them. So if they drop a grade at GCSE, it might mean they can’t get into the sixth form or do the apprenticeship that they want to do. They might have to retake an English or maths GCSE. At A-level they might not get into their first choice university.

The only way to make sure that there’s no grade inflation nationally is to take a harsh view of lots of those borderline cases and, in the end, to overgrade quite a lot of children and undergrade an equally large number of children in a way that preserves the national distribution but is not fair to individuals.

If I could try as untechnically as I can to turn to this idea of an algorithm which became central to this debate.

Lead 8: Yes, so I think we might need to lay a foundation before we go on.

Sir Jon Coles: Okay, yeah.

Lead 8: So the model that was proposed incorporated an algorithm that would have – well, if you want to explain the impact it would have. So let me start with something really basic. Would a teacher assess a child and say “I think this child will get a C” and the algorithm would moderate that, or was a different approach being proposed?

Sir Jon Coles: So for all, a different approach, really. So all teachers were asked to say what grade would the child or young person have got, but they were also asked to produce a rank order across their school of which – who was the highest achieving, who was the lowest achieving. Everybody ranked in order. And then what this model did was essentially predict for every school, if we’re talking about A-level, how many would have got an A, how many would have got an A star, how many would have got a B, and so on. Based only on historic data. So how well did children in this school normally do, adjusted a little bit for the prior attainment of the young people.

So if in this school, on average, across, you know, recent history with a bit of adjustment, five would have got an A star, six would have got an A, seven would have got a B, and so on, then what the Ofqual proposal was, was that we would then take the – we would produce that model, say how many grades each school gets, and then we take the rank order that the school has given us and we give the first five in this example an A star, the next six an A, the next seven a B, and so on. That’s how it was decided.

So effectively, the grades the teachers had given in most cases were simply discarded, and this model was put in place, using the rank order and the historic information about school performance.

Now, the thing about this is, that could only conceivably be a fair thing to do if the results of individual schools are quite stable over time, if you can accurately say, “Well, yes, there would have been five A stars in this school, that’s right, always are, always will be.”

That isn’t right, isn’t true. And the paper I sent to Ofqual in the end uses their own data from their own website just to point out to them that it isn’t true. There are very wide variations from year to year, just ordinarily, in the number of children getting an A star or an A, or at GCSE a 7 or a 5 or a 4, right across the country. It’s perfectly, perfectly normal for there to be quite a number of schools where there’s a 10 percentage point swing from one year to the next. Some are up, some are down.

And the thing is, you can’t tell in advance which is going to be which. And the model discards the fact that there is that year-to-year randomness of the 10-point swing either way.

So, you know, there will be schools where you would get a five-pupil increase in the number of As, let’s say, and there will be schools where you get a 5 percentage point decrease. The model discards all of that and gives them all the modelled number and treats the modelled number as if it’s right, and the people who would have added to 5 as overgrading and the people who would have taken away 5 as undergrading, even though they could have been perfectly accurate in what they were saying, leaving aside obviously that we can’t really know, even at the individual level.

So this means that, later on, there became a lot of discussion about outliers. And it is true that there was a particularly acute issue where, for example, if a school historically had always had two children getting a U and two children get an E, the model would tell them that their bottom two were getting a U and their next bottom two were getting an E, even if, in this unusual year, all of them were going to get a B or a C or better, in other words, all of them were performing very highly. So you’ve got these particularly acute outlying examples where, you know, young people were dropping three or four grates from where everybody would have expected them to be.

But that isn’t actually the biggest issue. The biggest issue is that even on Ofqual’s own estimation after the fact, only 60% of modelled grades would have been correct, which is to say that 40% of grades would have been wrong on average across the system.

That is, at GCSE, 2 million grades would have been wrong. And that was a known fact by Ofqual on the day they wanted to go ahead with this model. A million would have been overgraded and a million would have been undergraded, roughly speaking. So we would have had a nationally representative distribution but at the cost of millions of grades being incorrect.

Now, sorry to go on, but if you were a young person doing ten GCSEs on this basis, the chances that – if all of those are GCSEs are independently 60% likely to be correct, the chance that all ten are correct is 0.6%. In other words, 99.4% of children across the country, on Ofqual’s own data, would have been given at least one incorrect grade.

Now, I thought that was profoundly unfair, because these things are consequential for children and young people.

Lead 8: I’m going to come back and ask you about the consequences, because I think that’s something we might – you know, it’s important to get out what the consequences were.

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: I just want – before we get there, though, I just want to understand a bit more about your attempts to try to persuade other people that this might be a problem. So first of all, I don’t – you didn’t have any difficulty, did you, in being able to access and speak to people in Ofqual or government about this, did you?

Sir Jon Coles: No. And, I mean, one of the very frustrating things was it seemed like we were having really good conversations, in which they were understanding the issues and taking them away and wanting to do something about it. So I wrote this paper. We submitted it as a Confederation of School Trusts joint paper on 28 April, and asked the director responsible in Ofqual for a meeting. He responded on 30 April. At the same time, we copied it to DfE officials and to the minister. And whilst the minister said – or the minister’s office said, “Look he’s got an awful lot on but, you know, I’ll make sure he’s aware”, we actually had a rapid response from the DfE director responsible.

Lead 8: Let me – sorry, let me help. I think we get to the point, I think, Sir Jon, where you wrote a letter. And let me bring it up on screen so that you can see it.

This is INQ000514574.

And I think we can see that you had met him –

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: – at a Department for Education advisory group.

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: And you set out in this letter – I won’t go through every paragraph of it – but I think did you essentially set out what you have described to the Inquiry what the problems were?

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah. So effectively, I’m saying to Ofqual: there’s no way of doing what you’re proposing to do in a way that’s basically fair to young people.

Lead 8: And if we go over the page, please, I think first of all on the first paragraph, you set out the fact that you have huge sympathy for the fact this is a really difficult task to do.

Sir Jon Coles: Mm.

Lead 8: And then you set out –

Sir Jon Coles: And, you know, there’s a good reason why we have exams: because it really is the only fair way of making sure this is equitable between young people, and we’ve just been told exams can’t exist. So, at some level, their job is impossible. The question is: how are we as fair as possible to the young people affected?

And particularly, I guess, I’m trying to emphasise in this letter and the following paper that’s attached, how do we avoid detriment to young people? Because this year, in particular, the costs of undergrading somebody are huge compared to the costs of overgrading somebody. You know, if you’re undergraded, you miss your apprenticeship or your sixth form or university or whatever. If you’re overgraded, well, look, that’s undesirable in the overall scheme of things, but, frankly, not the end of the world in a moment where we’ve got, you know, a global pandemic.

Lead 8: And were you contending for unmoderated teacher-assessed grades going forward, or had you proposed something different to that?

Sir Jon Coles: No, I – I think I and everyone in education being fair about this would acknowledge that it was almost certain that what were called the centre-assessed grades, the grades that teachers would put forward, unmoderated, would be inflated. And, you know, there’s a long history of that being the case through English education that, when teachers are marking things, they’ll tend to be lenient to their own students where it counts, and so that is an issue and that action should be taken, as far as possible, to avoid unreasonable grade inflation and introduce as much fairness as possible, but, as I say, recognising there has to be some leniency to deal with the actual uncertainty of the situation.

Lead 8: So trying to characterise your approach, were you trying to find a sort of middle ground or a route through –

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah, so –

Lead 8: – this problem?

Sir Jon Coles: In what I was putting forward, was to put up forward something which was practical, which was doable, that, you know, having sat in that seat in my past, I’d have thought I could do this and was, you know, realistically going to introduce more fairness, rather than less, into the system without introducing too much risk that we start disadvantaging significant numbers of young people in an unfair way.

Lead 8: All right. I’ll come back to that when we come to the final outcome of all of this, but just sticking with this letter for a moment. I think that you set out there in the third – the paragraph that begins “Second, in disregarding”. So I think, is this the point that you’ve just made, that this was a model that effectively set aside in large part what teachers would have assessed children to be?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, that’s right. And Ofqual make the argument that teachers are better at rank ordering children than they are assessing them against an objective standard, which is – there are an awful lot of caveats to that, but that is broadly correct. When you’re trying to do it across an enormous number of children, for example GCSE maths in an eight-form entry school, you know, 240 children, getting your rank order perfectly correct is essentially impossible.

But leaving that aside, Ofqual wanted to say: look, rank orders we can believe; CAGs we just can’t believe, and we’ll only use them when we have to. So my view was, that was a mistake because you were discarding some really important information in just jettisoning them and not thinking about how to use them better.

Lead 8: And just if we drop down, please, to the paragraph that begins:

“I should stress … my concern is only fairness to students. With no accountability measures for schools this year, I don’t think I can be accused of ‘producer interest’.”

That could be a point that was made about a head teacher trying to intervene, or a chief executive trying to intervene in this way, that you would have an interest in trying to produce higher grades.

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah, and of course, in a normal year, that would be a legitimate thing to be concerned about. This was not a normal year. We weren’t going to have league tables. We weren’t going to have, you know, accountability measures. We weren’t going to be using these in Ofsted inspections, and so on. So I would like to think that I would have been entirely objective no matter what, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that somebody in my position putting forward that view would be doing so on the basis of their own interest, because I did not have an interest in this, other than wanting fairness for students.

Lead 8: I think if we go to the final page where you say, I think you reiterate again that you had been given a good deal of time by the Chief Regulator and that – again, reiterating that –

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: – your concern was fairness to children; is that right?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes.

Lead 8: I think if we go then please –

Sir Jon Coles: So this is right – that letter is right at the end of this process after I’d gone through really quite a lot of stages with Ofqual and the department, of talking to them, having meetings with them, and so on. So this is my letter to the Secretary of State in July, so some time through this process.

Lead 8: Yes.

And if we go, please, to INQ000514611.

I think, in fact, Sir Gavin Williamson made time to see you in order to discuss this; yes?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, that’s right.

Lead 8: So one assumes for someone who must have had huge demands on his time, he did make time to –

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: – to hear from you directly about what it is that you were worried about.

Have you had a chance to look at this note of the meeting?

Sir Jon Coles: Mm.

Lead 8: It sets out that you had explained that you thought the model was flawed from an accuracy point of view, and more so from a fairness point of view, and that when it came to the results season, the picture would look very difficult.

So, again, did you broadly explain the things that you have explained here to the Secretary of State?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes. So as untechnically as possible, really, to reiterate. And I should say that at various points in my discussion with Ofqual and with the department, they had appeared to recognise that what I was saying was correct. So there seemed to be substantial recognition that they had understood that the point we were making, which was “You can’t do the thing that you’re trying to do” had been taken on board and understood, and at various points, they’d promised to come back to me within a couple of weeks at one point, and so on. And so this had carried on for a couple of months. And ultimately, this point of escalation to the Secretary of State follows quite an extensive engagement with the department at senior levels, with Ofqual at senior levels, including with Sally Collier herself.

And I wrote to the Secretary of State, really, because we got to the point where I was sitting in a meeting with Sally Collier which I thought was to follow up “Right, what are we going to do about these concerns?” and she just said to me, “Well, look, this is what we’re doing. This is the decision. We need to go ahead now. I need your support for it.”

Which is pretty extraordinary when I’ve just spent a couple of months trying to explain to her and her team why, actually, it’s a fundamentally flawed aim.

So that was the point at which I wrote to the Secretary of State. I think he’d been briefed to some degree by his team. I explained to him briefly, really, that it’s not possible to accurately model the grades in the way that they’re doing, that they would be introducing serious unfairness for hundreds of thousands of young people, and that they were heading for disaster in August if they just carried on down this path.

Lead 8: And I think if we pick up from this note, and of course I emphasise it’s a note from the meeting, no one has signed it to say it’s accurate or anything, it sets out here:

“[The Secretary of State] concluded there wasn’t an immediately obvious and logical route that avoids all the problems … that there would be winners and losers, and that what he wants is to have a system that is as fair as possible, arising from a less than perfect situation. And that it should be backed up with a strong appeals system, and … autumn exams …”

I mean, did you agree with that: that there would be winners and losers, and that this really was the best that could be done in all of the difficulty that everyone faced?

Sir Jon Coles: No. And, I mean, interestingly – I mean, this is a very Civil Service note of a meeting. What Gavin Williamson actually said to me is, “Well, I think you might be right, Jon, but I think it’s too late now to do anything about it.”

So I think that summarises: acknowledged these concerns and agreed that the situation would be challenging.

He was firm that moderation was necessary. Well, moderation was necessary but that wasn’t what they were doing. They weren’t moderating teacher grades; they were discarding teacher grades.

There weren’t immediately clear fixes available. I think we did discuss some clear fixes which were available, and it was still possible at that moment for him to direct Ofqual to do something different – the point that I made in writing subsequently to his special adviser Jo Saxton as well. I didn’t advocate moving results day and never had.

So the suggestion that you could avoid all problems, that’s right, you can’t avoid all problems, because there must be some give in a system. You have to have some grade inflation if you’re going to be as fair as possible.

The system that they had introduced certainly would guarantee winners and losers, but they guaranteed equal numbers of winners and losers, and it was perfectly possible to have a system where you had more winners and many fewer losers, and that was the point that I was trying to get across to them.

Lead 8: Obviously the point was reached where, I think, it’s – you’re – the model that you proposed wasn’t accepted, and the exam – or, not exam, but the grade that was produced was based on this model for both GCSEs and A-levels; correct?

Can you just explain what happened, then, when those results came out, what it was that – what happened to the grades in terms of the extent to which they had been downgraded from teacher assessments?

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah. So, I mean, there were multiple different kind of public reactions to these. I mean, the first thing to say is that it had just happened in Scotland already.

Lead 8: Yes.

Sir Jon Coles: So the exam system had fallen over in Scotland and they’d eventually decided to go back to teacher grades. Now, for reasons that, you know, I think somebody else will have to explain, Ofqual were convinced that their model was in some way better than the Scottish model. Now, actually, it was – I mean, you could make that argument, but the idea that it would be more publicly acceptable I think was totally implausible, because Scotland’s was a more generous model than England’s.

So on the day that results came out, there was, I think, very predictably, uproar, because schools felt that children had been treated unfairly, a lot of children felt that they’d been treated unfairly. The outlying worst cases where children who might have been expecting to get a B or a C got an E or a U, really hit the headlines. And these were things that were really impossible for anyone to try to defend. The government tried to put in this so-called triple lock fix before the results came out. That was widely condemned as invalid, though I think it would have helped a few people potentially.

Lead 8: Can I just ask you to pause there.

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: Why wouldn’t it help to say, “Well, look, if you’ve been – you didn’t get the grades you wanted, you can appeal”? Why isn’t that a fair solution to the problem?

Sir Jon Coles: Well, I put forward to the Secretary of State’s special adviser in mid-July, I said to her: look, at this point, there are three possibilities for the DfE. One is DfE lets it run as it is, and I think this is the slow motion car crash option. I call it that, and I think that’s what we got, the DfE just let it run and we got the slow motion car crash.

Second option, which I thought was the best option, but would have been a politically brave option, which was that the Secretary of State at that point could direct Ofqual and say, “Actually, in these circumstances, I want you to do this different thing.”

And the third option was to have a mitigation strategy. And I felt at that point that an appeals option – you know, we had, in our consultation document, put forward a significant number of potential improvements and mitigations, right back in April. And it felt by this time as though they’d just been simply ignored. There was a set of things that could have been done in April which had been ignored.

