15 October 2025

(10.00 am)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: Good morning.

My Lady, please may I call Ms Susan Acland-Hood.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood

MS SUSAN ACLAND-HOOD (sworn).

Lady Hallett: Thank you for coming along to help us,

Ms Acland-Hood.

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.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Susan Elizabeth Acland-Hood Andrews.

Lead 8: Ms Acland-Hood Andrews, is that how – would you prefer if I addressed you in that way?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: No, just Acland-Hood or Susan Acland-Hood is fine.

Lead 8: Ms Acland-Hood, you ought to have in front of you three different witness statements, or they’ll certainly come up in front of you. I’m going to take them one at a time.

The first is INQ000587823. And may I check, please, that you’re content that that witness statement is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: The second statement is INQ000587992, and are you content that that witness statement is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And the third statement is INQ000146054. And again, are you content that that statement is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Thank you.

I want to ask you a little bit about your background, please. I think it’s right that you were the chief executive of Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service between 2016 and 2020; is that right?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: That’s correct.

Lead 8: And that in September of 2020, you came to the Department for Education?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, that’s right.

Lead 8: And in fact you joined in the aftermath of the assessment issue that had arisen or had certainly become a real issue in August 2020; is that correct?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And you joined, the Inquiry understands, because Mr Jonathan Slater had resigned?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: That’s not quite right. I initially was asked to come and give assistance as a temporary second permanent secretary in the department, specifically focused on addressing the exam issues. Very shortly after I joined

in that second permanent secretary role, Jonathan

resigned, so about four days after, in fact, and I was

asked to become acting permanent secretary and I then

applied for the job and substantively was given it in

December.

Lead 8: I see. I’m grateful for that clarification. But

I think the important point for our purpose is that you

weren’t in post at the time of some of the specific

events that Module 8 is interested in?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: That’s right.

Lead 8: But you are authorised, I think, to provide evidence as to the Department for Education’s assessment of those issues and reflections upon them; is that right?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I’m very happy to speak on behalf of the department. I will be doing that from what I have gathered from documentary evidence for the portion where I wasn’t there in the department.

Lead 8: All right.

I’m being asked if you could perhaps slow down a touch.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Of course.

Lead 8: I’ll try and do the same.

What I wanted to do this morning, Ms Acland-Hood, was maybe try and draw the camera back a bit from some of the issues that the Inquiry has examined and to ascertain what the Department for Education accepts, and then to seek your assistance in clarifying some of the factual issues that evidence had been given about over the past couple of weeks, but perhaps require a degree of clarity.

So can I start, then, please, with planning –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Mm.

Lead 8: – and ask whether it’s accepted by the Department for Education that although SAGE had started to provide advice from 4 February 2020, that there might be mass school closures, that the provision of this advice didn’t prompt operational planning for the closure of schools?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I think that the department was planning on the assumption that there might be local or regional or, indeed, individual school closures in response to workforce challenges, but did not, until quite a late stage, do extensive operational planning for the full closure of all schools.

Lead 8: And does it also follow that that advice hadn’t prompted operational planning as to how children’s social care services would be provided in the event that the pandemic became more severe?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Again, I think there was quite a lot of operational planning that was based on assumptions around workforce shortage, so people were doing scenario planning based on proportions of social workers being ill, but much less planning, actually both a long time before the pandemic, and in that period, was focused on the social work consequences of other infection control measures like lockdown.

Lead 8: Yes, so rather than thinking about operationally “what will we do if the pandemic gets worse”, and, for example, children aren’t at school, how will social care or child protection systems be maintained in that scenario, it was that sort of planning that wasn’t in place until a late stage?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I think people were planning for what happens if the pandemic gets worse and lots of social workers are ill –

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – instead.

Lead 8: And is it also accepted that there weren’t any specific plans in fact for example delineating who vulnerable children might be until in and around 17, 18 March?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think for the purposes of who might be going to be kept in school, that true, yes.

Lead 8: And I think it follows from all of the evidence that we’ve heard, that because there was no planning around the prospect that schools might close until a late stage and, I think, can we check that we’re on the same ground here by “late stage” we mean 16, 17, 18 March?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: That’s right.

Lead 8: That for that reason there hadn’t been any meetings with the leaders of multi-academy trusts or school leaders of local authority schools or with local authorities in order to discuss that eventuality?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: In order to discuss the specific mass closure of schools, yes, correct. There were other meetings discussing other aspects, but not that.

Lead 8: And what, in terms of the other meetings and the other things that were being discussed in the lead-up to school closures, what sort of things were being focused on at that point?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So there would have been meetings and guidance focused on infection control measures in schools, for example.

Lead 8: Yes, and do you accept, and hopefully we won’t need to go to it, but by infection control measures at that point, that was the sort of basic advice around how long you, you know, washing your hands –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – wiping down surfaces, that kind of advice, not infection control in the sense of there should be distancing in schools or –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, it was the passing on of that, of the current public advice –

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – on infection control.

Lead 8: And is it accepted, then, that a number of consequences flowed from that? And if I may, I’ll put those to you. Schools hadn’t been given notice by the Department for Education that they should start to make plans for educating most children in their homes, and I mean prior to the 15th, 16th, that period?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So there was standing existing guidance from the department that asked every school to have an emergency plan, including a plan for school closure and we’d frequently managed the closure of individual schools or groups of schools in response, for example, to – for an individual school it might be a buildings issue, for a group of schools it might be a gas leak that meant that an area was evacuated. So as a standing instruction to the system, every school was expected to have an emergency plan of that kind. And we were also having conversations with schools about individual closures and, indeed, small numbers of schools were closing because of illness or anxiety or because they had an individual pupil affected and they were managing, for example, deep cleans around that.

So there were conversations going on about individual schools thinking about an individual closure, but it was predicated on the assumption that that was workforce or illness related. I think it would be fair to say it was predicated on, I assume it would be for relatively short periods –

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – not the whole system for a long period.

Lead 8: I mean, most people who have children at school, will be familiar with snow days, and the kind of very widespread events that might close schools. But again, none of that is premised on parents, for example, providing education to their children or children being educated online.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I mean, I would say, actually, that the guidance we give the system now does have a strong expectation that, even for a relatively short closure, there will be remote education provided. But at the time that was less common.

Lead 8: Forgive me, I didn’t want to speak over you –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Sorry.

Lead 8: – and we’ll come to what may have changed since, but I think at the time, and I think – I understand you’re accepting that schools weren’t given the forewarning that they might be required to pivot to educating children in their homes for potentially a significant period of time?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, that’s correct.

Lead 8: And do you accept that schools just weren’t prepared for that wholesale pivot to having most children at home and in need of education?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think different schools were very differently prepared. And again, I think you’ve heard some evidence to the Inquiry on the preparations made by both some trusts and some individual schools. So my characterisation would be that preparation was very uneven and not where you would have wanted it to be.

Lead 8: And do you accept it was uneven because, in order to provide or in order to have or achieve consistency, there does need to be guidance issued from the centre that ensures that everyone is preparing –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – in the same sorts of way?

And do you also accept the evidence which has emerged since, that many schools in England weren’t geared towards teaching online? So, for example, teachers hadn’t been trained in online teaching or schools didn’t have access to the sorts of platforms, maybe, that some schools did have access to.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, again, I completely accept that for the generality of the system. I think, again, for complete accuracy, there were some schools that were – that had done more of that in their daily life and were better prepared than others.

Lead 8: Yes. I think the figures, obviously, that were provided by the Department for Education in the June of 2020 were 12,000 schools that didn’t have a learning platform. I think the majority of those, to be accurate, were primary schools?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Right.

Lead 8: And that 1.3 million children didn’t have access to an appropriate device.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: We’ll obviously come back to the impact that had on children’s education. Just on the issue of the vulnerable child policy, if I may call it that, but the mitigation of allowing vulnerable children to go to school, is it accepted that another one of the consequences of the lack of planning was that there hadn’t been time to engage with local authorities or school leaders of MATs or school leaders of local authority schools in order to consider the best or the potentially best ways of identifying vulnerable children?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, again, from my reading of the documents, I think there were conversations, again, about – I mean, recognising that in any emergency of this kind it tends to be the people who are already vulnerable who suffer the most.

I think there were conversations that were going on about trying to make sure that we were heavily focusing on vulnerable children, but on that specific issue of identifying people to attend school in a mass closure, that’s correct.

Lead 8: Well, I think it’s more about being able to have the conversations in advance –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – in order to think about how – there’s the messaging issue that I’ll come to –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – but I think understanding from schools and from – if I say “schools”, in general – if – I mean leaders and local authorities – in order to understand potentially who do they say the most vulnerable children are, if we’re categorising vulnerable children, are there children who we are missing, and if we’re affording a discretion, are there specific groups of children that schools think we ought to be including in the guidance as well? So it’s the lost opportunity for those sorts of conversations.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And then also that schools missed the opportunity to have conversations with families in advance of the announcement being made that schools would close about the prospect, for example, that their child might come into school?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. I’m pausing on that one because I think that – and, again, the department has accepted in all of our corporate statements that there should have been more planning, both a long way in advance and in that immediate period. I think the communication of the expectation that schools might be about to close, in that very short-term period, I think would have been remained problematic even if the planning had been done.

And again, I’ve thought about this quite carefully. I think that ideally you would do that planning not in the heat of a growing crisis, because I genuinely do think there are difficult choices to be made at a point where you are seeking to keep schools open as long as possible. And again, there was a principle that I don’t think was firmly established until summer 2020, but which was that school is so important to the lives of children that you want it to be one of the very last things you close and one of the very first things you open in trying to manage spread.

And when you decide that, you almost, by definition, put schools at the frontier, you put them at the point where you’re going to be making decisions both to open and close at a cusp point where it’s difficult to make that decision, and so I think talking to people about being about to close before you get to that point, when people are anxious and in the midst of it, was a difficult decision to make and I think would have been a difficult decision to make even in the presence of more detailed planning.

And that was true, I think, in the run-up to, in December and January, where there was more planning but it still felt very difficult to signal that without accidentally catalyzing it before the moment where people had decided it was – the decision had to be made.

And, so I – again – I’m sorry, I’ll stop in a minute – I think my reflection is we should have done more sharing, we should have engaged people better but the absolute best time to have done that would have been further in advance as part of more detailed contingency planning such that when you got into the crisis moment people had more of that understanding at their fingertips rather than being doing it in that crisis moment.

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: And I know, you know, the best time to plant an oak tree is 100 years ago and the second best time is now, but I do think there’s something about that decision-making in those very fraught moments.

Lead 8: Yes, decision making at an inflection point –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Correct.

Lead 8: – may not be necessarily – may not have the outcome that you or, let’s be accurate about this, it’s not decision making, it’s –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – (overspeaking) –

Lead 8: – consultation and sharing information at an inflection point, maybe – may lead to consequences –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – that are not intended.

But just sticking with here –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – does that mean that what you’re suggesting is that in a future pandemic – and I’m putting aside long-term planning for a future pandemic, but you really need to start to have those conversations before you’re heading towards the tipping point?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: So here, in February, when you could have a calm conversation and say, you know, that “We haven’t reached this point yet –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – but if we were to reach it, here are the sorts of things that you need to do”?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: A number of witnesses before the Inquiry have talked about the potentially stigmatising effect of the messaging about vulnerable children or, as the director from Kent Social Services described it, almost anger on the part of people, you know, “You’re telling everyone else their children shouldn’t go to school so why should mine?” Do you accept, again, that that was one of the consequences of the lack of planning, that there hadn’t been time to think about how that message would be provided to people if there was – if this policy was going to be implemented?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I certainly think more planning would have given more time to think about the messaging. I’m not sure I’d make the direct connection with a sense of stigma, partly because I think that reluctance of people to send their children, particularly in the first lockdown, was more related to perceptions around safety than stigma, and we see that both in surveys that were carried out and in what happened in January, where the – I don’t think there was a reason why stigma would have been different but perceptions of safety were and the numbers were very different.

Lead 8: So, again, if we just stick on that issue for a moment, do you accept, though, that the messaging and putting it in terms of vulnerability, was nonetheless potentially a barrier to some people sending their children to school and the different kinds of messaging needed to be provided in order to get more children into school in the early part of the pandemic?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think more time to plan would have allowed us to do better work on the messaging, certainly.

Lead 8: Because, I mean, I think, witnesses like the Children’s Commissioner, I think, have said it could have been framed in a much more positive way, in other words there could have been ways to convey this to families that didn’t make it seem as though it were punitive or that it was an unsafe thing to do.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, again, I hesitate on that because I think … I don’t see anything in the department’s messaging from that time that made it look punitive and there was quite a lot of care taken to make the point that schools were not closing because they were unsafe but because there was a need to reduce overall community transmission. I think again, however, I completely accept your point that more time would have allowed more thought, work and consultation on trying to make sure the messaging was as good as it could have been. I think it would still have been difficult. I mean, I think the overarching message to society at that time was so strongly that the right thing to do was to stay at home that you were going to have difficulty persuading people not to.

Lead 8: But do you accept that that’s not inexorable because – that that will be the position because the concern is, obviously, that it leaves very, very many very vulnerable children in potentially dangerous situations and that everything does need to be done to try to get those children into a safe place –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – during those sorts of periods?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think it would have been much better if there’d been earlier planning. I think we could have done better messaging and I think that might well have helped. I’m just not sure it would have been the silver bullet. I think it would have remained difficult.

Lead 8: All right. And maybe we can come and consider some of the issues that might have made a difference in January 2021.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Can I just turn, then, to the issue that has been raised with a number of witnesses, which is the position of children who had education, health and care plans and trying to understand what the rationale for allowing, on the face of the policy, those children to attend school was.

If I can just premise the question by saying that – and the Inquiry has looked at the guidance for March and April and I think this follows through into the guidance of May 2020, as well – that on the face of the policies, it said that children with an education, health and care plan could attend school but the policy then qualified it effectively by saying that the test – and I mean “test” in the sense of a test in guidance – was whether or not children with an EHCP whose personal care needs couldn’t be met at home could go to school, and whether – so that’s the premise.

And first of all, was that the intention of the policy: that really only a subset of children with education, health and care plans should attend school?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So I think the – I think there were two aims in allowing children with an education, health and care plan to attend school. The first was around care and safety and recognising that some of those children would get better care and be safer at school because of the needs that they had. And I think there was a second concern which was around the provision of their education, which again, in general, for a child with an education, health and care plan, is better provided in school. And in a sense, the essence of the education, health and care plan being in place is that they need specialist provision in order to be able to get good access to their education.

I think the balance between those two aims shifted from the very first iteration of the guidance. I think it actually shifted quite quickly but I think the very first iteration of the guidance was heavily counted towards care and safety.

And so there were – the phrasing you describe was in there, as well as some phrasing that essentially said if they could safely be supported at home, they should be, which I think tilted towards a default of, kind of, at home unless they need to be at school.

I think we quite quickly – and sorry, I say “we” as the department – I think the department quite quickly saw that the numbers attending were very low and were concerned about that.

And, sorry, the other thing I should say is that across government there was very – there was high concern, when writing the list of key workers who would be able to send their children to school, and making these decisions, that there would be too many people in schools for effective infection control. And very early on that was the biggest concern. And it very quickly pivoted, because it became clear that, actually, not very many people were going to school, to a concern about there not being enough children who were vulnerable and would be better off in school, in school.

So you can see that when we published the updated guidance on 19 April 2020, we changed the wording quite significantly. And I don’t think it was just wording, actually, I think the underlying intent shifted. And so that guidance said – and I have an INQ number if you would like: INQ000519887. And that guidance says:

“The government encourages vulnerable children and young people to attend educational settings unless they have underlying health conditions that put them at severe risk.”

So it changed that presumption.

It also set out specific expectations for each of children and young people with a social worker, children and young people with an education, health and care plan, and children and young people who were otherwise vulnerable.

And on the – sorry, do you want me to –

Lead 8: No, I’m just – we need to just go to the page number, which I have.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Of course, I’m so sorry.

Lead 8: No, it’s fine, you’ve just raced slightly ahead of me.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So, 0003.

Lead 8: It’s page 3.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So at the top, just below those two bullets:

“The government encourages vulnerable children and young people to attend educational settings unless they have underlying health conditions that puts them at severe risk.”

Thank you very much indeed.

Lead 8: So if we carry on with that and look at the next sentence:

“During the coronavirus … outbreak, vulnerable children and young people are defined as those …”

So we have the first one: effectively, children who have a social worker.

Then the second bullet is:

“have an education, health and care … plan whose needs cannot be met safely in the home environment.”

So, it’s not a test that puts it the other way round and asks – risk assesses whether or not this child can safely attend school; it’s still premised on children whose needs – do you see the point?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I do.

If you go to the next page, 004 –

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – you have the specific expectations for children with an education, health and care plan. I agree with you, it has that starting headline that says “cannot be met safely in the home environment”, but it then says, again, the second paragraph underneath “Expectations on attendance”:

“Where the risk assessment determines a child or young person with an EHC plan will be as safe or safer in an educational setting, it may be more appropriate for them to attend …”

So it’s starting to shift, and it then shifts further. And I think the key thing to say is we can see a shift in the attendance of children between the writing of this guidance, and the next attendance figures. So, at 17 April, the estimate was that about 5% of vulnerable children and young people were attending on site. After the publication of these guidance, the next figures were on 24 April 2020, and the estimate then was that 10% were attending. So approximately a doubling in the attendance of vulnerable children and young people.

I think it is still far lower than you would want, to be clear –

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – but the department was seeking from this point – and then in further iterations of the guidance you see that balance shift further towards attendance. And again, I think there’s a – I think there was a real challenge here in trying to get the balance right between children’s safety, education, managing the fact that there was still quite a lot of uncertainty, that as well as children with an education, health and care plan, often needing that school support, there was also a very large overlap with children who, at that stage, were being told that they were clinically vulnerable or clinically extremely vulnerable, and people were trying to manage that balance and that shifting picture.

Lead 8: I think that’s understood, but I think it’s just not clear why a simple test that said “risk assess whether or not this child can safely go to school”, rather than the other way round, would have answered that.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I have to say, I tend to agree with you.

Lead 8: And the other issue that has come up in respect of this is obviously the risk assessment itself and the evidence that some children either weren’t being risk assessed, or – and that was evidence that I think the Children’s Commissioner had gathered during this period, and then the Ofsted evidence, as well, that some people – some children who were entitled to go to school were not – were still not being offered places. And I think the issue that goes to is how, in this sort of situation, the government monitors the implementation of these kinds of policies and knows if there are problems in their implementation which may not be – may not be clear because these are decisions being made by individual institutions.

Is that a matter that the Department for Education has reflected on since the pandemic?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and I think – I mean, Ofsted, of course, is part of the answer to that question so the reason that Ofsted are able to opine on that is because they were working closely with local authorities and looking at that, and both in emergency situations and in normal business, the department has to think very carefully about, where you have duties that apply to schools or local authorities, how you make sure that you’ve got assurance that the duties are being carried out, but how you do that in a way that doesn’t remove responsibility from the body that holds the duty. And we think about that a lot.

Lead 8: Yes. But is it accepted that – and thinking about the context of a pandemic, that there does need to be a better way to ensure that that intelligence is coming to the Department for Education quickly, so that it’s understood there is a blockage in the implementation of the policy we’ve enacted?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So I think one of the reflections – so there were a set of places where data flows were a challenge before and during the pandemic on many of which we actually used the pandemic as a spur to try to put much better data systems in place subsequently. That’s still a work in progress. But I think often having good, transparent and relatively real-time data can really help with those challenges and making sure that you are getting assurance without being overbearing on a system that is working hard under difficult circumstances.

Lead 8: I’m going to move on, I wanted to check, though, before I do, the Inquiry has obviously heard evidence about section 42 being adjusted –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: – so that the duties on local authorities to provide requirements in education, health and care plans was abrogated and the duty became one of reasonable endeavours, the Inquiry understands from the evidence that the rationale for that was that these were the sorts of services or therapies that children might be offered in school, and if they weren’t in school, they weren’t getting them. And I think the issue that has arisen, that that doubly disadvantaged these children because of the way the policy was working. And because of the need of a risk assessment, which meant that they weren’t at school, and then at the same time, because they weren’t at school, they weren’t getting what was offered – sorry, what they had previously been entitled to.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and I think there’s a reason that the department didn’t make a similar set of provisions when it came to the January lockdown, where the approach that was taken was a little more: if the child cannot get the provision that they need not in school, then we should do everything we possibly can to support them to be in school and to get that provision.