By July, I felt that appeals and the appeals system and the thinking and the development around that was about, you know, the best option if they weren’t prepared to direct Ofqual.

Lead 8: Yes.

Sir Jon Coles: The problem with that, of course, with any appeals system, is that trying to build it, and particularly trying to build it from results day onwards, was very difficult at that moment. It would have taken a lot of resource and time. A lot of anxiety was being generated by young people who thought they’d missed university places and felt that was unfair. It created uncertainty for universities as well. So I think they ended in a position where, having published these results, got an enormous backlash, realised they were in, kind of, PR difficulty, they probably had no option other than to say, “Right, we’re just going to have to resort to the CAGs and to the assessed grades that teachers have submitted.”

Lead 8: So that – I think I’m going to fast forward – that’s where it, I think, ended up; is that correct? That it was the centre-assessed grades –

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: – that became …

And in terms of your assessment of that as the outcome of this whole process, did you think that that was a satisfactory outcome?

Sir Jon Coles: No, because I thought that you could have had a better outcome than that, which would have been fairer. I thought that if they’d done the things we’d suggested they did in April, about supporting schools to do this differently, about creating different incentives, about setting up a proper quality assurance process, and so on, they could have got a better result.

If they’d used the alternative approach to including information from CAGs as well as a statistical process alongside it, that also could have delivered a better and fairer result.

I think we can see in those results that there are visible unfairnesses, so there’s more inflation in independent schools of grades. There’s particularly more inflation in independent sixth form colleges, also called “crammers”, with some examples of really truly outlandish grading having been accepted. We can see that there are – you know, fee colleges in some cases have got disproportionate increase in grade and so on.

So all of these things could have been improved upon and a fairer result achieved for young people.

Lead 8: I’m asking you all of these questions, Sir Jon, to really sort of come to a final point which I hope to develop a bit further, about what this said to you about decision making within government about children during the pandemic, and what was problematic about it, or whether there are broader lessons that can be extrapolated from this?

Sir Jon Coles: Mm … yes. And, I mean, some of these I think relate to other things that we may come to talk about in due course as well.

Lead 8: Yes, we are.

Sir Jon Coles: I mean, firstly, I feel strongly that there wasn’t sufficient thought given to the starting point of: what is the fairest thing we can do for young people? How do we avoid, in this very difficult situation, not of their making, detriment to individual young people?

And that wasn’t the starting point. The starting point was: how do we avoid grade inflation?

And I think the reason for that was that that had been an entrenched plank of policy for such a very long time that government had, you know, made strenuous efforts over many years to remove grade inflation from the system, and that had become, you know, almost a fixed point of belief.

So nobody was questioning that as the starting point and the objective.

I think that there’s a sort of strong element of groupthink here, of people thinking: this is a thing we can do. And once they’d decided on that, or alighted upon it – which I think they did very early, I think they did in March – that this a thing that we can do – before they even produced their first consultation document – they stopped thinking about: is there a better alternative? Is there a fairer alternative? It became a doable thing which achieved the objective. So I think that was an issue.

I think there’s a culture in government of people digging in and looking to repel borders, of saying: this is our policy, and everyone else, you know, we need to explain why this is wrong. Lines to take kind of culture.

I think in this case maybe it was exacerbated by the fact that, back in 2012, there’d been a sort of big row about examinations, particularly about the grading of English GCSE, where Ofqual had come under huge fire from the whole of the schools system, and had really dug in and defended its position, and strongly – you know, part of its culture was the belief that: we’re the regulator, we’re right, we have the entitle – we’re entitled to say what the standard is and we should push back against other people trying to affect that.

And I think that was part of it as well.

I think the fact that there was a lack of expertise in the Department for Education, a lack of real educational expertise in the people dealing with this issue. You know, people who were bright, well motivated, hard working, but simply didn’t have a background in education, and particularly not in qualifications, which is, as, you know, we’ve seen, a technical area.

And so there wasn’t confidence in the department, really, to ask the right questions, to challenge Ofqual in the right way. And those things, I think, were important.

I think, finally, there was a real lack of leadership, actually, amongst senior civil servants and leaders in Ofqual, and at the political level. There was not a sense of “We are going to get this right for young people come what may.” And even in the statements that I’ve read on behalf of the department, on behalf of politicians, on behalf of the Chief Regulator, it’s an extraordinary story of buck passing and of people saying, “Not me, guv. You know, I did the best I could in the circumstances.” And relatively little, even now, reflection about how they could have done a better job and avoided an outcome which we all agreed at the outset would be a bad one.

Lead 8: Sir Jon, I’m going to move on, then, if I may, to ask you about your involvement in the recovery group as well.

Sir Jon Coles: Mm.

Lead 8: Is it right that that was a group of people who the Department for Education arranged to provide advice to it, about how to help education and schools recover after the initial – well, in the initial stages of the pandemic?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, exactly so. So pull together mid-April, call the recovery group, and in practice dealing with, you know, the issues of the day as much as, you know, the future of recovery, as it were.

Lead 8: I’m going to go straight to some documents that might help throw some light on the approach that was taken to this. And if, perhaps, we could go to INQ000649527. I just want to use this to ask you about some of the matters that you have set out in your witness statement.

So we can see this is an email of 22 April, and if we could just scroll down, please. Thank you.

We can see in the second paragraph that you are asking questions about whether or not the recovery group can have access to the scientific advice that was being provided to the Department for Education. And if we look at the second paragraph, you were saying that you would like it so that – because you thought you needed to understand it if you were going to provide advice.

And I think if we just scroll down a little bit, please, we can see – sorry, if you carry on scrolling down. This may not matter if I can’t find it because you might be able to remember. Thank you.

So I think you were also asking, at the start of the next page – you also wanted, I think, to understand more about what the aims and objectives of the government were. And I think as well you refer there to the fact that you had a confidentiality agreement with government, as well.

Sir Jon Coles: Mm.

Lead 8: So, standing back from that email, does it encapsulate some of the issues that you were facing as a member of this recovery group in being able to advise government?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes. I mean, this is only five or so days in, I think, from the first meeting.

Lead 8: Yes.

Sir Jon Coles: And so this is very much me sort of thinking this would be a very helpful thing for them to do and that they would probably be willing to do that, because they’d asked us to advise, and if we’re to advise, we need to understand what is it you’re trying to achieve, and what is the basis on which you’re making judgments? And so that’s really what this email is asking for.

And to be honest, I don’t understand even now why that became a problem.

Lead 8: And was that because, for example, you – I mean, were you being asked to help at this stage to provide a strategy for reopening schools, for example, or did that come later?

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah. I mean, so the premise of the group really was: we are here to advise on recovery, so we recognise this is a very difficult moment, schools are closed, and we’re working on lots of things live at the moment – how are we going to improve remote education, what are we going to do about, you know, the vulnerable, et cetera, et cetera, but really the focus of the group was to be on the future and how we would recover from this situation.

And it was already clear that we might potentially be asked some quite difficult, practical questions about: well, how would we reopen? Would this model be better than that model? And in order to answer that question properly, I mean, obviously, we can advise on what’s the easiest thing for us to do, but whether – and I think this became an issue over time – whether what we’re seeing as a practical thing that can be done is consistent with what you think needs to be done in order to suppress the virus, you know, obviously we need more information than we currently have in order to advise properly on that. So really, it was in order to make sure we could give useful advice, really.

Lead 8: And did this become – did this problem persist, that the recovery group wasn’t being provided with scientific evidence or the data that government was working from?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, and I mean, as we may see in other things in this pack, you know, we were asked to respond very reactively to pieces of guidance and – pieces of guidance which may change extremely quickly for reasons which were completely invisible to us.

You know, sometimes, you know, over a period of time, as we’ll see in some of these documents, on occasion we were told that secondary schools would open, then that they wouldn’t open, and then they were back on the table, as I think one of the documents puts it.

So we couldn’t see why any of this was happening. We couldn’t understand what was the basis for decisions that were being made or not made, and it made it very difficult to give good advice.

Lead 8: Can I – maybe if I just ask you to pause there, and if we just go to, I think, the document you were referring to, INQ000649534. And I think – forgive me, I think we need to go to page 5 first, which is the start.

So I think we can see this is an email of 9 May, and this suggests in the first paragraph that it’s being put to you that secondary schools – it says:

“… secondary is now back on the table for the first of June with an ambition for ‘some face to face contact to supplement online learning …’”

And then the rest of the email sets out some of the things that government were thinking about, and then it says:

“I would be really grateful if you had any thoughts that leapt out for you on this [on these] initial propositions, or is there something we have missed.”

Then it goes on to say:

“Clearly this is all [very much] up in the air …”

So is that what you mean, that these quite potentially, I suppose, quite significant decisions being put to you in this sort of email correspondence.

Sir Jon Coles: Yes.

Lead 8: So not a sort of worked up “Here’s the policy we’re thinking of promulgating. Could you – you know, could we have your best ideas on it?”

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah. And I was fine with that, in principle. I thought it was really appropriate for the department to ask us questions at an early stage of thinking and to get our input to that, so I don’t object to that in principle.

I guess the point from the earlier email would be – and I suppose this is partly me having been a policymaker for a long time – you know, I always thought the job of the policymaker was obviously to sort of balance interests and to try and understand what was the legal advice telling us, what was the scientific advice telling us, what would be practical in schools, what would this mean for individual children, what would it mean for members of staff, and so on, and try and synthesise that into a useful proposition about: okay, what is it that we ought to do, then?

And on this point, I felt we just weren’t well placed to do that, because we didn’t have access to an absolutely essential piece of the jigsaw, which is some scientific advice about – now – as I read it now, you know, some of what we then experienced of rapid changes of direction and government suddenly veering off to do something different seems to have been – and, I mean, I think this was clear at points – seems to have been as much of a surprise to the department and to officials in the department, I think probably to ministers in the department, as it was to us.

You know, sometimes it seems clear that Number 10 just decided to do something on the basis of “We’re not clear what, but presumably, some changed scientific advice” and a piece of work which the department had in fact spent quite a long time working up and on which we’d invested a lot of time advising was sort of thrown away and something quite different put in its place.

Lead 8: If we could just please go to page 1 of this email.

And I think this is you just having a private word, and I think just – is this a sort of attempt to say, “This isn’t – this sort of approach isn’t working” or “This is difficult”?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes. I think in this particular case, we were – the day before – we’d reached the day before a scheduled announcement, and there were some completely different models in play of what ought to be done. And I suppose, as I say in this email, that raised my Civil Service antennae a bit. It’s a long time since I’ve been a civil servant. If you get to the day before an announcement and you’re not clear what you’re announcing, you need to pull the announcement. It’s a terrible idea to announce something that you haven’t thought through properly, and if you’ve got such completely different options still on the table on the day before you’re announcing something, really that’s telling you you’re not ready to announce it.

Lead 8: And I’m going to just ask you, then, if we could come to I think the final bit of some of this email correspondence, which is INQ000649536. And I think, first of all, Sir Jon, if we note the time of this email. You were writing it at 1.45 in the morning.

Sir Jon Coles: Uh-huh. I hadn’t noticed that, but yes.

Lead 8: And if we look at what you say, you start by saying:

“I don’t know what to say, really. This isn’t your fault, but I keep giving advice and commenting on documents, being ignored and getting no feedback. Does any of the advice from the Advisory Group actually make it to Ministers?”

And if we scroll down a little bit, I think at about the midpoint of that email, it says:

“We have had multiple meetings in which no meaningful information was shared and then a frantic rush at the last minute with (apparently) multiple policy changes in a very short period of time (though we had to guess what they are from the text) …”

Then I think you say:

“… none of [it] tested on the Advisory Group, and in so far as we had opportunity to comment, we advised against what was proposed.”

And then if we just go down to the bottom, please. I think you say – forgive me, it’s at the bottom of page 12. You say:

“I’ve never heard the leaders of the large trusts so concerned and so negative as they were at [the] meeting earlier this week. I think the Department is in serious danger of losing friends and needs to take some care with the communication of this.”

Forgive me, I’ve got the wrong page. I’m looking at the page number on my page, as opposed to the page –

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, it’s right next page. I’ve got it here.

Lead 8: But you’ve got it. Thank you. I’m so grateful.

Again, does that encapsulate some of the concerns that you had about the way policy was being developed at this point in time?

Sir Jon Coles: I think so, yes. That was me at my most sunny and cheerful. It was – I mean, as I say in this note, you know, and it wasn’t just me, you know, we were doing all we could to lean in, as it were, and help the department and give them useful advice. And, you know, there were people who were putting a huge amount of effort into doing this alongside their day job, and nobody was expecting, you know, particular thanks, and nobody was expecting that their advice would always be taken, but these frustrations that we simply don’t know what happened to it, there was no feedback on it. It wasn’t clear whether it had gone anywhere.

There was a random last-minute change of policy, and after we’d spent a long time commenting on something, suddenly that wasn’t the policy any more, and there was no explanation as to why it wasn’t the policy any more. You know, it’s frustrating to be on something called an advisory group and for it to feel as though your advice is going into a black hole and influencing nothing and poor decisions are being made.

Lead 8: That’s what I wanted to ask you about, because obviously, if you were – you might feel neglected or that you weren’t being acknowledged or given feedback, but – and that was the question I was going to ask you. Did that – did you think that mattered, though, when you saw the outcome of the decision making?

Sir Jon Coles: Well, look, I think, you know, it wasn’t about me, and I think all of us working on the group, you know, it was very clear it wasn’t about us. You know, we were trying to help as, you know, millions of people across the country were doing their best in very difficult circumstances. It was nothing special about that, in the circumstances.

But when you put quite a lot to effort into saying, “Look these things just won’t work in practice, and we’ll need to do it this way in order for it to work”, or “There’s a better way of achieving that aim, and it’s this”, or just giving them some words which would land better with your peers, and then them reverting to the version that you told them wouldn’t work or won’t land well with your peers, and then seeing your peers disheartened and upset and feeling like bad decisions are being made, you know. And what I’m reporting about, the despondent large trusts’ chief executives, these are not a despondent group of people, they’re a get-up-and-go group of people, and just feeling as though the decisions that were coming from government were making their lives unnecessarily difficult.

And so, as you say, if what was coming out was excellent in ways that we hadn’t considered or thought of, perfect. But actually, what was coming out had all the flaws that we were identifying and was being received in that way by our colleagues.

Lead 8: And are you able to offer any insight as to what the problem was? Because people were reaching out to you from the Department for Education. They were asking you for your insights. So where did the – where do you think the impediment lay, or what was the problem in the situation?

Sir Jon Coles: Well, I mean, some of what I say in my covering statement is about the very visible centralisation of government in this period, that it did feel as though decisions were made outside the department in sometimes capricious ways by people who did not understand the issues that they were dealing with and had simply decided to overrule the advice they were given, or possibly to ignore it.

So I did at times feel for the servants who I think – you know, particularly more junior civil servants working extremely hard and diligently to try to pull together good quality advice, really listen to the external advice they were getting and pull together something which reflected that but also achieved the policy objectives and, you know, was balancing different views and different interests and so on, only to find, you know, that for no reason that anybody could really explain, that idea had simply been overturned and something else was now the decision.