I think the – again, I think some of this is not about the level of preparation; it’s about the deep uncertainty that there was during that very early pandemic period. Uncertainty about safety, not just of individual children but of different procedures and processes. So for example, there was an enormous amount of work the department did on aerosol-generating procedures, which are needed for some children and young people, where there was real uncertainty about the safety for the child and young person and for the person administering the process and uncertainty about workforce impact.

So again as it turned out, although many, many schools and colleges and children’s social work teams did really hard work during the pandemic with staffing pressure and difficulty, the kinds of staffing level drops that we had been asked to plan for, and that people thought might transpire, didn’t come to pass. And so it’s quite easy to look back on it and say, “Well, it looks like there were enough people that you could have done all of those things and you didn’t need to disapply it”, that really wasn’t clear at the point when those provisions were put in place and we were trying to strike the right balance between making sure children got everything that they possibly could and not leaving people in a position where they were forced into unlawfulness because they – because it was impossible to do the thing that was asked.

Lead 8: But is there a lesson to be learned from that about pre-empting or making changes to children’s rights and entitlements before there is evidence that it’s actually required? Because I think that was an issue that also arose in respect of the coronavirus regulations, where it seemed to be assumed that there would be a need for the changes that were made, but I think the department’s position is they weren’t used because they weren’t needed?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. I think there’s definitely a lesson to be learnt about that although I would, on the coronavirus regulations, I don’t think it was an assumption that was made; I think it was something we were being asked for rather powerfully by – so there were meetings with ADCS, Local Government Association, and those changes were specifically asked for because people thought they would be needed. So it wasn’t – I don’t think it’s fair to say that the department assumed it. I think a very large gathering of people who were responsible for the provision of those services agreed. I actually think the key mistake there was that we were speaking to the providers, the producers, and we didn’t engage children’s charities and children’s rights organisations directly in those conversations to make sure we were looking at both halves of that.

I say that. I’m very, very clear that those producer organisations were trying to do the right thing for children; I don’t think they were trying to, sort of, do something they shouldn’t but I think we would have had better preparatory discussions if we’d engaged a wider group of people in them, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that the department assumed it was needed. The department were asked for the changes.

Lead 8: Yes, and maybe that’s a question of the department testing more –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – whether or not those changes are needed, and I think the position in adult social care was different because there was a need to demonstrate workforce shortages. But that wasn’t the position when it came to children.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and I think that is exactly the sort of thing we’ve learnt from and would do differently in a future pandemic.

Lead 8: Can I just ask you, then, just about children more – the much broader cohort of children who might be described as vulnerable, not in a technical sense of the term. But the Inquiry has seen the analysis that was prepared by the Children’s Commissioner for England, I think in 2018 and 2019, and I can take you to it in your bundle, Ms Acland-Hood, if you want to see it –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes – (overspeaking) –

Lead 8: – but I don’t think it’s controversial that the Children’s Commissioner, on her analysis, thought there were about 2.3 million children who would fall within her categorisation of vulnerability, those being children who live with one of the three toxic trio factors for childhood adversity and we have seen some evidence that the Department for Education calculated it on a lower basis.

First of all, I wanted to check whether it was accepted that there was a much broader cohort of children who would fall potentially within a definition of vulnerability than that that was set out in the department’s guidance.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and that was the reason for the other “vulnerable” category. I’ll just say one thing about the Children’s Commissioner’s analysis, so I think we completely accept that there’s a much wider category of children who could be described as “vulnerable”. I think Indra Morris, in giving evidence to the Inquiry, raised questions about the use of the term “vulnerable”, and I have to say I personally share that uneasiness about the use of the term, but I’ll use it for ease.

The Children’s Commissioner’s analysis looks at number of factors including children in low income for which she uses the definition of free school meals. She then adds up groups of children who suffer from all of those different kinds of vulnerabilities and some statistical analysis is done to try to remove overlaps because of course they are heavily overlapping groups.

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: She then subtracts from that children in contact with children’s social care, and identifies a group that are not in touch with children’s social care but might be otherwise vulnerable, and we accept all of that analysis.

The one thing I would say is that a very large proportion of that group will be children on free school meals, and of course, schools do know which children are on free school meals. So it’s true that the school might not know, for example, that the child is a child of a prisoner, but it’s – I think it’s – I don’t think it’s quite right to suggest that the school would be unaware of any form of vulnerability for all of those children in that identified group because the free school meals category is so large, and overlaps with so many of those other characteristics.

Lead 8: So can I –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Again, I don’t say that to be difficult, or to question her analysis, I think her analysis is very useful, but I just – it’s been bothering me a bit that we haven’t been clear about that – (overspeaking) –

Lead 8: The composition of –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – quite significant overlap.

Lead 8: – that vulnerable group?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: So I think on the department’s own narrow estimate for vulnerable children, I think – is it 1.9 million children, on a narrower measure?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and, again, it’s not – it’s a slightly different composition of factors and I don’t think we would ever suggest there was a sort of hard boundary of – and again, it’s one of the reasons why the “vulnerable” term is slightly difficult. I mean, these things exist on spectrums. Also, people can have extremely satisfying, effective and fulfilling lives, even while in these categories, they can have excellent parenting, people can be extremely supportive despite being in one of these categories and so they are – they are strong indicators of risk that you want to be attentive to and think about but I don’t think they should be used as a sort of label, a definitive label of, kind of, lack of safety in the home, for example.

Lead 8: I think what in fact this really goes to is the calculation of the attendance of vulnerable children at school and having a much better understanding of the risks that children are exposed to when they’re not at home. Because the Department for Education statistics were measuring children with a social worker and children with an EHCP?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And I wanted to ask whether it’s accepted that that’s an underestimate of the – in fact, the number of children who would have been vulnerable or at risk during the pandemic?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, it is. I think it’s the – I think that particularly children with a social worker is a good proxy for the group where there was the clearest knowledge that there was likely to be some risk to them in the home. Almost by definition. Because if we know that there’s a risk to a child in the home, we use those procedures around the children’s social care system.

Lead 8: Yes, but you understand there’s lots of children on the cusp of care?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: There are lots of children who receive services that are less than the statutory services, in order to prevent them escalating –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – to be in that position?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Can I just come on then, please, to a separate issue, which is the one that you’ve just touched on, which is that of consultation, and used the coronavirus regulations as an example of that, and first to ask whether it’s accepted that the way that those regulations were enacted was entirely asymmetrical in terms of consultation. That consultation was only with those organisations who sought the relaxation of those statutory requirements as opposed to organisations who might speak to the consequences of them?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. I think that’s right. I think there was an attempt to engage informally with the Children’s Commissioner, but as the Court of Appeal found in the judicial review, that was inadequate. And we accept that.

Lead 8: And the Inquiry has looked at the correspondence from around this period and has seen that the Children’s Commissioner was writing to the Department for Education on 6 April, precisely on the point that the guidance that had just been published left a void because it informed – it stated that local authorities may well – I’m summarising – may well not be able to meet their statutory obligations, and didn’t say anything about what those statutory obligations were.

Yes. So she had written on that very issue and these were the regulations that were going to fill that –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – that void. And it’s difficult to understand why, in those circumstances, putting to one side that she is the Children’s Commissioner, why she would have been left out of the consultation.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So I think the – and – and, again, remembering that I’m doing this on the basis of the documents that I’ve seen.

Lead 8: Yes –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – my understanding is that there were informal conversations with the Children’s Commissioner, and that the team at the time thought that they were engaging her, but that was short of a formal consultation with her, and that the court judged that that was insufficient and we accept that judgment.

Lead 8: When you say engagement with her, do you mean the email that was sent on 16 April?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: It is my understanding that there was other engagement with her.

Lead 8: Right. Well, I don’t think we’ve heard anything about that. But nonetheless it’s accepted, as the Court of Appeal said, the regulations were unlawful for that reason.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And it’s still very – I’m not sure I quite understand, there had been consultation, albeit informal. Are you suggesting that the Children’s Commissioner had in fact been treated in the same way as local authorities and the service providers who had been consulted?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So there had been – there wasn’t a formal consultation of any kind. So the – everyone who was consulted was consulted informally. I think there was more conversation with – and again, I do this on the basis of the documents that I’ve been provided with – I think that there had been more discussion and consultation with those who were putting forward the measures. But it’s not that there was a formal consultation process from which she was omitted; it was that the work was being done at enormous pace and people were trying to engage as quickly as they could.

It is my view that if we had time to ring up and talk to the ADCS, we had time to ring up and talk to a wider range of children’s organisations, not just the Children’s Commissioner, actually.

As it happens, I think people did try to have that informal engagement with the Children’s Commissioner, but I don’t actually think that – I think we should have sought to have at least that informal level of consultation more widely. That’s my view.

Lead 8: I’m going to move on to an entirely separate, albeit related issue, away from consultation. And it’s just to understand the position about the social work guidance that was provided on 6 May.

So, first of all, I think it’s right to say that that guidance was intended to fill the void that had –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yeah.

Lead 8: – existed until that point, in terms of making absolutely clear what statutory obligations could be –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yeah.

Lead 8: – no longer had to be met in the way that they had been put before, yes.

And that guidance put some guardrails around the exercise of those obligations – around the exercise of those regulations as well, didn’t it?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, it did.

Lead 8: It required sign-off and all the rest – and those other things we see in the guidance. But the concern is that the other visits that that guidance applied to, so the other forms of everyday social work visits, those safety rails didn’t apply to that, and, indeed, appeared to presume that social work visits would be remote unless it was necessary. So, again, instead of it being the other way round: you should use remote visits only if it’s necessary.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Do you accept that?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I do.

Lead 8: And do you accept that the guidance, such as it was issued, was – just didn’t contain the safeguards that were necessary in order to ensure that social work practice was consistent and was being carried out in a way that ensured child protection was maintained?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think it – what it sought to do was protect the highest priority work and allow flexibility so that social workers could prioritise. So the challenge with some of the statutory timescales was that they risked requiring social workers to go and do the thing that was about to be out of time rather than the most presently urgent thing. So I think the intent was to allow social workers to focus on the things that would allow them to safeguard children best.