So I think in these moments, that was the most significant single factor: the over-centralisation of decision making. The fact that, you know, as we’ve heard, the department didn’t feel empowered to do its own planning, even at the outset, and had to wait to be asked. Because, you know, whilst that is a failure of leadership in the department, it doesn’t come from a clear blue sky. You know, this learned helplessness has come to be because of an extended period of over-centralisation of government, because people are waiting to be told by Number 10 and by the Treasury far too often, and there’s a loss of cabinet government really, in this country in a way that, you know – I’d really tried, once I’d left the department, to sort of stay away, really, from the department for quite a long time, to, you know, not be treading on my successors’ toes, as it were.

So, coming back into this at this moment, of course it was a particularly difficult moment, but it did feel like there was a very visible decline in departmental capability compared to what I’d been used to, and a decline in the ability of the department to set its own agenda, compared to what I’d been used to.

So, I mean, I think there are other factors as well, but in these points, I think that was very significant.

Lead 8: If I could just ask you to wait one second.

Sorry, I was just checking the time.

Can I move on to ask you about a different point that you’ve made in your evidence, and this – it’s – I think these are two things that are interrelated to each other.

I think you suggest in your evidence that you had concerns that there wasn’t a sufficiently positive message being conveyed about the need to reopen schools and about the circumstances in which schools could be reopened; is that correct?

Sir Jon Coles: Mm, yes.

Lead 8: And was that a problem that you saw operating at different levels, as it were?

Sir Jon Coles: Mm. So I certainly felt that that in government, there wasn’t a clear enough articulation of the value and benefit of reopening schools, and I thought that wasn’t clearly enough stated.

As early as 18 March, just to make this point, I had sent round to our heads a simple graph from the Italian experience – which obviously had been going on through, you know, the previous months and six weeks – of mortality in different age groups in Italy, which showed us that nobody under the age of 18 had died of Covid-19 virus, and virtually all the mortality was in older adults. And obviously my purpose in sending this to our heads was to say, “Look, please reassure children and parents that they are not here at significant risk. Please also reassure your staff that they are not in significant risk.” Obviously, we know we do have some older staff and some vulnerable staff but, you know, for a young, healthy adult, this is not hugely risky, but particularly for children, this is not hugely risky.

And that messaging I thought was not clear enough. It wasn’t until August that Chris Whitty said, “There is more harm – there will be more harm to children from not attending school in September than there ever would be from contracting the virus.”

Now, he said that in August. Of course, that was also true in March, and we knew it to be true in March, but it doesn’t mean that it was the wrong decision. You know, I’m sure this is something the Inquiry will be looking at extremely carefully. I don’t know whether it was the right decision or not to close schools in March, but I understand why that was the decision. But I don’t think it should have taken until August for Chris Whitty, the health side, and the education side, to be saying in very clear and loud terms to the whole of the country: Look, the reason we’re closing schools is not because children are at risk. Children are not at risk. We’re closing schools in order to protect the wider population, at-risk people, the elderly, and to avoid damage to the NHS.

But that first part of the message, that children are not at risk, was not clear enough from government. And government did know well the harm that was being done to children by the closure of schools. It’s understood, this. And this was part of our discussion. But it wasn’t being loudly proclaimed that actually we want to get children back into schools as quickly as possible. And the decision making that then followed from government showed that they didn’t in fact prioritise – you know, Eat Out to Help Out came before school re – so some of this is – you know, I think these are very big issues, and I think it has affected – it is one of the things that continues to have impact today: that parents, children, and what’s happening with school attendance now, you know, is affected by the fact that we were not clear enough through this period that school is incredibly important. That school is an enormously important protective factor, that it matters particularly for the vulnerable, but it matters for all children. That it is good for children’s physical health and it’s good for their mental health. Being out of school is a bad thing and that they are much less at risk in school than out of school.

And I think that a lot of that messaging could have been much earlier and such stronger and would have supported the general social acceptance of the reopening of schools at the earliest opportunity.

Ms Dobbin: I’m going to pause there, Sir Jon.

I think my Lady, it has come to the short adjournment.

Lady Hallett: Certainly.

Sir Jon, I understand you are content to come back this afternoon?

The Witness: Yes, of course, my Lady. No problem.

Lady Hallett: I’m really grateful. Thank you very much. Very well, I shall return at 2.15.

(1.15 pm)

(The Short Adjournment)

(2.15 pm)

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, this is the continuation of the evidence of Sir Jon Coles.

Sir Jon, just before the short adjournment, I’d asked you some questions about government messaging around the return to school, and I just wanted to return, then, to a related issue that you set out in your witness statement which is about the role of unions in that, perhaps, messaging as well.

Can you just perhaps summarise what your concerns were about the position being taken by unions in relation to the reopening of schools?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, thank you. I suppose part of my concern about government leaving this vacuum of, you know, lack of kind of strong positive messages about the importance of children going back was that it did leave space for some very negative voices to fill that space. And the so-called Independent SAGE produced a report which was highly, I thought, alarmist about the health risks to young people and really not based in evidence at all. And I wrote to them in response to that, just sort of challenging a number of the things that they said.

And likewise, I thought that the teaching unions were overwhelmingly negative in a way which was not supported by the evidence or the facts about the risk to children and to staff, in general, of a return to schooling. And so I also wrote to the teaching unions to challenge some of that narrative, but also to suggest speaking and talking about the issues, and it felt as though government and the unions were simply talking past each other, really, on these issues, and I thought it may be helpful to have a conversation with them.

So I was very concerned that the messaging from the unions was unduly negative in a way that was unwarranted, was not in line with what our staff were saying to us in any way, and, you know, the generality of our staff – although, again, I had union reps writing to me, as we may discuss – and that this was very harmful to children.

Lead 8: And was the issue, as you saw it, really the lack of a government voice in that debate? Is that what made it more difficult to deal with?

Sir Jon Coles: I think that was important. I think the fact that government wasn’t clearly articulating the strong benefits of a return to school meant that voices like Independent SAGE, which had this, as far as I could see, wholly unwarranted argument that children were going to be at risk if they returned to school, when I think we were all very clear that children were much more at risk from not being in school than they were from the virus, I think it allowed that space to open up.

However, the unions were very proactively arguing that this was highly risky for their members and for children. And again, that wasn’t what the generality of our staff was saying to us, and it certainly wasn’t what we believed to be the truth based on, you know, the evidence that we could all see in front of us.

Lead 8: Do you accept that the unions had a legitimate role in arguing a case on behalf of their staff, that they might be at risk by the return to schools in September 2020?

Sir Jon Coles: Well, I certainly accept as a matter of principle that unions have a legitimate role in representing their members. That’s certainly the case. And that can be a hugely important voice in any sector, including in education.

However, I thought that amplifying voices, which suggested that children and young adults were in general at serious risk from the return to school was not what their staff was saying to us, certainly was not what our staff was saying to us about their attitude to the return to school, and was in danger of being seriously harmful to children.

Lead 8: So just trying to get to the core of what you objected to, was it – was what you were really taking issue with unions articulating a case that children were at risk rather than just, as it were, focusing on their members and their interests?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes. So, for example, in the message that union reps sent to me, which is in the pack as 649607, they quoted the so-called Independent SAGE group, including David King, and said that until there’s clear evidence that the conditions that they set out were met, schools shouldn’t reopen. And they said to me – this was based on one of the town hall meetings I held – so I held online so-called town hall meetings for all staff in which I talked to them through the pandemic, in which I talked to them about where we were, what we were doing, what was coming next, and I took questions from them online, as well. And I expressed the view that I wasn’t worried about the safety of my own children returning to school at that point in the year, and the union reps writing to me said, “This is not a widely shared feeling amongst our colleagues. It’s important that parents who rely on an important figurehead in education such as yourself to provide them with reassurance are being given such reassurance based on empirical evidence rather than instinct.”

So in my reply to them, I pointed out – sorry, am I jumping ahead?

Lead 8: Sorry, you are jumping ahead a little bit, because I’m going to help by putting your reply on the screen so that it’s a little easier to follow.

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah, thank you.

Lead 8: But I think from what you said, you’d had a meeting, you’d put forward your own views and there was correspondence which followed on from that?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right. So a group of some of the trade union reps from some of our schools had then written to me with this letter.

Lead 8: And I’m just going to bring up your reply to shortcut – so that it’s clear the sorts of issues that were being dealt with at this point in time.

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: INQ000649608.

I think we’ll be able to pick up from this what had been suggested to you in the correspondence. So I think that one of the issues that had been raised was this issue about if children were in bubbles of 15, they wouldn’t be able to see subject specialists.

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: And I think you were suggesting that that wasn’t an issue for primary school children; is that correct?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, so only primary – I mean, this was an extraordinary letter because I think it expressed views that we were not getting from our staff in general, our heads were not hearing from teachers, and so on. So, this point, they won’t see subject specialists, therefore, essentially, arguing that it’s not valuable for children to be in school, it’s a really extraordinary thing to say, because all we were talking about was primary school children returning to school, not secondary school children. And therefore, in general, primary school children are not taught by subject specialists. In general, they’re taught by their class teacher.

So that seemed like an entirely spurious argument designed to block or, you know, argue against returning to school, for a reason which had no validity.

Lead 8: Then I think in the second paragraph you deal with secondary schools. I think the suggestion being that they wouldn’t be going back until 15 June, which was something that one union had argued for; is that correct?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes.

Lead 8: And then I think we can see, secondly, one of their arguments was that Year 6 children and teenagers couldn’t socially distance in the street, therefore wouldn’t be able to socially distance in school, I assume, from the way you’ve replied; is that right?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right.

Lead 8: And then, I think, thirdly, we get to this point that you’ve just raised a few moments ago: that they were saying that what you were contending for was “instinct”; is that right?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes, so they argued that my saying that I wasn’t concerned about the risk to my children, who – incidentally, one of whom was about to return to school at this point, being a primary-age child – they described as “instinct”. But it wasn’t instinct; it was an evidence-based assessment of reality. And I suppose I’m just sort of quoting the evidence to support the view.

Lead 8: And then I think the fourth – where you say “Fourthly”, I think that an argument had been mounted using the BMA, but I think here you were pointing at that in fact what was being put forward wasn’t the official view of the BMA either; is that correct?

Sir Jon Coles: That’s right. That’s right.

Lead 8: And then also dealing with the – here, the view that had been put forward by Independent SAGE, although I think in fact you were trying to explain that in fact Independent SAGE hadn’t said, I think, what was being contended for – (overspeaking) –

Sir Jon Coles: No, and the argument being put forward by colleagues in the latter was that this was inherently dangerous for staff and pupils. That wasn’t the argument being put forward by Independent SAGE.

I did independently have a strong disagreement with Independent SAGE about some other assertions they’d made, but here their argument is about wider community transmission and the risks that you’re increasing the R number by having more social mixing, not that these individuals are at risk.

So I felt that here union colleagues were misrepresenting the facts in order to argue a position which they held for other reasons.

Lead 8: And may I ask you what you thought those other reasons were?

Sir Jon Coles: Well, I think – I think there was an institutional position from the NEU, and I suppose that’s why I also wrote to Kevin Courtney and Mary Boustead, as the then joint general secretaries of the NEU, because it felt as though the NEU had adopted an institutional position that it was against schools reopening before the summer, which then union reps in the letter to me were representing and looking for arguments to justify rather than assessing a case on its merits and considering: are we at risk? Are our children at risk? Is this good for children?

Which I think, in our experience, the overwhelming majority of our staff were thinking: are we at risk? Are our children at risk? No. Is this good for children? Yes. Should we, therefore, be doing it? Yes, we should. And we’re fully supporting efforts to reopen schools.

Lead 8: And then I think just – maybe this is the crux of the issue, this penultimate paragraph:

“You say that we should not open until we can guarantee the safety of staff and students.”

Sir Jon Coles: Yeah.

Lead 8: Was that effectively the position being put forward?

Sir Jon Coles: Yes. So it’s saying that we’re arguing that reopening places staff and students at risk. And I just simply make the point: that was never the reason why we closed schools. It wasn’t that we thought these people are particularly at risk; it was part of the national effort to break networks of transmission to protect the elderly and the vulnerable. That was why we’d closed schools.

And as I say in this document:

“I know of no serious expert who argues that this virus is seriously dangerous to children and young [people].”

And, you know, my broad point in the final paragraph:

“Young people have played their part in suppressing the virus, but they are paying a high price in lost education at a crucial time in their lives. Society owes them a debt and it is time to start repaying it. I ask you to get behind efforts to bring children back to school as soon as possible, as the vast majority of our colleagues are.”

Which was indeed my experience: that, in fact, despite these letters from the unions, our experience on the ground was enormous support, tremendous goodwill from staff, a real commitment to do the right thing for children and young people, and this very frustrating, you know, national narrative being painted by the unions that in some way teachers were blocking this, which was not our day-to-day experience at all.

Lead 8: And can I just ask you, this – your reply to the effect, you know, we shouldn’t open until – because we – the union position being: we shouldn’t open until we can guarantee the safety of staff and students. And your position: there is no risk.

Can I ask you two things arising out of that.

First of all, it might be said, well, there is – there would be a risk to teachers, because they might have a vulnerability themselves. They are putting themselves at risk of getting Covid and, you know, potentially endangering their own families. That’s one point.

Then the second point might be said against that is: what about the risk of children getting Long Covid when they get Covid?

So could I ask you to deal with those points, please.

Sir Jon Coles: Mm. Well, I think I deal with the first of those quite directly in the penultimate paragraph. So I don’t say in this there’s no risk, because there’s nothing in life which is no risk. Walking down the street is a risk.

What I do say, though, is in our school communities there are clinically vulnerable staff and students, but they are not being asked to return to school, and nor are staff or students living with clinically vulnerable people.

And so it’s not, of course, that anything is risk free, and this is not completely risk free, but what was happening at school level was that there was a careful, measured risk assessment taking place. Our advice, our HR advice to schools, was that any member of staff who considers themselves clinically vulnerable or has concerns, you know, should be treated with sympathy, shouldn’t be required to work if they’ve got good reason to think that they are vulnerable. We shouldn’t be forcing people to do this. And we didn’t need every member of staff in order to do what we were being asked to do, which was, still, open for a minority of schools.

So we had this careful, well-thought-through risk assessment policy. That was happening at school level. Nobody was raising concerns that that was treating anybody unfairly. Equally, children were not being required at this point to come into school. So, schools were being opened for children and young people, and invited to come in, but there was no enforcement of that. This wasn’t a situation where, in May and June 2020, we or the government or anyone else was saying that children must come to school. Children were being given the option to come to school, which overwhelmingly people wanted to take. And if there were concerns from parents and others about a particular child coming to school, that was always dealt with, with care and consideration. And the general position that people were encouraged but not required was held fast to throughout that period. So, yeah, I think – I think that deals with those issues.

Lead 8: And what about the issue of Long Covid in children? Was that more complex to deal with than dealing with staff who might have been clinically vulnerable?

Sir Jon Coles: Well, I don’t think we knew very much about Long Covid at that point. I’m not sure when people started talking about Long Covid, but I don’t think it was yet. Somebody might be able to tell me that, firstly.

Secondly, I think my point that this was not a compulsory requirement, either at this stage or, you know, later on in that term, you know, did mean that if there were parents or others who had significant concerns about their child being at school in that period, you know, this was not a requirement for them. And if there were people who either felt that they or their children or other members of the family were clinically vulnerable, they didn’t have to – they didn’t have to attend school.

Lead 8: I’m grateful. And can I take it from that, Sir Jon, in terms of Long Covid, you hadn’t received information from the government by that stage about Long Covid or needing – or that consideration needed to be given by schools to it at that point?