I think, again, this is another case in which people were worrying about both a set of workforce challenges and a set of challenges around acceptability of face-to-face visits to families, not just to the social workers, that risked putting people in a place where, even they were trying to do the right thing, they were found to be unlawful. And this guidance essentially reflected those regulations and, as you say, put those guardrails around it.

It did seek to say, “Where you’re worried about risk, you should prioritise face-to-face”, but you’re right: it carried the implication that other things would default to remote.

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: And I think that is – again, I really understand why that was the position at that time. Again, if you think back, the kind of – the whole thrust of everything that we were being asked to do was for as many people as possible to stay at home, to do your work from home if you possibly could.

Again, I think this is one of those where, having lived through that, you might well – again, if you were faced with exactly the same pandemic – which, again, I’m always conscious we need to make sure that we aren’t overplanning for exactly the same thing we just experienced, but I think you might do something different: I think you might push harder that you go face-to-face unless you can’t, rather than the other way round.

Lead 8: Yes, you reverse the presumption –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – and you put a consistent –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – you put some clear principles around –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – deviating from the norm of social work practice?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And the other issue in relation to this is obviously the really practical one of PPE.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And about providing guidance that’s actually realistic about what might happen on the doorstep. So can I just deal with those two things as well.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Did this guidance also reflect the fact that there were shortages in PPE as well, or was that a concern at this point?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: It was. We were making sure very hard to make sure PPE was prioritised for the children’s social work force, and we were relatively successful in that, I would say, but we were always conscious – I mean, again, this was a period in which everyone representing any workforce that was still in face-to-face contact with anybody was clamouring for PPE. And so there was a sort of enormous cross-government … I was about to use the word “bun fight”, but that’s probably not helpful. It was better than that.

There was a process in which everybody could see the really clear need for their workforces to have PPE, and there was a really difficult exercise, in my view, being done to try to rank those needs in order and get as much PPE to the people who needed it most as possible. And we did quite well at getting children and social workers to the top of that list, but we were acutely conscious that it was – you know, there was far more demand than supply, as a whole, and so we couldn’t – I think it would be fair to say at this stage we couldn’t necessarily guarantee that if we had pushed for everything to be done face-to-face we could have said there would definitely be enough PPE to make that happen.

So we – again, we were trying to give flexibility. I think you could have given that flexibility still with the default the other way round –

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – and it might have been better, but I think people were acutely conscious of those practical difficulties.

Lead 8: All right. I’m going to move on to a new topic which is that of impact assessments, and specifically equality impact assessments as well.

I think – can we see if we can do this without necessarily needing to go to one, just so that the Inquiry can understand the Department for Education’s perspective on equality assessments.

I don’t think there’s any dispute, there wasn’t an equality assessment carried out prior to the closure of schools.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: I think we have a draft one that was carried out some time after, I’m not sure it’s clear if it was finalised. Or not?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: It was written at the same time as the impact assessment for reopening in June. It was done because the Public Sector Equality Duty – I mean, again, you, of course, know this, but applies not just to moments of decision making, but to all of the exercise or the functions of any public authority and so the judgement was it was much better to write one in detail when we could and then make sure that in the implementation we were going back round and seeing if we could do even more.

Again, the writing of the assessment isn’t the thing that fulfils the duty; the duty is fulfilled by giving good – giving due consideration at the moment that the decision is made. But as a department, we tend to find the writing of those assessments helpful, as well necessary, in trying to make sure we’re doing our job as well as we can.

Lead 8: Yes, and because they can be important for identifying mitigations, as well.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: But can I just come back to equality impact assessments and their potential limitations in relation to children.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: I mean, the first limitation that may be particularly relevant to children is that socioeconomic disadvantage isn’t a protected characteristic, yet it is one of the most important characteristics that affects children’s development, education, and many of the other issues that you’re concerned with; correct?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And the second, perhaps, inherent limitation is that the characteristic of age isn’t a protected characteristic when it comes to the provision of services either.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and I mean, as you can see in the impact assessments we wrote, we tend to write the impact assessment as if it is, because it’s helpful. But you’re right, that’s not part of the legal duty.

Lead 8: No. And also an equality impact assessment is about comparing protected characteristics, as well, which is of less use in a pandemic situation, because those things may be of much less interest. What you’re really interested in is just impact on children.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Which obviously raises the – or points to the importance of child rights impact assessments as an alternative tool. Do you agree?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So I certainly think that there’s value in making sure that impact on children is being considered. The department do use children’s rights impact assessments and we find it a helpful tool in many circumstances.

I suppose the other – and, again, this is covered in the legislation on equalities impact assessments, but you always have to guard against, a bit against the sort of writing of the assessment substituting for the thinking really deep embedded in the decision itself, and so my only question about the use of children’s rights impact assessments is whether you – whether what you actually want is for the core of the decision to be focused on children’s rights.

I would actually argue a lot of the decisions the department took during the pandemic were kind of deep focused on the rights and interests of the child. But I mean, I agree with your reflections on the limitations of equality impact assessments in focusing on disadvantage.

Lead 8: But I think what you’re saying is that if rights assessments are to be used as a meaningful tool, then they have to – they do have to properly reflect all of the implications, for example, of a policy on children in a way that is meaningful and realistic?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and I think I’m saying that you want to make the requirement around it comparable with the real-world decision making that happens.

And again, I say this carefully, but there is a trade-off between a requirement that – and again, I – I do feel there’s a little bit in respect of equalities impact assessments, there’s a trade-off between a requirement that asks you to consider every one of an extremely long list of things, some of which may be more or less relevant to the specific decision being taken, and how far it is easy to genuinely get a decision maker to think about all of those things, including when they may not be that relevant to the core of the decision being taken. So there’s something about – and again, the legislation does actually cover this but there’s something about our practice in doing it and the way we set it up to encourage this. There’s something about proportionality and the – and I don’t mean not caring about equalities or children’s rights, I mean really focusing on the things where you’re going to make the biggest difference, have the biggest impact, and making sure that is at the centre of the decision maker’s consideration, and that can sometimes be easier if you’re not required to present those things in a list of everything you can think of –

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: – as opposed to with focus on them.

Lead 8: Can I just check that I’ve understood. You, I think, maybe does that go to the sort of comparative exercise –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – that you have in an impact equality assessment whereby those comparisons may not mean very much in the context of the decision you’re making?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think it goes to the comparative part, and it also sometimes goes to – and again, I say this carefully because I do think there’s something about the logical exercise of being required to think about everything that is helpful, but for a decision maker, for example, taking decisions about school closures in a pandemic, there are some things where the impact is so great that it genuinely should be weighed up against the risk of mass fatality.

And there are a whole lot of other things that just aren’t ever going to seriously be considered – I mean, sorry, even if they were considered seriously, it wouldn’t be for very long, in contrast to that. And again, I hesitate to give an example, but the question is, how do you make sure that in the moment of actually making those very difficult decisions, you are able to focus remorselessly on those things that have really big, really serious impacts that genuinely might shift your decision making on those really material points?

And sorry, I – I’ll – I will shut up in a minute, I’m sorry, but I’ve thought about this quite a lot. But there is something about how you frame a requirement or a provision, both so that it’s comprehensive and so that it’s proportionate that I think is hard, and bears consideration.

Lead 8: Can I just separate out, I think there are two –

Lady Hallett: Before you do, I’ve been asked twice now to ask you to slow down.

The Witness: I’m so sorry.

Lady Hallett: I didn’t ask you the first time because, like me, you speak very quickly so I didn’t want to criticise myself but if you could, I’d be really grateful.

The Witness: I’m so sorry, I will. I’m going to write myself a note.

Ms Dobbin: I think that on that issue you’ve just raised, Ms Acland-Hood, you may have jumped to an issue that Module 8 has been exploring, which is the question of where you measure or where you balance children’s rights against precisely the sort of other interests and rights that you’ve just described. So if you’re considering schools, where that – when you’re considering the closure of schools because of the potential impact it might have on broader transmission of a disease, where does that thinking and where does that weighing up and balancing take place?

The Inquiry has seen the evidence of the Children’s Commissioner, writing to SAGE to suggest, or to ask why are children’s interests not being taken into account in that forum?

So can I ask you about that first.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Mm.

Lead 8: The Department for Education was represented on the children’s task and finish group –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – wasn’t it?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: So is it correct that in fact insofar as there was a voice for children’s interests or a voice that was able to say, “This will have terrible consequences for children’s education”, it was – it was reflected in SAGE, or certainly, as the children’s task and finish group?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So, yes, and the department was part of the setting up of the children’s task and finish group. I think the – although I think there – SAGE is not a decision-making body; SAGE is an advisory body focused on medical and health evidence, and so principally, we were listening, at SAGE, not talking, because we aren’t the holders of the medical and health expertise. I think the more important point was that SAGE were providing one lens, that we needed to make sure that children’s health was being considered, and was being considered in the broadest frame, but that there would be non-health-related considerations as well, and I don’t think it would have been – I don’t think the right mechanism would have been to try to feed those in through SAGE; I think it was about combining the SAGE evidence on health with other evidence and perspectives, and I think you can see the department doing that throughout the pandemic, seeking to say: what about the other impacts on children?

Again, at some of the most difficult moments where the health advice is starting to say some more restriction in society is needed in order to manage the pandemic, the department, certainly from the summer onwards was consistently saying, “Yes, and interfering with children’s education is the last thing you should do when you’re trying to identify the mechanisms for controlling that spread”.

Lead 8: And I think the issue then is – I think the first issue, and it’s the one that’s been raised in evidence, is whether or not the Department for Education was sufficiently – I hesitate to use the term “in the room”, but whether or not it was sufficiently integrated into the main decision-making processes, and I think that means Downing Street, in order to ensure that those interests were properly taken into account.

Has the Department for Education reflected on whether or not it did have the role it ought to have had when those really significant decisions were made?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, so I think, in general, the department did have a good voice. I think there are two things that I would say about that which are relevant. The first is actually back to the topic of pre-pandemic planning, and the way that government as a whole thinks about its resilience and rapid response planning. And I think this was true before the pandemic and for quite a lot of the course of the pandemic.