Sir Jon Coles: No, and I’m not sure that there ever has been a piece of guidance to schools about Long Covid. Somebody may correct me again if I’m wrong about that.

Lead 8: Thank you.

My Lady, that, I think – that’s all my questions for Sir Jon. Did you have any questions for him?

Lady Hallett: No, I don’t have any questions. You’ve covered everything very thoroughly, thank you very much, Ms Dobbin.

Thank you very much indeed, Sir Jon. There aren’t any other questions for you. I’ve found your evidence extremely helpful and very interesting, so thank you for all the help you’ve given to the Inquiry.

The Witness: Thank you.

May I just say one more thing?

Lady Hallett: Yes.

The Witness: I came across this, that I wrote on 18 March, which I just want to make a point about. I wrote to heads:

[As read] “I cannot say for sure that these will be the most important days of your career, but I do know there well be few days when your leadership, positivity, belief, warmth, and care will be needed more. Morale is low in many places, anxiety and even fear are high. You know that we will get through this together, and everyone else will look to you to give them that sense of purpose and belief as well. With your leadership, I have no doubt that your whole staff team can rise to the level of events and give children the sense of positive purpose as well.”

And I suppose I want to quote that because I want to pay tribute to the leaders in our schools, because I believe that they did show that leadership, positivity, belief, warmth and care throughout this period, not only at the time of closure, but for all the Covid period. And for the whole staff team who, despite my objections to things that Ofqual and the government and the unions might have done, I think that whole staff team did rise to the level of events and did go above and beyond what they were asked to do in the interests of children, and there is a large group of adults in society who did tremendous work in the interests of children and young people, and I just want to pay tribute to them. Thank you very much.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Sir Jon. Well, you paid tribute to them, but, whether or not everybody agreed with you, you obviously deserve a tribute for the leadership you tried to show to protect the interests of children and young people, so thank you for all you tried to do. You’re obviously a very busy man generally, but looking at the time you sent your emails, you must have been extraordinarily busy during the lockdown period, so thank you very much indeed.

The Witness: Thank you, my Lady.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, the next witness is Sir Hamid Patel CBE, and he is going to be asked questions on behalf of the Inquiry by Ms Cayoun.

Lady Hallett: Ms Cayoun.

Ms Cayoun: My Lady, thank you. Sir Hamid is just taking a seat.

May I please call Sir Hamid Patel.

Sir Hamid Cbe

SIR HAMID PATEL CBE (affirmed).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Lady Hallett: Thank you for coming to help us, Sir Hamid. I hope we haven’t kept you waiting too long and you were properly looked after.

The Witness: I was, thank you.

Ms Cayoun: Sir Hamid, thank you. You have provided a witness statement for the Inquiry. I think you have it in front of you.

And the reference that we have for it is INQ000649936.

I think you signed it on 8 July 2025. Can you confirm, please, that the contents of that statement are true to the best of your knowledge and belief.

Sir Hamid Cbe: I can.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Sir Hamid, you are the CEO of the multi-academy trust that is Star Academies, and that is a position that you have held since 2011; is that right?

Sir Hamid Cbe: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And as I understand it, in addition to that role, you are also a board member of Ofsted and the chair of the Confederation of School Trusts; is that right?

Sir Hamid Cbe: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. You have told us in your statement that for the period of the pandemic, Star Academies comprised 28 schools throughout England, 19 of which were faith schools, specifically Muslim schools, and that these were a mix of primary and secondary.

In terms of geographical spread, three of your schools were located in London, and the remaining 25 were located across Lancashire, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and the West Midlands; is that right?

Sir Hamid Cbe: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. I understand that in 2020, 24% of your children were eligible for free school meals, so somewhat higher than the 17.3% of children nationally; is that right?

Sir Hamid Cbe: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Sir Hamid, may I ask you please to keep your voice up a little if you can, and perhaps if the microphone is slightly closer to you. Thank you very much.

I also understand that 13% of your children were children who had special educational needs and disabilities.

Sir Hamid Cbe: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And 61% were children who had English as an additional language, so three times as much as the then national average of 19.5%.

Sir Hamid Cbe: Yes, that’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Before we begin properly, Sir Hamid, and in order to help us put your evidence about the impact of the pandemic on your children and young people in context, I just want to ensure we have everything we need about the characteristics of the population of children and young people at your schools.

You tell us, for example, in your statement that the health outcomes were particularly poor in several of the towns in which your schools are located.

Sir Hamid Cbe: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And you cite specifically Blackburn, Bradford, Birmingham and Blackpool; is that right?

Sir Hamid Cbe: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: You also tell us that many of your pupils live in towns and often in crowded accommodation, that a significant proportion of your pupils live in multi-generational housing, and you say that 20% of your pupils lost a close family member during the pandemic; is that right?

Sir Hamid Cbe: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

You point out that your schools serve many economically disadvantaged families, and you point out that many of those parents would not have been eligible for furlough and may have been reliant on seasonal employment, for example, in seaside towns.

Sir Hamid Cbe: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Sir Hamid, is there anything else that you would want to add to help us understand the context that your schools operate in before we begin?

Sir Hamid Cbe: No, that’s fine. Thank you.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

I want to ask you first about some of the ways in which your schools responded to the pandemic.

Can we please look at INQ000647793. Thank you.

This is the September 2020 edition of your academy’s magazine.

Can we scroll down, please, to page 3. We see a diagram in the middle of that page of what you describe in your statement as a pledge that Star Academies made.

If we look at pledges 4 and 5, we recognise those probably as what would have been the school’s obligations during periods of lockdown: to provide quality of education at home and to ensure that children of key workers and vulnerable children could continue to attend school.

Pledges 1, 2 and 3 appear to go further than the services that schools were required to provide. And if we scroll just briefly down to page 4, for example, we can see how Star Academies – page 4, if I could, please – of the subsequent page, please – cooked and distributed meals to local residents and key workers and PPE, for instance.

Sir Hamid, the question is this: why, in the circumstances of a pandemic, when the delivery of education itself was so challenging, did your schools go further to provide these additional services to the communities?

Sir Hamid Cbe: We identified families in need through our own records, staff outreach and referrals from local partners. So we knew that many of our families, many of our parents, would struggle with the lockdown. So we decided that it is necessary that we operate food banks, hygiene banks, PPE, educational supplies, advice centres, and even vaccination centres.

We felt it was necessary to become trusted hubs for families at a time when – it was a time when schools were often the only professionals maintaining regular contact with vulnerable children and vulnerable families. Staff filled gaps left by other services, and we felt that this need was there from the audits that we’d done with our schools.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

And one of those points that you make in your statement, specifically on that, is that you say:

“Children’s Social Care staff no longer visited vulnerable children and families and so there was an increasing need for school staff to fill this void, conducting home visits in the event of concerns that could not be addressed remotely.”

We understand, Sir Hamid, that many children’s social care staff were visiting children remotely, through phone calls or Zoom visits, for example.

Did you consider that your staff additionally needed to visit them in their homes, and if so, why?

Sir Hamid Cbe: We felt it was necessary. These students need familiar faces. They had no contact. I mean, in the case of children’s social care, they had decided to step down or close many, many cases, and some of these were decisions that we challenged. But they were dealing with a significant load, and therefore, they were only prioritising the cases of significant high need. And we felt it was necessary for our young people to have those visits so that we could support them with safeguarding, emotional, mental support and wellbeing needs.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. I want to ask you also about some aspects of your practical experience of delivering education to children in their homes.

You explain in your statement some of the different challenges that children at primary and secondary level faced.

Starting with primary level, what were the realities and the key practical challenges for your schools in delivering education to primary children while they were at home?

Sir Hamid Cbe: So if we start with primary pupils, firstly focusing on EYFS, remote learning can’t replace play, interaction, and hands-on experiences that are essential for young children’s development. So we had a situation where EYFS pupils need – they need – they need adult supervision. They need adult support at home. And many of our families were dealing with multiple children, and they weren’t able to support all the children that they had.

So you had the primary pupils – we were delivering EYFS lessons. Parents would have to sit with them. And if a parent wasn’t able to sit with them, they wouldn’t attend the lesson.

In terms of – we provided parent guidance, resources. We made regular calls home to parents. We delivered short, interactive sessions. We focused on stories. We focused on songs. So we did the best we could with EYFS pupils, but the reality is that EYFS pupils do need that interaction, which is very, very difficult to provide in a remote environment.

In terms of other primary pupils, we – at Key Stage 2, we were able to deliver a hybrid programme of learning. So we had some online learning, we had some activities – offline activities, and they were able to cope with that.

There were pupils within primary, for example SEND pupils, EAL pupils, they had specific challenges that we had to overcome, but generally, we found that the youngest children were the ones that struggled with remote teaching.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

You mentioned EAL students having particular struggles, and of course, we noted a moment ago that 60% of your children had additional – had English as an additional language.

Can you just help us briefly with what their particular struggles would have been during times of school closure.

Sir Hamid Cbe: So EAL pupils, if they have a parent who can speak English or they have family members who speak English, then they have someone to support them. EAL pupils need to be in a language-rich environment. They need to hear words. They need to speak English. They need to be in that environment. When they’re not – when they’re in an environment which is dominated by community languages, then they will struggle when it comes to accessing some of the online learning because they don’t have someone next to them explaining to them what’s going on and sort of translating for them. And it is for that reason that for some of the EAL pupils, we provided bilingual support, and in some cases, we called them into school as well.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Moving, then, to secondary students. One of the things you say in your statement is that it was important that, as far as possible, learning was based around live-streamed lessons. Why? What were the particular benefits of live-streamed lessons?

Sir Hamid Cbe: We wanted to make sure that our children get a good experience. We wanted to make sure – we were – initially, we were worried about children being left behind, children falling behind. We wanted to make sure that they got a good experience.

When – as part of the pandemic response, we ran a telephone line, StarLine. That telephone line was accessed by about 125,000 parents on a weekly basis. That was being run by ourselves, with 21 other organisations. And we heard from parents that schools weren’t providing – that they just provided the home learning packs, and parents were struggling with those home learning packs. Where’s the instruction? Where’s the taught learning?

So we felt it was very, very important that we delivered live lessons. And in our secondary schools, we – there were schools – within a week of schools closing down, we were delivering the full timetable. We were delivering the full timetable.

Of course, we sort of learnt – as we sort of worked through the pandemic, we sort of refined our approaches. So initially what we did was we moved the entire timetable – those delivering in school, we moved it online. So they were getting online lessons, full day. They were getting the morning registration. They were getting every lesson in its entirety. But then students – at first, they were really engaged, motivated, and then they started saying to us: we’re struggling with the intensity of the remote teaching.

So we then started looking at the pedagogy, because initially, it was all new for everyone, it was just sort of flying the plane and sort of figuring out – building it at the same time.

So as we sort of progressed in the pandemic and as we sort of built some proficiency, we then moved to a model where we were delivering full live lessons, but we were having a break after every 20 minutes. We were breaking it up after 20 minutes. We were sort of giving them activities, offline activities. After every two hours, we were giving them a 15, 20-minute break from lessons.

So we felt it was very, very important that they get the quality instruction from teachers. Otherwise, the kids that we’re dealing with – they are disadvantaged kids. They are the kids that are currently, right now, in 2025, they’re 19 months behind their peers when you look at performance at GCSE.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Patel – Sir Hamid, I beg your pardon. I want to pick up a point that you made a moment ago about motivation.

Amongst your evidence, you exhibited a risk assessment for remote learning, and one of the risks that you identified there, particularly for secondary students, was that pupils may struggle to concentrate, or that they might lack self-discipline and motivation.

We have seen in our Children and Young People’s Voices report, and if we could please look at that at INQ000587936, page 83.

At the top of that page, there’s a small sample of some of the quotes that we had directly from children and young people about their experiences of remote learning. I think if you can read from those, you will see that they were struggling with motivation.

Sir Hamid, in your experience, how best could educators, in practice, response to this challenge of children essentially having their attention divided on to perhaps more engrossing things on the Internet?

Sir Hamid Cbe: Yes, so this is why we need a hybrid model. We need some face-to-face, some online. It can’t only be online. There needs to be some face-to-face. Of course, we’re in a pandemic, schools were closed, so face-to-face wasn’t possible. But a hybrid model is more effective.

Secondly, I would say that there’s a whole range of strategies. Teachers got better. Remote teaching got better. By the time we reopened schools, remote teaching got much better. So there are pedagogical strategies that can be used. There’s cold calling. You can have lots of conversations. You can build in quizzes. You can build in lots of assessments. You can make it very interactive. You can follow it up with phone calls, wellbeing phone calls. We were making phone calls on a week – every child got a phone call on a weekly basis. We did a consultation with every child on a weekly basis. Vulnerable pupils were getting daily phone calls. Vulnerable pupils were required to come into school, but not all of them were coming in. And if they weren’t coming in, we were doing a daily phone call to them. We were doing a weekly – every three days, we were doing a home visit to those vulnerable pupils. All of that is very, very important. They need those conversations. They need people to speak to. They need to be able to tell people that “I’m struggling to motivate. I’m struggling. I’m struggling with this,” and we can then sort of equip them with strategies.

So those conversations were very, very important. So if we are ever going to have those remote learning again, we’ve got to make sure that wellbeing is sort of built in as a sort of key part of the remote learning offer. So lots of mentoring, lots of conversations with them, making sure there’s PHSE lessons as well, not just the core lessons, deliver the PHSE lessons, provide that emotional wellbeing support. All of that could help.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

May I ask you on that, one of the things that you raise in your statement is that when children returned to school when they reopened, one of the impacts that was noticed was that online safeguarding issues linked to grooming, child exploitation, sexting and gaming, were all amplified by a lack of parental supervision. And you note that a number of online safety issues that had occurred at home were brought into school. More disclosures were received around online grooming, exposure to inappropriate content and online bullying. You say those concerns arose during phased reopening and persisted into full reopening.

Sir Hamid, what sorts of things were your teachers noticing in your pupils that led you to draw these conclusions?

Sir Hamid Cbe: Well, we were having conversations with young people. We have regular conversations with them. We did a survey on their return to check on their wellbeing, and young people were sharing their experiences of lockdown with us.

We knew that many, many young people were spending 19 hours, 18 hours, 19 hours, online. You know, their sleeping patterns had changed. People weren’t sleeping – in some ways, they weren’t feeling tired. They were feeling exhausted, but they weren’t feeling tired enough to go to sleep because they didn’t have the physical activity. So without the physical activity, some of these young people are very alert. Then they were in – you know, they were with their parents. They were all sort of – everybody was working from home, so people just sort of slept and sort of slept between, I suspect, lessons, and so on.

And therefore, young people were spending 19 hours. And we were sort of trying to understand. We were asking young people, “Well, what are you doing online?” “Well, we’re gaming and we’re having conversations. We’re talking about X, Y and Z.” So all of this sort of started to suggest to us that there are some real issues. We had some delayed disclosures.

At first, we found that kids had become desensitised to this stuff because that’s what they were sort of consuming 24-7 whilst they were in lockdown. They didn’t even think it was – there was anything wrong with it. But it was only when they came back and we started implementing the PHSE lessons and RSHE lessons, and when children started to sort of build that confidence and we re-established relationships with trusted adults, that’s when we started to hear from kids the real sort of experiences that they’d had online.

I suspect there’s so many kids that had been groomed and, to date, they haven’t disclosed.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Sir Hamid.