The starting assumption was that the key people to have in the room were the owners of the presenting risk. In other words, the Department of Health, because it was a health risk.

Again, you can also see this in some of the exercises that have run since. So, for example, the – again, I may get the precise name wrong because it’s changed – but the department for energy and net zero in response to risks around power. And the Department for Education doesn’t hold many causes of risk. We have some, but mainly, we’re a department that holds really big society-wide downstream impacts of those risks.

And quite a lot of the sort of structures and the set-up around resilience during the – before the pandemic and during the early part of the pandemic assumed the key people you had in the room were the, kind of, risk-causing people, not the risk-impacted people. And we’ve now that conversation in those terms really clearly within the resilience secretariat and they’ve shifted that fundamental set of assumptions, so we have not just a seat at the table when there’s something being decided about children but an assumption that we should be a core part of resilience preparations and contingency planning.

And again, we’ve been exercising that over the last couple of weeks through Exercise Pegasus, which I think may have been mentioned by others to the Inquiry, and we do see a different approach.

I think that’s also about the department’s own capacity and capability. So because of that starting assumption, we didn’t really see ourselves as a department that needed a big infrastructure around – a big standing infrastructure around resilience. We now have a very good – and I pay them tribute, they’ve done a huge amount of work in support of me today – resilience team in the department, and a much stronger set of structures.

The second thing is I think there were a small number of extremely high-profile decisions that directly affected children where it was odd that the department was not in the room when the decision was taken.

Lead 8: Do you mean the decision to close schools in March 2020, the decision to close schools in January 2021?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I do.

Lead 8: So essentially the biggest decisions –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – that affected the Department for Education –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. And I –

Lead 8: – wasn’t present in the room –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: And I both understand that – and again, I do think it comes down to this point of having decided that is the last thing you’re going to do, you’re going to be doing that in the most extreme crucible moments, but I nevertheless think that it would have been better to have the Secretary of State for Education in the room.

Lead 8: And do you think that’s a reflection of it being an in extremis situation, or a reflection of children’s rights and interests not being properly afforded the importance that they ought to be when those decisions have the capacity to change their lives, effectively?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think it’s – I think it’s – I think it’s about those very extreme moments, I think it’s about everybody involved thinking they knew how to worry about children’s rights themselves without someone else needing to tell them. I think there’s – and again this is a sort of – I have to be careful because this can be a slightly tedious refrain of government. I think – and I’ve worked in the centre of government as well as in departments, but there’s a bit of a tendency when you work in the centre to assume you know what departments are going to say and you have enough expertise without them to take many decisions, and there’s a tendency when you work in departments to assume that the centre doesn’t have nearly the expertise it thinks it has, and needs really your expert advice.

And sitting, as I am currently, in the department, I would say that it was a less a risk that the people taking the decision in the centre didn’t care about or take seriously children’s rights, it was that they thought they had the information that they needed without the department in the room.

Lead 8: Thank you.

Four more minutes to the break time, and maybe we can make a start on the – it’s a related topic to what you’ve discussed but it goes to events that I think you were closely involved in, and the Inquiry would be assisted by your evidence on it. And that is the events leading up to 4 January 2021.

Lady Hallett: If this is so important, Ms Dobbin –

Ms Dobbin: We’ll have a break.

Lady Hallett: And given the stenographer has been struggling this morning, I think we’ll take the break now.

I think you’ve been warned about our breaks, Ms Acland-Hood.

And I shall return at 11.30.

(11.12 am)

(A short break)

(11.30 am)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: Thank you.

Ms Acland-Hood, before that adjournment, we were turning to the issue of January 2021 and the events leading up to school closures and specifically the issue relating to mass testing. And it’s really that that I want to focus on and see if we can clarify some of the events.

Shall we see if we can manage without the documents, but if we – but if we do, we can turn to them. The Inquiry saw that on 4 December, I think it was a Covid-O meeting, took place and the issue of mass testing was discussed. And it was said at that point that the taskforce was supportive of the proposal for testing in schools, but said that the Department for Education didn’t have robust delivery plans or clarity on funding.

Are you familiar with that meeting and the note to which I’m referring, or would you like to see it?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, no, that’s fine. I’m familiar.

So I think, and my Lady, the Inquiry, I’d really like to set out this sequence of events around mass testing and I’ll try and do it really slowly.

Lead 8: Before you start, if I interrupt at any point –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Of course.

Lead 8: – it’s because it may be that you’re coming to a point that I was going to ask you about where I think there is – or the Inquiry thinks there is a lack of clarity so if I interrupt you it is for that reason.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Of course. And you should do exactly what you need to do. I’m just really keen to help with this bit, because I think it’s quite confusing.

So I think the fundamental confusion arises because there were several different plans for mass testing in quick succession, so I’m just going to try and lay those out and then perhaps we can look at particulars in relation to them.

So I’m going to start in October 2020, when DfE worked with DHSC and Public Health England on piloting of mass asymptomatic lateral flow device testing, both in universities and in schools and colleges. And two different things were being tested: one was what was called “test to find”. So this was, effectively, mass or widespread testing of asymptomatic people to see if more positive Covid cases could be found and then managed.

The second thing was what is quite often in the papers referred to as “serial testing”, and that is using testing instead of self-isolation when there’s a positive case. So if someone tested positive, rather than all of their contacts having to isolate for a long period, the contacts would instead take seven consecutive days of lateral flow tests.

And both of those two things were tested in the pilot, and the pilots were supported by health colleagues and by the military in terms of the administration and management of that for schools and HEIs.

Lead 8: Ms Acland-Hood, it might help, just before you proceed with that, just to clarify, the pilot was relatively small, wasn’t it?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: It wasn’t – it might give the impression, if you talk about a pilot, that it’s all over the country in lots and lots of schools but – (overspeaking) –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: No, no, it was very small, it was to establish whether the principle worked.

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: And it was promising, and at that stage in October we were particularly interested in the serial testing aspect because we could see at that stage that there were many more children missing school because they were self-isolating than because they were ill. So the proposal – that piloting led to two things. The first thing was the deployment of mass testing in universities for the return from university before Christmas. And that was piloted on a wider scale and then it was rolled out. So the announcement was made on 11 November that there would be on-site lateral flow testing in universities as students went home, to try and make sure that that return of students didn’t spread Covid.

And that was carried out. So test kits were deployed to universities. They set up testing centres, students were tested and they went home. So by the time we get into this December period, one important thing to remember is that we have done this in universities. There’s a lot more schools than universities, but we’re not starting from scratch.

The proposal that went to Covid-O, and this is the 10 December meeting, so this is the meeting after the one that you referred to, was to set up testing sites on school and college sites to deliver lateral flow testing and it was specifically to do testing on return to secondary schools of school and college staff, so not students at this stage, just staff, and to introduce serial testing of close contacts. And that, at that stage, was still somewhat dependent on MHRA approval but it was expected.

So what we were planning for and standing up on 10 December was something that requires a test site in every school but not the regular or on-return test of every pupil. It was staff and then it was serial testing for staff and students. And that’s important because the numbers are very different. So if you’re only testing contacts, you don’t need nearly as many tests as if you’re testing every student, either once on return, or regularly.

You can see in the papers that, having worked on that very closely with DHSC, they wanted to withdraw – they didn’t want the paper presented as joint and –

Lead 8: Can I be clear, just so we’re not losing the thread, which paper it is you’re talking about?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Sorry, so this is the paper that was presented to Covid-O on 10 December.

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: And my recollection and understanding from the papers is that that was principally because the Secretary of State for Health, on seeing the paper that morning, said that he wanted it to go further, and for there to be more testing. And that was quite challenging for the team because up until that point the main interaction with Health had been about whether or not enough lateral flow devices could be made available to do the testing that was already proposed.

So we had, again – and I understand all of these positions, incidentally – we had officials saying, “You’ve got this big plan for testing. We’re also seeking to roll out very widespread” – there were a whole series of plans for very widespread community testing – “We don’t know if we can give you enough kit to do the school testing you’re proposing”, and we’d been negotiating that with them and trying to get to the point that we could do what was in this proposal.

And then, when the Secretary of State for Health saw it, he wanted there to be more testing.

In the meantime, they did agree this proposal and we announced it on 15 December. And on that proposal, we’d had quite a lot of discussion with school partners. There was anxiety about school staff delivering the tests, but because of the scale of it and because of the benefits of the serial testing in particular, we were – and because of the pilots as well – we were pretty confident that we could do it.

Lead 8: So, just to go back to the meeting where it was being said there wasn’t robust delivery plans –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: That was before that.

Lead 8: But in terms of delivery of what? Was that delivery of the more limited serial testing –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – or was that – so even at that point, with the limited plan, that was the concern?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: It was. I mean, I think I’d say two things about that. First, six days is an awfully long time in this period. We were doing – we were moving things along hour by hour on a lot of these issues. And the second is, again, rightly, it is extremely common in government for people to say that each other’s plans are not robust enough yet and to test them and kick them and push them. So I think there were worries about it.

I think by the time we got to the 10th, the worry wasn’t about whether – so there was a – as I say, there was still, relatively close to that, a concern about whether or not enough lateral flow devices could be made available, and there was still work to do on the logistics. I mean, all of this was being done – I mean, if in normal times in my day job you asked me to set up a programme to administer a health test to a very large number of children in every school across the country, I would tell you it would take three years. That would be my starting estimate. So all of this is being done at extreme pace.

But by the 10th, I think we were appropriately confident that we could deliver that serial testing and teacher testing proposal. And I can say that with quite a lot of confidence because if you fast forward to what we actually did, and there’s some more story in between, but schools reopened to vulnerable children and children of critical workers on the 4th, secondary and primary and we had some primary schools open, as well. By 6 January, two days after that, we had administered 47 – a little bit more than 47,000 lateral flow tests in school settings, which again, give or take, would have been more than enough to meet the expected demand on this first plan.

So my level of confidence that we could execute that first plan is not theoretical. We did it. We did it under slightly different circumstances, having attempted something else, but I feel really secure in my judgement that we – had that remained the plan, we could have executed it and I think we could have executed it really well.

The second thing that happened then was that the Secretary of State for Health continued to press for a more comprehensive testing programme.

Lead 8: Can just ask you to pause before we proceed to that, because I think there’s just a – there is a factual issue here in that the Secretary of State announced – there was a public announcement on 15 December –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – that schools would be expected to roll out testing –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – and that’s the serial testing –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – that you were – you’ve described. But we know that on the same day, on 15 December, there is this important paper that sets out the requirement, for example, to mobilise 49,000 people, and I think that’s where there’s a lack of clarity –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yeah.

Lead 8: – whether or not, when the public announcement was made –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yeah.

Lead 8: – there were still – are these –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: No, this in relation to a new plan.

Lead 8: – (overspeaking) – yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So this is why it’s confusing.

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So on the day we were announcing that, we were under pressure to go further and do more. And the proposition that was made then was for testing on return of every secondary child, two tests within a week. And again, the scale of that is an order of magnitude different from the serial testing requirement. And that is why there were – even though the announcement was being made on the 15th of the first plan, there were papers circulating on the 15th which related to the second, more intense plan. And it was in relation to that plan that we were seriously worried we wouldn’t have the workforce and the capability to deliver.

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: And again, you can see in the papers, both us trying to work out what we can do through the school workforce and us saying we really think we would need support to do this.

There was then a third ask, which is for secondary pupils to be tested weekly. So both a test on return, two tests a week apart, and weekly testing thereafter, which again, just further increases the ask in respect of testing.

Lead 8: Can I just ask you to pause, because I think that is suggestive of or relates to what Sir Gavin Williamson said about these increasing demands –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – being placed on the Department for Education. This is in the context of the transmission rates –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – going up and the emergence of the Kent variant.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Did you – I mean, you were party to all of this. Did those demands seem unreasonable in that context? Or was the issue, the manpower that would be expected? I hope that makes sense.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, it makes perfect sense.

Lead 8: There’s the reasonableness of the testing ask and the reasonableness of how to man it.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. So we entirely understood why more was wanted in the context of the infection picture, and we really wanted to do everything we could possibly do to keep schools open, but on the 15th and 16th in particular we were really worried about the practicalities of doing that. So we’d done – again, I’m not going to say it wasn’t rapid work, it was rapid work, even for the first plan I described, but we got to the point where we had a pretty good idea how we would do that, but this was a huge extension of that.

Now, we – and both I and the Secretary of State expressed that, and again, you can see that in the minutes of meetings. However, everybody involved in this, the Secretary of State for Health, the Secretary of State for Education, me insofar as it is my place to have a view rather than to execute the things I’m told to do, and I mean I do advise as well as execute, really wanted to do anything we could in order to keep schools open. So I want to explain that the requirement changed. I’m not actually complaining about it. I just want it to be clear.

And what we did then, having expressed our anxiousness about it, was – and again, this might come across oddly, but we did what civil servants do, which is you give your best advice and then when you’re given an instruction, even if you think it’s difficult, you execute it as well as you possibly can.

So when we were asked to expand that, we went away and we ran at that problem as hard as we possibly could. I mobilised staff across the department and asked them to work over Christmas. We communicated to schools. It was a very, very difficult communication. We were asking something that I think felt deeply unreasonable to schools, and I really acknowledge that. But the context was that we were being told: if you want to keep schools open, you’ve got to go further and do more, and make this happen.

And by the time we get to 29 December, which was the day of the critical conversations around whether we needed to kind of – essentially whether we could open, there was a conversation in which there were strong health voices advocating for a bigger delay to the return to school for infection management reasons, and because, by the – and again, I know this sounds – again, in normal times this sounds very odd, but between the 16th and the 29th, we had done a huge amount of work on this. We’d got the logistics organised with the delivery of this much larger number of tests, we’d issued guidance, we’d got ready to run webinars for staff, we had got some MACA support, not as much as we wanted, it was advisory rather than on the ground, but we were increasingly confident that we could deliver this greater level of testing.

Again, we’d initially said it would be voluntary for schools to take up, and there was a push to make it more required, and we said we’re going to have to accept that this is a huge ask for them and people will possibly do it if they possibly can, but you will see us in the meeting on the 29th saying: actually we think we can now do this much bigger ask, and if that’s what it takes to keep schools open, we’ll do it. And the compromise was a delay of a week, with that testing in place.

In some of the papers, it is presented as though the delay was necessary in order to get the testing stood up. That’s not my recollection. My recollection is that people wanted the delay anyway for infection control reasons and it would help. I mean, it certainly helped us. It made it easier. But there were a whole set of people who needing testing on 4 January whatever we did, because the school was open for vulnerable children and the children of critical workers.

And we did have tests centres set up in the vast majority of schools by 4 January. We had lateral flow devices delivered to 97 – I think 97.2% of schools by 4 January. We tested 47,000 people, as I said, by 6 January. We ended up carrying out something like a quarter of all of the tests in the testing programme in school sites. And I think that that testing programme was one of the most extraordinary things that was done in what was an extraordinary time, and I cannot emphasise enough how grateful I am to schools, to trusts, to teachers, to teaching assistants, to parent volunteers in large numbers who came together to make that happen, and actually also to my staff in the department – sorry – who did that.

And I think it is – again, there is a debate about how far the testing really made the difference, including in, kind of, whether that could have held infection in January, and I think it is the scientific consensus that it wasn’t going to hold that position, but we didn’t know that at the time we stood it up, and it did really help us to manage infection through the whole of that January to March period, and to manage school return in March. And we continued to test on return at each point when schools came back after a break. And it increased both confidence and helped us to manage.

And I just wanted to set out that – there’s quite a lot of – it felt as though there was a suggestion in there that the testing was badly done or badly organised, and I don’t think that reflects the reality. I think the reality was that we were asked to do some very challenging things – sorry – that changed rapidly, and people rose to that challenge absolutely magnificently, and I wanted to say that.

Lead 8: I think what might be surprising about all of that is that it was left to schools, and that’s not put as a criticism; that’s put as a – obviously that would be a mammoth effort –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, it was enormous.

Lead 8: So, I think one of the things that obviously wasn’t clear from the underlying papers, but I think can just about be worked out, that maybe there was military assistance of quite a small number of people?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: About 1,500.

Lead 8: So, small, compared to the number of schools that, if you were going to help implement this sort of plan, would be available?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. So we’d hoped – so, again, if you go right back to those October pilots, there was military support for the pilots that was on the ground actually helping do the activity. And we had hoped for that as part of the rollout. And it became clear, again in that slightly messy period in December, that that was – and again, we had a moment where there was a suggestion there might be 5,000 people available. It was, I think, already – that was in the meeting papers, but already by the time the meeting took place, it was – so again, this is the 15 or 16 December meeting, I think, in the papers, I say in the meeting it’s not clear that this is really a kind of solid offer.

The MACA request was made, we did get support from about 1,500 people, but again, if you think about the number of schools there are across the country, that didn’t mean a person in every school; it was group of people who could give advice and support, and we had some sort of fly-in teams who could go if there was a particular difficulty, but it did fundamentally mean the core of the activity was in schools and by schools.

And I think it was an exceptional thing to ask. It would have been much better to have been able to find a way of not asking school staff to do that, but in the moment where the choice was, if this is going to happen, this is how it’s going to happen, we leant as hard as we could into trying to make it happen and we did.

Lead 8: And do you have a clear understanding as to why the support that might have been available wasn’t made available?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So I think there was – I think there were couple of reasons. I think there’s a limited amount of MACA capacity, so there’s a sort of straight question about how many people were available, and all of the other things that they were being asked to do. There was, again, so as well as our several different testing plans during this period, there were a very large number of different plans put forward at various different points for mass community testing. And again, there was a mass testing event in Liverpool which schools were a part of and which was MACA-supported because the whole thing was MACA-supported, and I think that a bit is with the supply of the test devices, there were a lot of people in DHSC and the Cabinet Office trying to work out and, indeed, in the Ministry of Defence, trying to work out how to deploy the available resource to all of the different requirements that were being made, and we were doing it at great pace. And I don’t know, and didn’t have visibility at the time, of exactly what the other competing requirements were, but I wouldn’t like to assume they weren’t also very important.

Lady Hallett: All of the other requirements would be doing their day job.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Correct, yes.

Lady Hallett: And we made a lot of demands on the military, which they wouldn’t normally expect, during the pandemic.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lady Hallett: And I’ve heard a fair bit about it, things like PPE distribution and the like.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and I would say the MACA support they did give us was extremely, hugely welcome and very helpful. And they did it very well.

Ms Dobbin: My question had been about other sources of support that might have been available, rather than just the militaries sources. Again, reading from the papers, it would appear that it was thought that the Department of Health, or that they might have been able to mobilise assistance, or test and trace England may have been able to –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: It appeared that there were suggestions there might have been other forms of support –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – that didn’t materialise.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, so again, in that set of papers, it was suggested there might be some possibility of more MACA support, there was a list of other workforces that might be possible to mobilise. And again, we continued to engage with DHSC on that, but I think at the pace available, they were struggling to crystallise that into a kind of – and again, I really recognise that the colleagues in DHSC were doing quite a lot of other things at the time.

So again, we sought that additional help. We really tried to explore it, but in the end, the task was to do it if we could possibly do it, and we knew that we could work with staff in schools and colleges. We had those links and connections, and we did deliver the programme.

Lead 8: Yes. I was going to say because that comes back to the issue of what the confidence levels were in and around the start of January 2020 – ‘21 as to whether or not this could be delivered, but it appears, from your evidence, that you did have that confidence from the work that you had been doing, that it –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – was deliverable?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and I think the confusion arises partly because of the different plans. So on 10 December, I’m very confident, and that’s because I’m delivering the first plan which we’ve been working on over time. On the 15th and 16th, I’m very worried because the plan has changed. By the 29th, I’m much more confident, even in the new plan, because we’d done some work.

Lead 8: I’m grateful. I’m going to move on to a different topic.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Of course. I’m sorry we took long on that, I hope that it was helpful.

Lead 8: I think that it’s been very helpful to have the clarity.

May I ask you, then, about, it’s – again, these are two interrelated things, really, relevant to most children, and the first relates to remote education and its provision during the pandemic.