I’d like to move on to our third topic now, which is how you approached clinical vulnerability among your children and families, and then perhaps, if there is time, some aspects of infection control.

We spoke earlier about the fact that many of the children attending your schools lived in multi-generational households, and indeed the very difficult statistic that 20% of them were bereaved. And you also separately mentioned that when your schools reopened, persistent absenteeism was a growing issue, and you linked this to the fact that there was an increase in the number of young carers, and a rising number of children who were looking after clinically vulnerable adults.

Would it be fair to say, Sir Hamid, that, in your school communities, a number of children may have been living during the pandemic with a family member who was clinically vulnerable to Covid-19.

Sir Hamid Cbe: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And when it came to encouraging families to return their children to school when they reopen, one of the things that you say is that schools noticed an increase in parents being overly cautious and keeping their children away from school for minor reasons. People were fearful. Misinformation and verified information was sometimes hard to distinguish.

Did you consider Sir Hamid, that there was a difficulty about balancing the need to ensure good attendance on the one hand with the potentially very valid concerns of those families who were worried that their children attending school might risk the health of a clinically vulnerable family member?

Sir Hamid Cbe: Absolutely. That was the sort of balancing situation. And that’s why we decided that we needed to take a compassionate approach. And we took compassionate approach. Where we provided reassurances to parents, and some parents were reassured by the infection control measures that we’d put in place, they did send their children back. Some parents didn’t feel reassured, so we took a risk assessment, we offered them online lessons, and we carried on doing it home visits, because these were intergenerational households and, as you say, many parents who were clinically vulnerable.

Of course, the – part of the problem was that the algorithm by which CV people were contacted and advised to shield wasn’t perfect, so you had many parents who were arguing that, “We’ve got CV family members here”, but not necessarily the, sort of, medical confirmation.

But it was tough. You know, you’re told that their children must stay home to protect vulnerable relatives. Then they’re told that their children must return to school regardless of family vulnerability. Then they’re told that they could request leave of absence but only at school’s discretion.

So this inconsistency places families in a moral and emotional dilemma. Do you protect your loved ones? Do you comply with attendance rules?

And it also places schools in a policy vacuum, expected to enforce attendance while managing real trauma.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Sir Hamid.

You spoke a moment ago about the infection control mechanisms that you had in place, and in fact you mention that your school was engaged with a DfE and Public Health England carbon dioxide monitoring project. Can you tell us, please, how practically and feasible you found it for your schools to try to reduce the risk of airborne transmissions by improving ventilation?

Sir Hamid Cbe: So we have two types of schools. We have an estate where there’s new schools. These schools have mechanically ventilated – mechanical sort of arrangements. And then we have schools where there’s natural ventilation.

So where there was mechanical ventilation, that was straightforward. You just put it on a, sort of, clean air setting, and that took care of itself. But where you had natural ventilation, that was a challenge, because you were saying the only way to address that is to open windows, open doors, keep fire doors closed.

So that is a practical solution. The COT – the CO² monitors, sort of, had red, amber, green. So whenever there was red, a red reading, the schools would know that we need to open the windows or we need to open doors.

Very practical, but not sustainable, because you’ve got a situation where you’ve got kids in – young people in coats in the classroom, or you’re having to turn the heating on and open the windows at the same time.

There is a point I would make on this: that there are many, many schools across the country that rely on natural ventilation. These are normally very old buildings. I do feel that there is a need to go and retrofit a solution, whether that’s a mechanical ventilation upgrade or HEPA filters or something, because schools in disadvantaged areas are the ones that often have the poorest infrastructure. They are the poorest buildings. So a national ventilation standard for schools, linked to health and learning outcomes, would make a difference.

One of the things that we argued with the universities and with the department was to say: why don’t you link the CO² data with learning outcomes? Because if CO² – if ventilation, good ventilation is important for health, if we can establish that good ventilation is important for learning, for concentration, then that means that schools that don’t have good ventilation, poorer ventilation, their kids are disadvantaged even before they step into an exam hall.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Sir Hamid.

I think I only have time for one more question about your overall reflections. You conclude in your statement that closing schools must always be a last resort. Is there anything that you would wish to add by that by way of expansion for my Lady to take on board?

Sir Hamid Cbe: What I would say is that the Department for Education and the government worked on the assumption that we wouldn’t shut schools, we wouldn’t shut schools. And we shut schools.

That’s why we didn’t put a contingency plan in place, because we only had one plan, and that’s to keep schools open.

I had discussions with ministers and ministers were very clear to me: we’re not going to put an exam contingency arrangement in place because next year we intend to run exams.

So I think it’s very easy to say don’t shut schools. And I think that’s my message: let’s not shut schools, because closing them down the first time is understandable, we weren’t prepared for it. By the second lockdown, we did understand the educational harm, the emotional harm, and all of the other safeguarding concerns that had emerged. So we should have thought very, very carefully the second time round, but we still went and closed schools.

Now, what I would say is: closing schools we should never do that, but equally speaking, we must – and I think we must protect schools as national critical assets, but we should be prepared that if ever there is a scenario where schools need to shut, then we need to make sure that we find creative ways of recreating the full school experience, and that includes establishing a national entitlement for remote teaching.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you very much indeed, Sir Hamid.

My Lady, those are all my questions. Do you have any questions?

Lady Hallett: I do.

Sir Hamid, you mentioned going fully online at the beginning, fully remote learning at the beginning. I’ve heard about the problems with many families, particularly in deprived areas, of lack of devices. That was obviously going to be a problem, given many of your schools are in disadvantaged areas. How did you cope with that as a problem?

Sir Hamid Cbe: My Lady, that again goes to my point with regards to a lack of a national minimum entitlement for remote teaching. I believe that every young person should be given a laptop, or a mobile device, and it should be upgraded by the state every three years.

Now, in this case, as I – we had about 30% – 30-40% of pupils that did not have a mobile device. Now, that doesn’t take into account the many, many families that did have a mobile device. When we did the audit, they said: yes, we’re okay, we don’t need a laptop, we don’t need a computer. But they did on the assumption that one or two computers would be enough. But they had three children at home, plus the husband and wife, they’re all working, they need five laptops, they don’t need three laptops. So my figures when I say 30%, 40% of young people didn’t have mobile devices, that’s 30-40% of young people who didn’t have any mobile devices. I suspect that the figures probably went up to 50% when we talk about a device for every child.

Now, in – at the end of January, we – it became very clear to us that there would be some sort of a circuit breaker, a few weeks’, sort of, lockdown. We had never, sort of, anticipated that there would be such a significant lockdown. Our concern was – were around Year 11 and Year 6s, because they would be sitting exams. So we did a quick audit and our audit disclosed that 30% of young people have no laptops.

So, immediately we used the trust resources, we had a conversation with our trustees, and we decided to order 1,000 laptops. We ordered 1,000 laptops. Then we decided that we would – we ordered a further 1,000, sort of, refurbished laptops. That was 2,000. Then we found 50 or 100 laptops in every school. We took all of them, so that’s about 28 schools, 100 laptops from around each school, 2,800, plus from the centre, around 200, that’s about 3,000, plus the 2,000 we purchased. That’s around 5,000. We had an IT team working and setting up those 5,000 laptops ready for remote teaching.

The one thing I will say is that the DfE laptops did come. The DfE laptops came very late for us. They were use – they were helpful when they came, but they came very late.

Now, the – as a system, I believe that the DfE purchased around 1.5 million laptops towards the end of the pandemic. That’s the number that we had distributed. The point – one point I would make on that, and I think it’s an important point, it’s a point about procurement and it’s a point about forward planning, a lot of those laptops that arrived were laptops that were not really usable. Almost all of them were not usable because they were laptops that had limited data capacity. By the time we uploaded the cyber security software, safeguarding software, all of that that’s required, they had limited data capacity for remote teaching.

So you can imagine that if you’ve spent – if you have 1.5 million laptops and you’ve spent £500 per laptop, that’s still about a 500 million investment, and I would argue that many, many of those laptops would still be around in schools where schools are not able to use those laptops. We decided to part exchange those laptops.

Lady Hallett: Well done, Sir Hamid. Obviously your trust did an amazing amount of work, and I’m sure the communities that you tried your very hardest – you and your colleagues – to support were extremely grateful to you, and rightly so. Thank you for everything you and your colleagues did. And thank you for helping the Inquiry.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, the next witness is Mr Kevin Courtney, and he will be asked questions by Ms Cayoun.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Ms Cayoun, I apologise, I overran your time there. You don’t have responsibility for it.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you, my Lady.

May I please call Mr Kevin Courtney.

Mr Kevin Courtney

MR KEVIN COURTNEY (sworn).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Lady Hallett: Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Courtney.

Mr Kevin Courtney: That’s absolutely fine, thank you, my Lady.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you, Mr Courtney.

You have provided a witness statement for this module of the Inquiry. I believe it’s in front of you. And the reference we have for it is INQ000588135.

I believe that witness statement has a number of signatories. They are: Dr Patrick Roach, on behalf of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, or the NASUWT; Mr Mike Short, on behalf of Unison: Ms Rachel Harrison, on behalf of GMB: Mr Dominic Hook, on behalf of Unite. And of course your signature appears together with theirs, all dated

Would it be correct to say that all of those individuals, on behalf of those unions, have had input into that statement and its contents were agreed by all of them.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, we’ve all had input and agreed it.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And are you satisfied that the contents of it are true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Absolutely, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And is it right to say that you give your

evidence today in your capacity as the former joint

General Secretary of the National Education Union, and

former member of the Executive Committee of the Trades

Union Congress?

Mr Kevin Courtney: That’s right. I retired from my role in August 2023,

but I was joint General Secretary along with

Mary Boustead during the relevant period.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And I understand that prior to having

full-time roles within trade unions, your own work was

as a teacher; is that correct?

Mr Kevin Courtney: That’s right. I have a degree in physics from Imperial

College, then a PGC, and then I worked as a physics

teachers teaching up to A-level, and teaching lower

school chemistry, biology, maths.

Counsel Inquiry: And in your witness statement, you have set out the August. 18 detail and remit of each of the unions who contributed

to the statement. Thank you for doing so. It means we

won’t need to go through those now. But I think

I understand that, collectively, those unions

represented about 760,000 teachers, half a million

education support staff, and around 40,000 social

workers. Does that sound right?

Mr Kevin Courtney: That sounds right. And it’s a majority of people working in schools.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And in terms of geographical reach, would it be right to say that during the pandemic, these unions operated across the UK, although I understand that perhaps the NEU has perhaps less of a presence in Scotland than the other unions; is that fair?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, we work with our sister union, the Educational Institute of Scotland, in Scotland, so don’t organise there ourselves, but we worked across the UK in collaboration with other unions.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And Mr Courtney, in your statement, you describe some of the ways in which the unions worked to respond to the pandemic. Would it be fair to characterise that as having been focused on the provision of advice and guidance to members, engagement with schools and education authorities, advocacy and media engagement in respect of your members’ concerns, and also direct engagement with governments of the UK?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, direct engagement with governments of the UK, supporting them when we thought they were getting it right, as in the wider opening of schools in September 2020, and in March 2020, sometimes contesting the case with government when we thought they were getting the science wrong –

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Kevin Courtney: – as we did at other periods.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, we will come to that.

Thank you, Mr Courtney.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Thank you, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: In your statement you also set out your assessment of the state of the education sector prior to the pandemic. This is a subject that the Inquiry heard some evidence about last week, and you go into some detail about it in your statement. So we’ll touch on it only briefly, if we may.

I think, however, that your main point is that the education sector was not resilient at the time that the pandemic hit, and the factors that I think you identify are, taking it from the headlines of your statement: reductions in real-term funding for schools; structural changes through the establishment of multi-academy trusts which changed the ways that local authorities coordinated the provision of education locally; challenges in teacher recruitment and retention; increases in teacher workloads; challenges in pupils’ behaviour and engagement; and increasing numbers of children with special educational needs and disabilities.

As I say, Mr Courtney, you have included far more detail from that in your statement, but have I summarised that analysis correctly?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, I think that I would say that we were very concerned about the level of poverty facing children in our schools, and our members were reporting children that were coming to school hungry. There were schools that were washing the clothes of children and seeking to feed them. But the other points are completely relevant.

The fact that school budgets had been cut also meant that class sizes were also going up, and we had the highest class sizes in Europe. And I think that’s relevant maybe late on in our discussion.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Courtney.

Coming, then, to the pandemic. You remind us in your statement that schools remained open throughout the pandemic to vulnerable children and key worker children, and that teachers and support staff worked in schools to deliver that provision.

Would you agree, Mr Courtney, that that was essential work that they were doing and that it was essential to keep schools open and available to the most vulnerable children?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, absolutely. We always supported the fact that schools, even when they were closed to the vast majority, needed to be open to those children of key workers and vulnerable children. We encouraged our members to go to work in schools on a rota basis.

I mean, support staff were generally in school the whole time, working with smaller groups than perhaps usual, but they were in school the whole time, and it was vital that schools were open. Even though they were then closed to the vast majority, it was vital that they were there for the children that were with them.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And similarly, you remind us that many teachers and support staff were working throughout to provide education even when children were at home, whether through live, remote learning or, for example, producing homework packs. Would you agree that that was also essential work?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Absolutely essential. It took some getting used to, at first, how to learn how to do the online teaching in the best possible way. And I think it’s also worth saying that even when schools were open to most children, which was obviously welcome when that was able to happen, the teachers, as well as teaching the classes of the children in front of them, were also often preparing work for children who were at home, because they were self-isolating, et cetera.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, thank you.

Mr Courtney, I’m not sure if you heard it, because you may not have been in the hearing room, but we also heard a moment ago from Sir Hamid about his schools, and the Star Academies were operating as hubs for meeting wider needs of communities, and we’ve seen similar evidence in statements provided by other school leaders.

Would you agree that many schools and staff actually took on a number of roles over and above those that were essential in order to meet the wider needs of their communities?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I absolutely would, and there was lots of evidence of that throughout the pandemic. I mean, at early stages there were CDT teachers going in and making PPE to – I mean in small amounts – to give to the NHS. But there were many instances where teachers were delivering resources to children at home and using the schools as that sort of resource hub.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

I’d like now to consider some of the concerns that union members had about the impact of the pandemic on their children and young people.

We understand from your statement that the NEU conducted a survey of teacher, leader and support staff members who were working in schools between 14 and 21 October. So during that period in autumn 2020, when most children were in school.

Can we look, please, at INQ000588135, which is your statement, at paragraph 81. Thank you very much.

You tell us here about what the survey highlighted. You say:

“… most members [were] reporting issues with pupils’ concentration levels and an increase in fatigue, with a significant minority noting an increase in pupils’ hunger and an increase in issues with clothing and hygiene.”

Later on in the paragraph you say:

“It is important to recognise that access to equipment did not only mean technology, some of the country’s poorest pupils were having to work from home without pens and books.”

You talk there about the poorest pupils. To be clear, were your members telling you that students were struggling with remote learning throughout, essentially because of poverty?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes. I mean, obviously in that period, October, schools were more open. They were open to the majority of children at that point, in – I think I’m right, it’s October 2020?

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, yes.