We’ve heard, obviously, evidence about children not having access to devices, but then related issues about children’s engagement with online forms of education, issues about how schools engaged with children in terms of remote education as well, so providing feedback, the ability to provide synchronous lessons, so a series of issues related to online education.

So I wonder if you could summarise the department’s evidence between what changed between the first and second set of school closures so that remote education became more engaging or more effective?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I’m very happy to do that.

So, as we’ve covered, before the pandemic, remote education was not a formalised or widespread practice in England’s primary or secondary schools. There were some schools that were making extensive use of technology in their teaching and others that were making very little.

Initial focus – our initial efforts for that first lockdown focused on working with a wide range of partners to develop content that could be accessed, whether through parents or through school offer, so things like the partnership that we made with BBC, with the setting up and development of the Oak National Academy, work with Google and Microsoft on platforms, work to whitelist education websites so that they would not be counted in people’s data usage, so they could be accessed for free, and ordering a first set of devices which was focused only on children with a social worker.

And I can talk a bit more about why we didn’t order more devices sooner.

Lead 8: I think it was disadvantaged children in Year 11 as well –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – so it may not have been quite as narrow as –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Thank you, you’re quite right. The priority order starting with those disadvantaged children with a social worker, and that was about 220,000 laptops which were distributed during that first period.

The logistics of getting hold of the laptops were a real challenge. Once you start sourcing in tens or hundreds of thousands, the laptops are being built for you, and almost none of them are built in this country. And so the flash to bang between ordering and getting a laptop is – involves somebody actually building the laptop and shipping it here.

In terms of expectations set in that first period of the pandemic, there were some expectations set, and they were strengthened somewhat in June, and then work began over the summer to develop the temporary continuity direction, which was eventually enacted in October, which required schools to make provision for remote education. But I think it would be fair to say that the requirements focused on schools’ flexibility in the first lockdown, recognising that not every child would have a device, recognising that teachers were teaching vulnerable pupils in school as well as trying to deliver remote education.

I think our reflection over the summer and as we went into the autumn was that we needed to strengthen expectations. And we did that through the course of the autumn, including asking for minimum daily learning hours to be delivered for different ages of pupil, and making more requirements in terms of contact and feedback from teachers, and those were then enforced through the temporary continuity direction which came into force in October 2020.

Lead 8: And was there – I may be able to cut through this a little bit – was there more understanding by the time of the second set of school closures as to what worked in terms of –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – helping children to engage? I mean, the Inquiry has heard some very serious evidence about – and it’s also reflected in what children told the Inquiry in its Children and Young People’s Voices report, but about the real challenges that children might have in just – you might be online, but there are a whole lot of other things that are vying for your attention which might make engagement in remote education rather harder.

And I think it’s trying to understand what makes the difference in that context.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. And – yes, so there was a lot of work, both formally and informally, to try to make sure that we were collecting and spreading good practice on what worked in delivering remote education. So we had the Get Help with Technology programme, which was not just about the delivery of devices but was about the giving of advice to schools on what worked. We had an Ofsted report in – which came out in January. We’d done some work on case studies, which we’d circulated, of good practice from schools. And that was not just about, as it were, use of the devices; it was about how to teach well through that medium and how to use blended combinations of live lessons, recorded lessons, and other types of work and contact.

Lead 8: If I can just then put this in the context of this Inquiry and looking to future pandemics –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – can I ask you some questions about how you take that knowledge and how it’s being used in order to ensure that teachers and schools might be ready in a future pandemic. So, for example, does that form part of teacher training or is it part of updates in teachers’ ongoing education? Are there ways it’s being harnessed?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So, yes, we have a standing piece of guidance on remote education now, which learns the lessons from the pandemic, in which we would expect – we do expect schools to use for short-term closures. And you saw that being in use, for example, when schools had to close in relation to RAAC. The standing remote guidance which was there was used by schools to stand up provision for students when they couldn’t be in school for short periods during that difficulty.

We continue to have available all of that good practice.

In terms of embedding in teacher training, there’s – I don’t think we have embedded different expectations on – specifically on how you teach principally remotely in teacher training, but there is an awful lot more training and CPD available to teachers on use of technology, more broadly.

Lead 8: That’s in fact exactly what I was going to ask you: whether or not the position would be different now if there was a pandemic or in a national emergency in terms of, I suppose, first of all, children’s ability to access technology and whether there is – whether there are, sorry, audits carry out, for example, or whether there is ongoing intelligence gathering about children’s access to technology, and whether that’s better understood now.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. I think it’s better understood. I think it’s – I think there is still a challenge, however. So we don’t require schools to have a teaching model that, for example, involves one-to-one device use for children. Some schools do, many do not. There are more schools that make more use of devices now than there were before the pandemic. There are now very few – certainly very few secondary schools that don’t make use of some kind of online learning platform. So that challenge of schools without platforms, I think that is now – has moved on very considerably.

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: But I think it is still – I think it is still the case – and again, we’ve been testing this a little bit through the Pegasus exercise – I think it is still the case that if a pandemic broke out tomorrow, there would be children without access to a device, and we would need to work quickly to try to address that.

I think we’ve done a lot more work on our sourcing and supply, but the challenge does remain that if you’re sourcing devices in the hundreds of thousands or the millions, somebody needs to build them for you. You can’t just pop down to PC World and get them – (overspeaking) –

Lead 8: Yes, I think it’s more about understanding the extent to which that is now a known, as opposed to an unknown –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – which it was at the time of the pandemic. So, in other words, if this happened, we know we would need to do this.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, it’s better known. So I think we do a – so we have better data on tech access. Again, it’s quite unlikely, on the basis of the data that we have right now, that we would know, sort of, to the child exactly who had a device and who didn’t on the day the pandemic broke out.

I’m really confident that we could get that information much more quickly than we did in the previous pandemic, and one of the things we’re looking at – again, coming out of Pegasus – is whether we put even more in place around that understanding.

Lead 8: Because isn’t that something – I mean, schools could audit those sorts of things presumably fairly easily –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – on an ongoing basis, and there must be an issue about that in any event, given that children’s access to technology may be generally important for their broader education?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and as I say, we would have a whole set of data series that would tell us, year to year, broadly, how many children were using that – do you see what I mean?

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: We’d have a good macro picture, but unlike the daily real-time data I now have on attendance where I can tell you, literally tell you how many children were out of school in any school in the country you would like to choose yesterday and for what reason they were out of school, and how that compares with the position the day before last week, I don’t have that level of pinpoint accuracy real-time data on this issue. I could – there is a kind of how many things we ask the system to provide us in that level of detail.

Lead 8: Yes. Thank you.

I’m going to move on to a different subject, if I may, and again, it’s one you may have had some personal involvement with, and it’s not an issue that the Inquiry has touched on before, and it’s about the appointment of Sir Kevan Collins and his plans for recovery after the pandemic.

I probably don’t need to take you to his plans because I think I can probably summarise that the most significant part of the plans that he produced were to extend the school day. Is that accurate to say that?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: It’s not the only part of his plan, but it was probably one of the most significant aspects of what he was recommending the government did.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. He framed his advice around three Ts: teaching quality, time, and – it started off as tutoring and then became targeted support because it extended slightly beyond tutoring, and time was the one – I mean, it – I think he would say they were all equally important, actually, but the time one was a big proportion of the total overall cost.

Lead 8: I notice on a slide he prepared, he said “Within successful school reforms time is the single most important powerful ingredient”.

But that was the point, I think, that – or maybe it boils down to, that was the most expensive element of the plans that he was proposing; correct?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And can you assist us with the extent to which the Department for Education supported the plans that he produced for recovery?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, so as quite often happens when you have an independent adviser of this kind, he had a team of civil servants from the department supporting him closely and helping him to develop the plan, so in a very practical sense. It was colleagues from the department doing the work with him, and we worked very – and again, sometimes you do that and you sort of wall off the team and the independent adviser is very separate and then they sort of pop out with their recommendations and you look surprised.

This didn’t work like that, this was much better integrated. So we had his close team who were doing the work with him but we were working in a very integrated way with him. There was really – there were really regular conversations. We were very supportive of the proposals and we were … I mean, I think it would be right to say we were conscious from the start that because of the scale and the ambition of the proposal, we would have to be working really hard on making sure we were demonstrating the value for money of the proposals, particularly to the Treasury, but we were kind of seeking to do that with him.

Lead 8: And were you satisfied that that – I assume that testing, then, was put in place to be able to say not only is this workable but it’s value for money as well, and this is what it might produce at the end of it?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, so ultimately, if I think the department – I mean, one of my jobs as the accounting officer for the department is that if I think we’re about to do something that’s really bad value for money, I have to try and stop it. So – but I would say – so there’s a sort of straight “Is it good enough value for money for the taxpayer to kind of reasonably support this?” And it certainly met that test.

I would say, though, that in negotiation with the Treasury you don’t get to do everything you think passes that “value for money” bar. The Treasury will also say, well, which of these things is the best value for money? So it’s – so we supported the proposals, we recognised that there would be a conversation with the Treasury on that sort of sliding scale of value for money point. And I think we recognised, with Kevan, that the time proposals would be the part where the value for money argument was hardest to make.

Lead 8: Can you just explain what happened, then, in the discussions with the Treasury about the plan which was supported by the department?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So there were a series of engagement – so, right from very on, Sir Kevan was transparent with the Prime Minister about the scale of the package that he was thinking about. So he talked about, certainly early on, there was a sort of 10 to 12 billion range that he described to the Prime Minister in one of the weekly notes that he sent and I think that’s in the documentation, and the Treasury knew that that was the sort of scale being described. And again, in fairness to them, they said right from the start, “This is not realistic. We aren’t going to be able to provide that level of funding.”

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: However, it is also true that at the start the Prime Minister said, and again I paraphrase, “Yes, I am looking for really big, really ambitious proposals. Keep going.”

So from quite early on in the process, there was a – a pair of messages – and again, this is not particularly unusual, and to some extent it represents people in government playing their appointed roles and doing their jobs but we were getting the message from Number 10 that we should be ambitious, and from the Treasury, that we were thinking about spending too much money.