Mr Kevin Courtney: So schools were open. Though many children were still self-isolating. But yes, teachers were reporting especially the effects of poverty was having an impact on these questions. I don’t know how much – you know, teachers would tell us that – you know, at first, obviously children – many children didn’t have a device or didn’t have the data. But even when they did, you would have situations where you’re trying to teach an online lesson and the child has – doesn’t have a room of their own, doesn’t have a space of their own, so there are other children trying to learn. There were cases where people would tell us that the child was in a room, and their father, who had worked the night shift, was also in the room sleeping during the attempt to have an online lesson. So, yes, poverty had a huge effect.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Courtney. We also see there also mention about mental health and wellbeing. Are those concerns that were developing for your members over the course of the pandemic or did they have them really at the outset?

Mr Kevin Courtney: We were describing mental health as a crisis before the pandemic, but – I mean, the absence of CAMHS support, et cetera, and members reported that it was getting worse during the pandemic.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. With regard to this comment that we see about pupils’ concentration levels and fatigue, you may be aware that in the evidence from schools to this Inquiry, school leaders have not generally identified Long Covid as a factor that they were concerned about themselves.

Long Covid symptoms can include fatigue and a lack of concentration. Is that something that your members were concerned about during the pandemic?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I don’t think that was something that came up in that survey in October 2020, and there would have been less knowledge, talk about Long Covid at that point, I think. But certainly it’s been something that members have raised with us, both about staff developing Long Covid symptoms but also about their students as well. Obviously, and thankfully, a minority, in both cases, but that can still be thousands of people.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. We can take that down now.

We were speaking there about points that your members raised in 2020, but you also exhibited to your statement the report from the NEU’s annual survey of its members in 2023, which gives us some insight into enduring concerns of your members.

And we read from that that, as well as having ongoing concerns about mental health and wellbeing, your members also expressed concern about behaviour and motivation in the year after the pandemic, and they appeared to, in that report, to link that to the pandemic.

What were your members concerned about in that respect, and why did they contribute this to the pandemic?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, so as I said, I retired in August 2023, but I still feel current with these questions, and our members report as a commonplace, really, that behaviour has deteriorated amongst some – amongst some children. And our members definitely put that down to the periods of school closure, the lack of socialisation for younger children who weren’t able to go to nursery settings, and that being an issue for other children at older ages, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Coming on, then, to questions about education recovery.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Okay.

Counsel Inquiry: We know from your statement that teachers and leaders reported consistently that children’s learning had been impacted profoundly by the disruption to their learning experience during the pandemic. And in your statement you are critical of the government’s decision not to fully implement the recommendations of the recovery commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins. This decision is something that her Ladyship has not yet heard about and will hear more about in due course, but, in outline, what did your members consider were the consequences for pupils of the decision not to implement that advice?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I mean, there’s a context to all of this, isn’t there? We’d had to close schools essentially because of the risk to community, not because of the direct risk to pupils. There were some children that got Long Covid, but we knew very early on that it wasn’t children that were at risk fundamentally from Covid; it was older age groups. But we’d had – schools had had to be closed for some time, I think maybe longer than they needed to be because of bad management by the government, but children were paying the price, even though they weren’t at risk.

And we see all of these effects that are reported now, about still having increased absence, these increased problems of behaviour, the increased mental health questions, and we – I think it’s vital that the government should be investing in this generation of children.

So Boris Johnson appointed Sir Kevan Collins in February 2021, and we supported that. We thought it was a rare good decision from the government to appoint Sir Kevan Collins.

We welcomed his report, which was calling for more time in schools, exciting activities going on in schools. He’d put a price tag on it of £15 billion, which we saw as an investment in our children, and the government went nowhere near it, offered less than a tenth of that, and he resigned in the summer of 2021.

That, I think, has been a betrayal of the children of this country, who paid that price even though they weren’t fundamentally the ones at risk from the Covid pandemic. It’s a betrayal of the children of this country.

And we should not just have been doing that, but we should have been investing in youth clubs, in play centres, in the child mental health services. All those things should have been happening. And they should be happening now. We should be reducing childhood poverty, we should be reducing class sizes in schools. All those things are possible and it’s what we should be doing for this generation of children.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you very much, Mr Courtney.

You began that answer by talking about decisions to open schools and close schools and the timing of those decisions, and I’d now like to turn to ask you questions about the position that the education unions took on those issues.

We know that on 18 March, of course, it was announced that schools would close to most children, in order, as you have said, to slow the spread of the virus, and I think it’s right that that is something that the unions had been advocating for and supported at the time; is that right?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, we thought it should have been done a bit sooner. We’d called for it in a public letter from the NEU, that is on 14 March, so not much sooner, but when you’re in an epidemic – when you’re in an exponential growth phase, then even a few days make a difference, and we think the schools – we think that closure should have happened sooner, and that if it had, the period of closure might well have been less.

Counsel Inquiry: We know that a step was taken towards partial reopening, after that closure decision, when guidance was published on 12 May, setting out a proposal for partial reopening to take place on 1 June?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And I think it’s right that the NEU did not support reopening schools on 1 June, and was advocating for schools to remain closed for longer. Is that a position, Mr Courtney, that would have been arrived at from any sort of formal ballot or vote among your members?

Mr Kevin Courtney: No. We were discussing with our executive around these questions, but we were reporting to the executive what we understood of the science of these matters. And we were part – we had published by then our five tests for safer school opening, which were about reducing community transmission, and we didn’t think that the government could meet those five tests – and we think they were scientifically supported – couldn’t meet them by 1 June. We thought that there should be a further two-weeks period of maintaining the period of restricted opening of the schools being closed to the vast majority of children. We thought there should be a further two weeks of that, in order that cases could fall further, and then in order that the government could have in place test, track and isolate methods. And I think that’s a scientifically supported – I mean, for me, that’s still the right position.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Kevin Courtney: We were judging it at the time on what we understood of the science, but looking back, I still think that was the correct position.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Courtney.

Just on the point of the views of members or the views of the NEU executive, the Inquiry heard evidence this morning from Sir Jon Coles of United Learning, and I think that you have had the opportunity to read his statement, and you will have seen that one of the things he says is that he:

“… did not feel that the views being articulated by the teaching unions reflected the views being expressed by our staff.”

Could that be right, Mr Courtney? Is it possible that some teachers and school leaders may have had different views to the NEU’s leaders about whether schools should reopen on 1 June?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Well, I’m sure it’s true that some of them would have had different views to the NEU, yes, but I do feel confident that we were representing the views of the vast majority of our members, and we tested it in a number of ways. We were having regular meetings with our members via Zoom, via other, you know, other mass participation events.

And I think it’s worthwhile saying that across the course of the pandemic, we recruited thousands more school workplace representatives and tens of thousands more members. That’s not a sign of a union that’s out of touch with its members.

There were times during the pandemic – I think it’s worth saying this – when we could see there were differences of opinion amongst members, and we were trying to take this into account. So, for example, I mean – is it all right for me into give this?

Counsel Inquiry: Certainly.

Mr Kevin Courtney: For example, during the period of partial closure of society in November 2020 when Boris Johnson went for that – do we call that the second lockdown? The half lockdown? That period of four weeks in November. We called, at that point, for secondary schools to be included in that period of partial closure.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Courtney. If I may, I am just going to pause you there and just bring us back to June 2020, just so that we can take the chronologically in the right order.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Right, okay. I was just going to say that that gave an example of where members pushed back on our position from two different directions, so we were engaged with members who had different opinions.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you very much. Taking us back, then, to June and the NEU’s position on the partial reopening on 1 June, Sir Jon tells us in his statement, and he told us this morning, that he spent some time engaging with you directly on this topic.

And I’d like to look, please, at a document on this before we pause for a break.

It’s at INQ000649526. Thank you very much.

This is the letter that Sir Jon sent to yourself and Mary Boustead, whom you referenced earlier, on 16 May 2020.

And this was sent just a few days after the publication of the Department for Education guidance I referenced on 12 May. If we can look, please, halfway down page 2, at the paragraph that begins “Our approach”. Thank you. We see that Sir Jon was explaining that the approach in United Learning schools was:

“… to work through in every school a very detailed plan as to how wider opening can be organised, following the principles in the guidance and working through all the specific issues of the building and the staffing.”

Then he includes some detail about that. And lower down, he writes, please, 2 paragraphs below:

“However, it is important in doing this planning properly and safely, taking account of all concerns and finding the best solutions that heads involve staff in the planning. I am pleased to say that colleagues across our schools have been heavily involved in planning so far. However, I think that your advice to your members not to speak to leaders about planning places both leaders and other teachers in a [very] difficult position and is counter-productive in risking making it harder to produce the best plan.”

Mr Courtney, had that been your advice to your members, and if it had, do you consider that it was a constructive approach to planning for safe reopening?

Mr Kevin Courtney: It was a position we held for about a week while we were getting materials ready with other unions to go out, and then we did encourage engagement. So I do think it was – I mean, it’s – I think it’s being mischaracterised here. I do think it was responsible.

We wanted to put in front of our members the best understanding of science, the best ways we could engage about safe reopening. So for a short period, we said “Don’t engage this week” or, you know – “but we’ll come back to it.” And then we were encouraging engagement. And indeed, Jon went on to talk this morning about some engagement he’d had from reps.

Counsel Inquiry: This would have been a week where time was really of the essence, and safety planning was a day by day imperative. Why would you want to delay that for a week?

Mr Kevin Courtney: In order to have the best possible advice on safety there to go out to our reps.

During the pandemic, we, at various occasions, issued safety checklists which we issued sometimes on our own, more often with other unions, that we sent out to our reps. We got them to go and talk to head teachers about them in order to put things in place.

You have to bear in mind that Jon is the chief executive of the United Learning Trust, and we had – you know, across the period running up to the pandemic, we’d had this process of academisation going on in our schools, and there was much weaker management in much – much less central capacity in many areas. So if you were a standalone academy, your relevant body was central government.

In the ULT, they had their central team. They could produce these sorts of guidance. If you were a standalone academy, you couldn’t produce them. If you were in a school in a local authority, your relevant body was the local authority, but it had been denuded by budget cuts, and there was much less capacity there. So partly, we felt that we were filling a void there in order to produce those checklists, et cetera, that our members could use with head teachers. So I do think it was the – a sensible thing for us to push for – to get that material out to members.

Ms Cayoun: I see. Thank you.

My Lady, I think that may be a convenient moment for a break.

Lady Hallett: Just before we break, just pursuing that point, Mr Courtney. I do understand, obviously, that you want to have as much information available as possible before you advise your members on what to do, but I’m still not following – pursuing the question Ms Cayoun asked you, I’m still not following why your members couldn’t at least engage with the leaders of the various institutions just to see what might be done pending receipt of the advice from you.

Mr Kevin Courtney: We very quickly were at that position, but we had been – this was one of the points where we had been contesting with the government, where we thought the government was definitely getting the science wrong, and I’m convinced that we were right about that, and we wanted to make sure that we could situate all that in the advice that we were giving. So we wanted to take that bit of time to get that right, and we also wanted to take – we were pressing the government at that moment to say that June 1 was going to be too soon.

And, you know, on 29 May, there were four very senior members of SAGE, not Independent SAGE. 29 May, four very senior members of SAGE who said in a coordinated intervention that it was wrong to open schools on 1 June. They were Peter Horby from NERVTAG, Jeremy Farrar from the Wellcome Institute, Professor John Edmunds from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Calum Semple, who’s a professor of childhood health and outbreak medicine. And they had a series of interventions that were all saying: we need to get cases lower in order to have test, track and isolate up and running.

Now, that was the position we held at the time, and this is confirmed, you know, by the course of events. We would have been better, as a society, if the government had delayed in those measures in order to get test, track and isolate set up and running. I guess there is a but if of hindsight, though. That does give me a bit of pause because I think the government actually never managed to get test, track and trace and isolate running, but if they had, then we could have avoided those second peaks, I think.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much. We’ll break now, and I shall return at 3.50, and I promise to have moved the curtains to stop the sun coming in.

(3.34 pm)

(A short break)

(3.49 pm)

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, this session will resume with the evidence of Mr Courtney.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Ms Dobbin.

Ms Cayoun.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you, my Lady.

Thank you, Mr Courtney. We were on the subject of the June 2020 partial reopening, and we had just looked at Sir Jon’s letter to you of 16 May.

If we can look now, please, at INQ000651602. Page 82 of that, paragraph 235. Thank you very much.

Sir Jon says in his witness statement, and he’s discussing here, having sent you that letter, that he:

“… subsequently met Mary and Kevin to discuss the points made in my letter and how we might work together. The entrenched position of the union, however, made any meaningful engagement impossible – despite recognising, in private, that children and young people were being harmed by the extended school closure and the low risk the virus presented to them and to most members of staff, the NEU refused to acknowledge this publicly or to encourage its members to take a positive view of the return to (limited) in-person teaching.”

Mr Courtney, if we may, I would like to take that in stages.

Is it right that when you met with Sir Jon, you recognised that children and young people were being harmed by extended school closure?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, that would certainly be right.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And is it right that you also recognised when you met with him that the virus presented a low risk to children and to most membership of staff?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, and we were acknowledging that in public as well.

Counsel Inquiry: Perhaps you would not agree that he says your position was entrenched and that that made meaningful engagement impossible.

Mr Kevin Courtney: No, I don’t agree with that. I mean, I’ve known Jon a long time. I knew him when he was in the Department, and then had many engagements while he was the chief executive of ULT, and I think he’s a fantastic chief executive of a multi-academy trust, but he’s wrong on this question.

We had positions. You could call them entrenched positions, if you like, but I think that’s a mischaracterisation in the context. We were talking about the best way to manage the virus based on our understanding of the science in the way that would, if it was managed properly, would minimise the amount of school closure time.

So we were advocating for our five tests around this period, which were about essentially getting cases low enough that test, track and trace and isolate could work.

Counsel Inquiry: I see.

Mr Kevin Courtney: That’s what we were advocating for.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Could we look now, please, at INQ000649155.

This is a letter that the NEU wrote to the Secretary of State for Education on 21 May, and this was a pre-action protocol letter about the decision to reopen on 1 June. And it’s right, isn’t it, that that’s the formal first step of challenging the government in court about a decision?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes. We’d been trying to get data from the government informally, if you like, and we couldn’t – they weren’t providing us with data, so we sent a pre-action letter, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, yes, and if I can help you on that point, if we look, please, at page 21 of this letter, we can see at paragraph 56 that what the NEU were asking for was all scientific advice that the government had relied on in reaching this decision. Is that right?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And to help us understand how matters had reached the stage of threatening to adjudicate this decision, can we look, please, at paragraph 27 of this letter, which is at page 8. We see from paragraph 27 that the NEU had met with the Department for Education through stakeholder meetings on 24 April, 1 May, 7 May and 12 May.

And if we can look, please, at paragraph 28, we see from that, that you yourself, Mr Courtney, had met with the Secretary of State for Education on 14th and 31 March – I beg your pardon. That should be 24th and 31 March, 7th, 14th, 21st and 28 April, and 6th, 12th, and 19 May.

We won’t go there but we know from elsewhere in the letter that the NEU was additionally invited to a separate meeting with SAGE, attended by Sir Patrick Vallance and Sir Chris Whitty on 14 May.

So Mr Courtney, I count that to be 14 meetings between the NEU and the Department for Education, Secretary of State or SAGE between 24th and 19 May – 24 March and 19 May. Is it right, though, that you consider that those meetings were not adequate engagement with the union during this period?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Well, they didn’t provide us with the data that we needed to understand the proposal to open schools on 1 June. If we were to support it, we’d want the data to show to our members to explain why it was a good thing. If it was the wrong thing, as we believed it was, we wanted to look at the data to see that.

I mean, I think your witness, Jon Coles, this morning told you that he was involved in meetings but didn’t feel that he was getting the data that he needed to represent the case. We were in that same position. We weren’t getting the data from that.

I mean, on one of the occasions when I met with Gavin Williamson, he told me – this was a wider stakeholder meeting. He told me that I sounded just like Dominic Cummings because I was always talking about the data as Dominic Cummings was. The data is important, and I think the Secretary of State should have been interested in the data as well.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Can we look back, then, at that letter before claim.

It is INQ000649155.

Sorry, I should have characterised it as a pre-action protocol letter.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And if we can look towards the back of that, page 22 of it, at paragraphs 60 and 61, we see there that your position was essentially that in the absence of having that data, the NEU needed to receive it and then needed five days from receipt to consider it. It sought an undertaking that the government would not make any final decision about whether to reopen schools until the NEU had that opportunity, and an undertaking that the government would not require, direct, or advise schools to reopen from 1 June until a meaningful opportunity to consider it had taken place.

Mr Courtney, you’ve been very clear that what you wanted was the data so that you could understand whether, in your view, reopening would create an increase in transmissions.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: But at this stage in the pandemic, I’m sure that you will recall that there was emerging concern that school closures were proving harmful to children. You’ve just accepted that you accepted that in your meeting with Sir Jon. There was rising concern about hidden harms, of abuse –

Mr Kevin Courtney: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: – neglect, domestic violence, and that the lack of education was increasing the disadvantage gap between the poorest students and others.

Taking a step back and understanding what you say about the risk of community transmission, do you think it was in children’s interests at this stage for the NEU to be prioritising sight of data over returning to face-to-face education for children?

Mr Kevin Courtney: What was in children’s interests was managing the pandemic properly. Managing it in the – in line with the best science.

If the government had followed our recommendation and closed schools earlier in March, then that period of school disclosure would have been less. If they’d followed our recommendation in June and got cases down and got test, track and trace working, then there would have been less school closures in the rest of the year.

So it’s not – I think your characterisation is wrong. It’s not us taking the data versus the interests of children. We wanted the data in the best interests of children. We were always seeking to manage the pandemic in the best way, and the – and that would allow you to have schools more open.

We met with the Danish teachers’ union around this time and talked to them about the fact that they’d managed to open their schools much earlier. And we were interested in that, but what was behind that was that their government had closed down society much sooner. By doing that, had far less cases and far less deaths. They had much smaller class sizes, so they were able to open in a much safer way. There are better ways –

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Kevin Courtney: – of running the pandemic than the way that our government did.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. I’m going to pause there again and just come back to refocus on our government’s approach.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Okay.

Counsel Inquiry: If we can look, please, at INQ000649156.

This is the Department for Education’s response to your pre-action protocol letter on Monday, 25 May.

If we can look, please, at page 3 of that, specifically paragraph 10.

We see that the letter provided you with links to the advice of SAGE and others that had been published the previous Friday, 22 May. You can see the list of that evidence there.

And if we go over the page, please, to look at paragraph 11, we see the response was that – the department’s view was that this would:

“… provide a large degree of transparency as to the scientific advice which the Government is taking into account.”

Mr Courtney, presuming that you had had a good look at that evidence that had been published the previous Friday, and understanding that you say you disagreed with it, would you accept that it was nonetheless reasonable for the government to be relying on the expert advice it had received?

Mr Kevin Courtney: The government should rely on expert advice, yes. We were pleased to get this letter from Andrew McCully, because, as I said, we weren’t getting responses to our informal requests for data.

The data it refers to here is publicly available data that we already had: the publication of the SAGE data on the 22nd. But it wasn’t full, was it? We know – I mean, I know from reading for this evidence session that Sir Patrick Vallance, in his Covid diary, wrote in June 2020 that the DfE had been unwilling to ask SAGE for information about childhood school transmission, because if they had asked SAGE for that, then it would be in the public domain.

And, you know, this letter refers us to SAGE saying that SAGE was supportive of – well, implying that SAGE would be supportive of the wider opening on 1 June. But as I said in an earlier answer, on 29 May, in an astonishing intervention from four senior members of SAGE, they disagreed with that. They said that we haven’t got cases down low enough, we can’t get test, track and trace running, this is isn’t the right way. And one of those four gentlemen that I spoke about said that an extra two weeks of closure now will be much less damaging to children than a further full closure because of a second peak down the road.

So that’s the balance that you have to look for.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Not whether we’re asking for data, but what is the correct way to manage these school closures in order to minimise the total period of school closure.

Counsel Inquiry: Well, the question, Mr Courtney, is about whether it is reasonable to rely on the official advice that the government had received. And I want to see if we can shortcut this slightly, because we were hearing from Sir Jon earlier today about further correspondence with NEU representatives in which they had cited the opinion of the BMA and the opinion of Independent SAGE. And indeed, I think in some of your own correspondence you cite Independent SAGE or the BMA.

And one of the points that Sir Jon makes, and I wonder how you would respond to that, is that it isn’t right to write correspondence or to advocate for a position relying only on the advice of the scientists with whom you agree and not citing the advice of scientists who the government had reasonably relied on. What do you say to that?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Well, I think that’s right. You should look at the science in the round. But I would say, in response to it, it is unreasonable of government that the DfE – not to ask SAGE to look at the evidence of childhood school transmission of the virus, as Sir Patrick Vallance said that they didn’t. And it’s unreasonable to ignore the position that these leading people, like Jeremy Farrar from the Wellcome Institute, also have.

And there is – sometimes there’s a contest over the science, but in my opinion, the government was just dead keen on getting schools open, no matter what the effect on the virus.

And I think you see that in the rest – you know, you see that in – at other points during the management of the pandemic when we did support opening, as in September 2020, but the government didn’t manage to get test track and trace in place then either.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Courtney.

Just before we leave this point about the situation in England in June, I just want to slightly unpick something you said earlier and ensure I understand it. Do you agree that there is a distinction between whether or not opening schools might have an effect on community transmission rates on the one hand, and, on the other hand, whether or not opening schools was safe for children and teachers themselves?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Do you agree that that is a distinction –

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, absolutely. There is a very clear distinction between the two. We were following – I mean, at some stages, at early stages, you couldn’t be sure quite what that distinction was. But it very quickly became clear that children were at low risk from Covid. That didn’t mean no risk, and many thousands of children have ended up with Long Covid in ways that I think could have – might have been avoided if the government that better mitigations in place, and that’s also true for staff, but there is a very clear distinction, and our actions were about community transmission –

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Kevin Courtney: – because – that’s because of the feedback they have on whether schools can be open or not.

Counsel Inquiry: I understand. Thank you, Mr Courtney.

So if we read in any EU correspondence, “It is not safe to open schools on 1 June”, we should read into that: because of community transmission rather than because of the effect on children and teachers; is that right?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yes, I think those questions of nomenclature, you could look back on those and think about those harder, but –

Counsel Inquiry: Some might say it’s more than nomenclature, because if you’re writing to teachers to say something isn’t safe, that is potentially quite an alarming –

Mr Kevin Courtney: Well, I was just going to make the point that Boris Johnson talked about schools being unsafe when he called for them to close in January 2021.

But yes, our point was community transmission is the question that we need to be looking at. That does, if – but if you reduce community transmission, then you do also improve the safety of individual members of staff from Long Covid. You improve the safety of any relatives that they have, that are clinically extremely vulnerable. You increase the safety of some members who are older and slightly more vulnerable.

So you do increase safety of teachers and other staff in schools, but fundamentally, it was about community transmission, which would, though, allow you to open schools for less periods of – for, you know, it would allow you to have schools open more of the time if you managed the pandemic properly, which our government failed to do.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. Thank you.

I’d like to come now, if I may, to the situation as it was developing in Wales during this same period. And I think it might help if I set out just a little context to these questions.

We know that in late May, the NEU and other education unions were engaging with the Welsh Government about the Welsh Government’s plans for a wider reopening of schools in Wales, and my Lady will hear more about that is in due course from Mr Mark Drakeford, but in summary, the proposal that the Welsh Government made to the NEU and others on 26 May was that the summer term of 2020 could finish early, on 22 June, allowing for a holiday over the last week of June and all of July, but that the autumn term would then begin early, at the start of August, when there were likely to be lower transmission rates, allowing pupils to receive more face-to-face education before an anticipated second wave in the autumn of 2020, which might force more closures.

And the detail of that, my Lady, is set out in a statement that Ms Kirsty Williams provided for Module 2B, but I don’t think for our purposes we need to go there.

Just for the transcript, it’s INQ000362237, at paragraph 184.

But I’d like, Mr Courtney, to ask you please, instead, to look at the note of the union’s engagement with that proposal.

That is at INQ000607980. Thank you.

This is a note of a meeting on 29 May, when the education unions gathered to provide their feedback on the Welsh Government’s proposal that I’ve just described.

We see at the top of this document a number of representatives from the Welsh Government were present, including the minister for education, and we see a number of union representatives were present, including David Evans of the National Education Union.

And we see at the foot of that:

“Steve Davies …”

And pausing there, I should have said that he was identified as a director of the Welsh Education directorate.

“… [thanking] members for their feedback at short notice, and concluded that moving the summer term dates was not a viable option following feedback from the members. Steve expressed that there was a strong desire for learners to get some kind of contact with their educational settings before September, and that [somebody] would set out options to the group.”

Then, over the page, we see a list of further options. I won’t go through them all, but they are essentially tweaks to the term dates in order to achieve the objective of having children in school at some point over the summer.

We see below, if we may, under “main comments” provided by the unions:

“An emphasis on the required scientific evidence …

“Clear and quick guidance …”

And we see:

“There is still a concern regarding contractual issues if an extra week is added before the summer term.”

Mr Courtney, a few questions arise. First, would you agree that what the Welsh agreement were doing here was engaging with the unions in order to provide more face-to-face teaching time for children whilst transmission rates were low over summer, in line with the scientific advice that they had had?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I should say, before answering that, that this wasn’t something that I was aware of before preparing for this. I had no direct personal involvement at the time, although I’ve read all the documentation and had a chance to talk with the unions in Wales, so I do feel able to engage and answer the questions.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Kevin Courtney: The idea of raising this particular suggestion, of bringing the holiday period forward by four weeks, that is not a bad thing to raise, and she certainly was engaging with the unions when she raised it, which was the question that you asked.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

And is it correct, as noted here from this minute, that on 29 May the unions opposed the first proposal that the Welsh Government made to shorten the summer term and start the autumn term early?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Yeah. I mean, I’ve got – I actually have a slightly different timescale from yours. I think it was raised on 25 May rather than 26 May, but there are differences in the documents. But it was raised on either that Monday or the Tuesday, the 25th or 26th.

The unions raised a set of questions about it, and there are a number of questions that it would occur to you to think about. If you’re bringing the end of term forward by a month, to 22 June, then – from 29 May, that’s only three weeks away. So you’re bringing the end of term forward. That means that any events that you have, any work that you have to do of getting children ready for – you know, getting ready for the end of term or any work you have to do of preparing for the next term, is suddenly shortened by four weeks.

Counsel Inquiry: And do you consider that that is why the unions opposed that plan?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Well, that’s not my point, no. My point is that there are those questions and there are contractual questions, and then the Welsh Government asked them to consult a light-touch consultation with their members.

So between the 25th or the 26th or 29th, they had that light touch consultation with their members, and members didn’t think it was a good idea. So it was raised on 25 May and dropped by the Welsh Government on 29 May.

Now, that’s a very short timescale to have any sort of discussion about something of the scale – at the scale of this. And there would be lots of questions that members would have about how you could get ready for those changes.

Counsel Inquiry: Understood. Thank you.

If I may, then, we’ll carry on and then come back at the end to the merits of that position.

If we can look, please, at INQ000350747, we see the announcement that Ms Kirsty Williams, Education Secretary, eventually made on 3 June 2020. And it’s not apparent from this document, but instead of announcing the restructured summer term that she had hoped to, she instead announced something of a plan B, and it was that schools stay open for an extra week in the summer term ending at 27 July, and that that week’s holiday would be redistributed to the autumn term.

In this statement, what I want to draw you are attention to is that she says:

“During this time I would expect schools to use this period to …”

And we see a focus here on: the health and wellbeing of learners and staff; a check-in with learners to support them in their preparedness; test operations for the autumn term; and to build confidence of families.

Are those objectives, Mr Courtney, objectives that the unions would have supported?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Those are – were the objectives.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Can we look, then, at INQ000615673.

This is the note of the meeting following that announcement at which the Welsh Government discussed this plan with the union representatives on 9 June, and we can see at page 2 the response of the unions to this.

Under:

“Huw Owen requested feedback from all representatives on the gender feeling of members.”

And we have, their:

“Main concern was the lack of guidance and information at the time of announcement.

“Extra week an issue, consternation amongst members, some already booked holidays, have worked throughout lockdown including Easter and half term holidays and feel they have fulfilled their contractual duty.”

We won’t go through all of those bullet points but perhaps we’ll give you an opportunity to take a moment to look at them.

And because I want to ask you, Mr Courtney, this list is about logistical concerns and practical concerns of union members. It’s not about transmission. It’s not about safety. Is that in accurate reflection of why the unions opposed this second proposal of the Welsh Government to provide more face-to-face time for pupils?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I wasn’t in the meetings, as I said earlier, so these are minutes of the meeting. And I haven’t had a chance to discuss all of that in depth with the unions in Wales. What I understood happened was that the first proposal was raised on 25 May, then the Wales government dropped it on 29 May. So that was the proposal to bring the holidays forward by four weeks.

Then on 29 May they raised the prospect of putting the term back by one week instead.

Then they asked unions again to consult with their members.

And I had thought it was slightly shorter than this period. I thought they were asked on the 29th and then asked to come back the following Monday. This is a week the following Monday. So I can’t be certain about those particular dates. But those sorts of questions would have come up from members.

Counsel Inquiry: Well, Mr Courtney, with respect, they don’t appear to be questions; they appear to be objections. Reasons not to do this; is that right?

Mr Kevin Courtney: There are some question marks in there, but yes, members would have come up with objections, if you like. I mean, that – that would happen. You know, people were presented with something that is presented very quickly, you don’t have a long time to respond to it, you’re thinking about – you’re thinking on your feet about these questions, and members – some members would have said – and why shouldn’t they? They’d been working really hard, they’d been in schools working on rotas, they’d been teaching online, the support staff had been in school the whole time working with children. And if they’d got a holiday booked, why wouldn’t they raise that as an issue?

Counsel Inquiry: So, Mr –

Mr Kevin Courtney: But this quite a small change that the government is producing, on one level, and the effects – the positive effects of it, if there were positive effects – and I think you would have to, you know, to model that and think that through – it’s one week, and people didn’t want to make that change.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Courtney –

Mr Kevin Courtney: And so when the unions then represented the views of their members, that was the response that – you know, that’s what members had said to them.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. Mr Courtney, if I may, we discussed earlier your members’ views about – your members’ concerns about the impact on children and young people of lockdown and of school closures, including, as we’ve said, the disadvantage gap, the impact on mental health and wellbeing. And you agreed a moment ago that those objectives of Ms Williams, in seeking to alter those term dates, were worthy objectives, and yet here we see the unions objecting to two plans, and in Mr Drakeford’s words, and I can give the reference in a moment, “The reason for doing that was because of the primacy of contractual arrangements.”

What would you say, Mr Courtney, to the suggestion that the unions acted here in members’ interests but that that position was one that wasn’t in children’s best interests?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I don’t think that’s a fair characterisation of these sorts of proposals raised with the very little time that they were presented.

You know, to produce something saying, “We’re going to bring the end of term forward by four weeks”, and to produce that at such a pace that it’s three weeks before that period, that’s not seriously thought through.

The second proposal of extending the end of term, there are worthy objectives, but would they be met is a different question. Would those worthy objectives be met by this extension of a week? And I think many of our members would have doubted that they would be met in that sort of way, and then they had their objections to it.

This is part of the interaction between stakeholder groups. And I must say, on behalf of the Welsh unions, when I spoke to them, they thought that they had a very good relationship with Welsh Government during the pandemic. They were quite taken aback by the position that Kirsty and then Vaughan Gething and then Mark Drakeford have taken in this. And they were working hard to get social partnership running, to make schools as open as they could be, to make them as safe as they could be, and they engaged throughout the pandemic in those sorts of – that sort of thinking with Welsh Government.

They thought their relationship was quite good. They’re disappointed by these statements from the government and the attacks on the unions that have come from those people. And they don’t think they’re worthy or valid in these situations.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Courtney.

My Lady, I said a moment ago I would give the reference for Mr Drakeford’s statement, and I didn’t.

Mr Courtney, I don’t think I need to take you there, but just for the record, it’s INQ000588203, and it’s paragraph 16 of that.

I’d like to move forward now in time, if I may, to the beginning of January 2021. And Mr Courtney, of course, you know that this was during a period when schools had closed again to most children, and again the two key policies for mitigation were: first, allowing vulnerable children to attend school, and second, facilitating the remote education of children who could not be in school. And we discussed earlier your agreement with my proposal that that was essential work throughout the pandemic.

Can we look, please, now at INQ000652055. This is a letter written by Unison, so not your union, Mr Courtney, but one of the signatories to your statement, to the Secretary of State for Education in England on 22 January 2021. We see from the first line that this was a letter written on behalf of staff working in special schools.

Can we please read from the second sentence of the third paragraph, “We agree that the most vulnerable children”. Thank you. The letter states that the union:

“… agrees that the most vulnerable children should be in school, but the wider definition of ‘vulnerable’ seen in this current lockdown has led to a significant increase in numbers of pupils attending special schools. This is putting support staff and pupils in these schools at risk and undermining the benefits of reducing community transmission.

“We ask the Government to implement urgent additional measures for special schools, including …”

And at the first bullet point, they request urgent review of the guidance as to who should be a vulnerable learner.

They say:

“In particular, the guidance should make clear that it may not be possible for every student with an Education, Health and Care plan to attend their special school or alternative provision setting.”

And at the next bullet point:

“Asking schools to carry out individual risk assessments of each pupil, with the emphasis on only attending the site where a pupil’s circumstances mean that it is genuinely not possible for them to be educated at home.”

Would you agree, Mr Courtney, that that letter appears to be aiming to reduce the numbers of children with education, health and care plans that were attending special schools?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I think you have to think about the situation leading up to this letter being sent and to read down a bit further in it, as well. Because what I take this letter as being about, fundamentally, is the request for vaccination of people who work in special schools. And you’ll see that in the fourth bullet point, there.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Cases had been rising dramatically. The Kent variant in the run-up to December. Then there was the period, you know, the lost Christmas. Then there was the question of Gavin Williamson saying he was going to open all schools, or all schools outside London, on January 4th, schools opening and then closing the very next – the very same day when Boris Johnson said they were unsafe to be open because they were vectors of transmission.

So that was the biggest message that was then being given out in society, was that schools were unsafe because of vectors of transmission.

Now, we were fighting for that understanding of community transmission, but if you’re working in a special school, you knew that your school had always had far more children in than, proportionately, than primary and secondary schools. You also knew that in very many special schools, your chance of social distancing was very dramatically lower.

I mean, in some cases you’re dealing with children who are – well, you’re dealing with their bodily fluids, in some cases, in some sorts of special schools.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Courtney, I’m sorry, the question was whether you agree that this letter appears to be aiming to reduce the number of children. I think, in setting that context, perhaps you’re agreeing that that is the aim of this letter. Would that be right?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Okay, but I think that context is important. Unison would have been facing very many calls from members saying, “We’re not sure that we’re safe in this circumstance.”

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Kevin Courtney: You know, that will have been the position that Unison was facing. So they sent a letter, but as I say, the fourth bullet point here, they were asking for vaccination of their members working in special schools. There had been priority vaccination of people working in the NHS, absolutely rightly. The number of staff working in special schools is a very small component of staff working in our schools altogether, and certainly, you know, these were amongst the people who were – had least protection from the virus in society. Certainly, people in the NHS were in that category, but –

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Courtney, I’m so sorry to interrupt you. We have had a module on vaccination, which included vaccination priority.

I want to ask you in this question about – and I think I understand from your answer that you’re also identifying the very difficult balance between those wider concerns about transmission, community transmission, vaccine rollout, but on this occasion, the individual interests of these children with education, health and care plans who may have wanted to attend their special schools. Do you think that, on this occasion, this union got the balance right between those children’s interests and those wider contextual interests that you’ve identified?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I mean, I think if the staff had been vaccinated, then there would – all these questions would have faded away. So I think Unison was properly trying to address that balance of risks, the balance between staff and teachers, and was suggesting a way forward that resolved them.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Can we look now, please, at INQ000350774. This is a letter from the same period but sent by the NASUWT Cymru to Mr Mark Drakeford on 12 January 2021, so again, not your union, but a signatory to your witness statement.

And in terms of context, this letter was written shortly after the Welsh Government had shared draft guidance with the NASUWT in which schools were required to provide live lessons to pupils, required rather than invited.

If we look, please, at the middle paragraph on page 2, we see the union’s response to this.

“There was no consultation over the changes to the Guidance and the implication of the change is, of course, that teachers throughout Wales can now be directed to undertake Live Streaming. This arbitrary change was in direct conflict with the purported aims of the Welsh Government to engage in Social Partnership …”

And we see at the bottom the objection that it would:

“… lead to a damaging increase in stress and workload on teachers in Wales.”

And again, in terms of wider context, the Welsh Government’s position was that this move to mandating some live streaming of lessons would ensure that there was equality of provision for students in Wales, so going some way towards that disadvantage gap that we’ve discussed.

Wouldn’t this intervention from the NASUWT have meant that not all children would have been able to access live streamed lessons, and wouldn’t that have been detrimental for disadvantaged children?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I mean, I should say again that I had no knowledge of this before preparing for this –

Counsel Inquiry: Understood, thank you.

Mr Kevin Courtney: – and wasn’t directly involved in it. But I’ve read this letter, and the NASUWT in it state absolutely that they support synchronous live learning. The content of this letter is about a relationship between union and management, where there have been consensual changes, and where a change has been made without proper consultation, and they’re asking for it to be reasserted that consultation is happening in these circumstances. I think that’s a proper thing for a union to raise.

It isn’t saying that people shouldn’t be engaged in synchronous live learning, which was by then absolutely commonplace across the profession, and members of all unions engaging in that.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Courtney, in that answer, and I think in some of your previous answers, you’ve emphasised the importance of consultation and the difficulty of things happening quickly. You talked about the very short period of consultation when we were looking at the July term time issue in Wales and, as you say, that is something reflected in this letter.

More generally, what would you say to the suggestion that, during a pandemic, governments were having to make the policy at breakneck speed, not always able to consult as much as they would have liked?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I mean, clearly during a pandemic, there are times when you have to make decisions quickly. But you should try and make the right decision, and sometimes – I mean, for example, around the question of the opening of schools in January 2021, the way the government behaved created enormous stress amongst teachers and parents in schools, and that was not proper – that wasn’t decision making being made in an urgent way because it had to be made in an urgent way; it was decision making – they had the minutes of SAGE of December 18, 2020, which said that you could not open the schools and have the R rate below 1, and they just delayed and delayed and delayed before they made the right decision.

So, yes, some decisions have to be made quickly. And you should still try and engage staff and unions with them. Some decisions have to be made quickly. Other decisions can be planned better than they had been planned, and there is no reason not to consult with unions about changes to contracts during the pandemic.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Courtney.

There is just one document I want to trouble you with before I come to your reflections.

That is INQ000649175 – I beg your pardon, that’s the wrong reference. That’s not the document I want to ask you to look at. I’m so sorry.

Can we look, please, at INQ000587899. Thank you very much.

This is the witness statement of Sir Daniel Moynihan, who is a head teacher by profession and CEO of the Harris Federation, a large multi-academy trust comprising 55 academies.

I think you’ve had the opportunity to consider this and I want to ask you, please, about paragraph 129, which is at page 21.

And here Sir Daniel is discussing some of the challenges that his schools faced in delivering remote learning.

And he says:

“Unhelpful challenges included the National Education Union Regional Representatives at one point demanding that Harris teachers teaching lessons online at home should be allowed to turn their cameras off for reasons of privacy. This was clearly not something we were able to agree to given the disruption to learning.”

Mr Courtney, is that a position that you recognise? And if so, wouldn’t that have made the experience of children learning effectively from a blank screen very difficult?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Well, that wasn’t a position of the national union. That was never something that we advocated for, that these lessons should be taught with cameras off.

So this is something raised by one of our reps or maybe two of our reps. You know, I don’t know the further context. And nor do I know at what point – from this paragraph here, at what point that was raised.

Now, it is certainly true that at the beginning of the lockdown in March 2020, when teachers were learning and understanding how to work with Teams classrooms or Zoom classrooms, that there would have been a lot less knowledge of how to do that well.

So, you know, the thing that you can do of having a false background behind you would not be something that everybody would be aware of. So some of them may have thought they were showing their home when they’re teaching online in these – so I don’t know what the context of this is. I don’t know when it was raised. I don’t know what that context is. It wasn’t the position of the national union. And something has been raised with them, and he hasn’t agreed with it.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Courtney.

I’d like to turn now to your reflections and your overall recommendations for the future.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Thank you.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Courtney, overall, the TUC advocates I think rigorous planning for infection prevention and control in schools in the future. And I think you have seen the witness statement of Professor Viner, from whom we’ll hear later in these hearings. I don’t think I need to ask you to go there, but I will read you what he says.

Mr Kevin Courtney: I’ve read it, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. I will read everybody else what it shows, then.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Sure.

Counsel Inquiry: It says:

[As read] “I have reservations about whether the recommendation of permission for schools to implement stringent and evidence-supported control strategies early in an outbreak situation and to prioritise in-person learning is workable and realistic in terms of individual schools introducing stringent control strategies. I absolutely support keeping schools open to prioritise in-person learning, but each pandemic will differ and there may not be a need for a control measures in schools.”

You, of course, Mr Courtney, are very familiar with the complexity of the school estate and of the costs implications of improving that estate, and also of all the competing demands on the education budget in England, and indeed across the UK. So there are some complex factors at play here: on one hand, practicality; on the other hand, uncertainty about the nature of a future pandemic; and also costs.

What do you say, then, is a proportionate way to square that circle in terms of preparing schools for infection prevention and control in the future?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Well, I mean, if we agree that closing schools was a necessity in this pandemic for at least some time, but that it has had very serious consequences for young people as a result of that, then we should be prepared to invest to try to stop that happening in the future.

I think we let children down by not investing pre-pandemic in smaller class sizes, et cetera, so – but on this question of the school estate, there are a number of other pressures on the school estate at the moment. We should be, and the government – the DfE is doing work on how do you get schools ready for the net zero for the climate demands. There is the RAAC concrete, there is the asbestos that’s in many schools. There is a need for a thoroughgoing programme of work in schools, part of which should be improving the ventilation and the air filtration in schools, which would not only help in – potentially in many pandemics – I mean, I recognise what Russell Viner says, that in some pandemics you might not need to close schools. In others, there might be even more need to close schools. If we were – in what we’d been facing was not Covid-19 but the Spanish flu of 1918, which did affect children much more than adults, then you would definitely have had to take measures.

So having ventilation, filtration, in place in schools would be a real benefit, I think, every year around cold and flu. It would be a benefit in the summer – you know, in the summer of 2022, when children lost time in schools because it was too hot and the schools didn’t have enough ventilation and they had to close because it was too hot. So investing in ventilation, I would think, should be a massive priority for the government.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Courtney.

I think, in connection with that, that you have also seen in your evidence bundle the evidence of Ms Susan Acland-Hood, permanent secretary for the Department for Education, and, within that, her summary of the department’s work to improve air quality in schools.

Do we take it from your answer that you approve of

that and that you think it is a valuable step?

Mr Kevin Courtney: I do. I think it should have been worked on at earlier

stages during the pandemic. Because, you know, we

supported the opening of schools in September 2020 and

in March 2020, but it would have been better if we’d

had – I mean, following March 2020, it would have been

much better if there were mitigations in place like

ventilation and mask wearing so that we didn’t have so

many children who had to have time off because they had

Covid. And there were huge – there was a huge amount

of pupil absence even after schools opened.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Kevin Courtney: So it would have been better to invest early on that.

Counsel Inquiry: You said opening in March 2020. I think you meant

March 2021?

Mr Kevin Courtney: 2021, yes, sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: Not a problem.

Turning then to broader reflections and

recommendations, and again, you set these out in some

detail in your statement. I think I understand that

many of your recommendations are essentially targeted at

improving the overall resilience, so you mentioned

a moment ago smaller class sizes, for example.

You will know that the terms of reference for this

Inquiry are quite narrowly limited to measures that can be taken to mitigate the impact of a pandemic.

Mr Kevin Courtney: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: Is there anything over and above infection prevention and control and broader resilience that we have discussed that you would suggest my Lady should consider?

Mr Kevin Courtney: Well, I really do think that class size comes into that. As I was trying to say earlier about the situation in Denmark, which did open schools much earlier than we did, part of the reason they were able to do that was that class sizes were lower in the first place.

Then they went back, first of all, with half class sizes. And that meant very small numbers compared with the bubbles that we had in this country.

They also had much better space standards.

So I do think that smaller class sizes is a part of pandemic preparedness.

And right now, pupil numbers in primary schools are falling because of demographic changes. If we could – you know, there’s a way of not closing schools but instead of – having class sizes that are smaller. That would be pandemic preparedness –

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you very much, Mr Courtney.

Please finish your answer.

Mr Kevin Courtney: I also think that dealing with childhood poverty is

a part of pandemic preparedness. The fact that so many

children couldn’t access – at first didn’t have

devices, didn’t have data, don’t have rooms to do their

work in, that leads to those differences in outcomes

that happen by wealth – doing what we can to reduce

child poverty and reduce childhood inequality is part of

pandemic preparedness, but so is that investment in

ventilation, air filtration, those sorts of questions.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you, very much, Mr Courtney.

My Lady, those are my questions. Do you have any

questions?

Lady Hallett: No, I don’t, thank you very much, Ms Cayoun.

Thank you very much, Mr Courtney, for the help that

you’ve given to the Inquiry and the help that your

colleagues have also given. I appreciate there’s some

difficult areas of tension between various bodies, so

thank you for trying to assist us in the way that you

have. Very grateful.

The Witness: Thank you very much.

Lady Hallett: I shall return tomorrow at 10.00.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Cayoun.

(4.37 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10.00 am the following day)