Lead 8: Yes. And I think the final outcome of it was that there was a much, much more reduced package than the one that had been advocated for by Sir Kevan.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, so the most important parts of the proposal on teaching, which was a massive expansion of teacher training, both for new teachers, so what is called the Early Career Framework which is the support we give teachers in the first two years of their career, and national professional qualifications, which is training for more senior teachers and for leaders, the propositions he made on that were accepted. The propositions he made on tutoring were accepted, and in the initial announcement the Prime Minister asked that the considerations about time be remitted and thought about harder and put through the spending review process.

And eventually, as a result of that, we secured a bit more than £800 million for an expansion of time in 16 to 19 but not anything for an expansion of time in schools.

We did, however, introduce a minimum requirement for the length of the school day at 32.5 hours. So we didn’t increase time but we did effectively ask every school to meet what was then the average being provided, because one of the things that became clear through the work that Sir Kevan did was that – both that there was a wide variation in the length of school days and that it wasn’t something that we had looked at or codified for some time before that.

Lady Hallett: I think the stenographer heard, and I did too, 800 billion. I think it was 800 million?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I’m so sorry. Yes. That would have been magnificent. No.

Ms Dobbin: I’m very grateful to you for clarifying that and it’s very helpful to understand then, because we’ve seen reflected in your evidence the point about the additional time being provided for 16- to 19-year-olds.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: So it helps understand why that came about.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: And I just will briefly say, because there’s always a risk that 16 to 19 and further education, in particular, get overlooked in these conversations, the reason we were successful in arguing for the extra time in 16 to 19 was that, unlike nearly every other country around the world, and indeed unlike the historic position, we, as a country, fund and support less time for our 16-18-year-olds than for our 5-to-16-year-olds. Nearly everywhere else in the world they offer more teaching time for those children and we offer less. So in choosing where to put that funding, they put it in that place.

I think, again, if you accept that there were constrained resources, I think that wasn’t a bad decision to make.

Lead 8: Yes, we might come to that, on some of the young people who had disproportionately difficult experiences during that period and there’s been children who were in that age group who are coming up to it.

Before I do, though, may I touch briefly on some of the issues that were raised by Sir Jon Coles in his evidence.

I understand that you’re familiar with and understand the point that he made about assessment in the summer of 2020 and the attempts that he made to engage with the Department for Education in respect of that. And in the course of his evidence, he explained about his engagement with Sir Gavin Williamson, but also, if I summarise more broadly, was critical of the department and its, I suppose, willingness to listen about the points that he was seeking to make.

Did you want to respond to that in terms of the Department for Education’s – so, whether it accepts that characterisation of its response?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I think there were two things I wanted to say about that. So the first is, I think it’s – there’s always a risk that when you’re in a position of relative power and ability to influence, such as when you’re in a government department, that you don’t take seriously enough and listen hard enough to the views of others, but I really see in the documents people trying to – I mean, giving Sir Jon a lot of time and a lot of attention and seeking to hear from him and listen to him.

And I also think that there was a lot of – it’s – it can be a little bit difficult when you can see and have explained to you one person’s input and one set of interactions. I think it’s important to understand that was happening in the context of a lot of people having a view about this, including many views that were directly pulling in different directions.

And so the department was not – I don’t think it’s a correct characterisation to say the department wasn’t listening. I think it was listening to lots of people, who had many different views, and trying to kind of internalise and manage them.

I do think – the second thing that I’d like to say is that – and again, as explained at the beginning, the – my very first few days in the department were entirely absorbed in thinking about what had happened over the summer on exams, and the task I was set was to understand that, to try to manage the consequences which were still continuing when I arrived, and – and to plan for the following year’s exams. And – so I did quite a lot of work, including on the formal lessons learnt work that we did around this. And I think it is worth saying that absolutely everybody involved in the process thought that some form of standardisation or moderation process was needed, including Sir Jon, whose alternative proposal was a proposal that involved a slightly different kind of standardisation than Ofqual had put in place.

And my conclusion, from having looked at the evidence, was that even if you had had a different form of standardisation and modernisation, and even if it made less change to people’s results than the Ofqual proposal, I am not at all convinced that it would have stood. I think there was a fundamental problem in seeking to assign grades to students that were – that they couldn’t see as being directly related to their work.

And where you had allowed teachers to give a judgement and the student knew what that judgement was, I think that anything that attempted to change that judgement would have been found to be unacceptable under those circumstances.

I completely understand why everybody thought some standardisation was necessary, and I also don’t agree that this was some kind of tussle between people who care about fairness and people who are sort of mechanically attached to standardisation of grades as a good in itself. Fairness matters between years as well as within years, so caring about standards maintenance isn’t instead of caring about fairness; it’s a form of caring about fairness.

And I therefore think that it was completely understandable that everybody wanted to try to make sure they were holding on to that, but I find it very difficult to see that any form of adjustment would have worked, and yet every single person involved in that debate thought we should be trying to do some form of adjustment.

And the result of that is that what we put in place for the future is, again, a standing requirement that, every year, schools keep a sufficient sample of pupil work through the year, that if they were to have to assign grades on this basis in the future, it could be clearly tied to people’s work, and any moderation could be clearly tied to pupil work as well.

Lead 8: I mean, looking – sorry, I didn’t mean to cut over you. Looking at it from the child’s perspective, if you had reached March of 2020 and you had been studying for your A levels, working really hard, and were told overnight that none of that would stand, and that your future was going to be decided by some unknown process, as you say, divorced from potentially everything that you had been doing, in that – that must have been incredibly difficult –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – for those children.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Do you accept that?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Lead 8: And do you think the better course, then, in that year, would have been just to go with teacher-assessed grades and to live with the inflation?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think … so – and, again, I’ve thought about this a lot, I think it’s really hard to see a really good answer if you start from there rather than starting further back. And again, this comes back to, sort of, the more planning you can do further in advance and the more contingency you can put in in advance, the easier.

I think, with the massive benefit of hindsight – and again, I, sort of, always remember, throughout all of this period and all of our reflection on it, so Sir Mark Walport, who was the Chief Scientific Adviser right at the beginning of the pandemic, I remember him saying the most powerful instrument in our scientific armoury is the retrospectoscope. And I’m, sort of, acutely conscious that it’s easy to do this through the retrospectoscope. But I think if I’d been doing it, I would have – knowing what I know now, and somehow, mysteriously, despite knowing what I know not having put in place the things that we put in place, I think I would have attempted to do something that, as it were, did the algorithm first and the teacher judgement later. In other words, that said: Here is what we think a reasonable range of grates for your institution looks like. Do your teacher assessment but be aware that if you’re outside that range we’re going to come and have a bit of a look.

So I think I’d have tried to do some more anchoring in advance, so that you didn’t have the situation where you had a teacher judgement which then felt overruled, but instead you tried to do some anchoring and then asked teachers to do their judgement within the anchoring. And I think you would still have seen significant inflation and I think you would still have seen schools taking quite different approaches within that. So some schools would have stretched the envelope more than others. I think it would have still been deeply imperfect, but I think I’d have had a crack at it that way around.

Lead 8: Grateful.

The other point that Sir Jon Coles raised, and it’s documented at the time, is his attempts to provide advice as a member of the recovery group.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And he – we saw him sending emails at 2 o’clock in the morning and asking the question: Is my advice going anywhere? Because I’m – the policies that come back don’t seem to take that into account.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Was there an issue during the pandemic with the department’s ability to integrate that sort of practical advice or was the problem simply that the policy shifts were so quick that that sort of advice couldn’t be meaningfully used?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think it was much more the latter. I think – I mean, again, you’re always synthesising and integrating lots of people’s advice, and so, even when you’ve done a synthesis, some people will feel that they haven’t been heard as well as others.

I mean, you know Sir Jon’s experience and pedigree. We take him very seriously in the department, as rightly we should. I think – the other thing I have some sympathy with colleagues on is the business of, kind of – again, in normal times we would really try to go back to everybody and say: yes, you said this, this is what we did, and this is why we’ve taken that bit and not that bit. I think the pace and intensity of work during this period – and again, some of what he describes as before my time in the department, but my – I’m – I think it’s very, very likely that people were just struggling to manage to find the time to do that level of feedback.

Lead 8: But also because shifts were being driven from outside the department, as well?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: I want to come up on, then, if I may, to impacts. Very broadly, just to consider what the Department for Education regards as being the persistent impacts of the pandemic on children.

Can I start with children in elective home education and the figures as they now stand. You’ve set out in your witness statement that the current position is that there are 92,000 children who are being home – well, who are said to be being home educated. May I ask, first of all, does the department accept that there was a link between that increase in the number of children being home educated and the pandemic?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, and again, I say that slightly cautiously because the numbers were rising before the pandemic but we certainly saw a very significant increase during and after the pandemic.

Lead 8: And is that part of the broader cultural issue that some witnesses have pointed to, that there has been this damage done to the contract between schools and families and the expectation that you go to school?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I think that’s certainly quite a significant part of it. I should say – it’s very important to say that we don’t, as a department, regard elective home education as a, sort of, inherently bad thing. There are many people who home-educate for very good reasons and who do it extremely well and – so again, we tend to try to be a bit careful not to sort of speak about it as though, kind of, like, everything about it is terrible. But we do worry a bit about whether people have felt forced into elective home education. We worry about a small subset of those who are electively educating who may wish their child to be off the radar of services for reasons that are less positive than that, and again, I – I just need to be incredibly clear that I’m not saying that I think that is the case for the vast majority of home educators but I think it is a part of the picture.

And we also do worry about, again, in some cases, we worry about the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of the education being offered.

Lead 8: Yes, and forgive me I didn’t mean to suggest that there were – (overspeaking) –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I know, I really know you didn’t, I just – it is one of the topics on which I know I have to be very careful, so I just …

Lead 8: Yes, and really, it’s just a reflection of the Ofsted concern about the numbers of children and the background to some of the children who are being home educated –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Correct.

Lead 8: – and the fact that a proportion of those children are vulnerable children?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. And we worry about that very much. And you can see the provisions in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is currently before Parliament which seek to address some of those concerns.

Lead 8: That’s a question that I wanted to ask you about. The Inquiry understands that the register of children who are being home educated is one of the things that the Bill contemplates will happen.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: Ofsted have raised the concern in the Inquiry about whether or not it will have access to that register. Is that an issue that’s being worked out in the detail of the bill?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: The other broader issue, then, that arises is persistent absenteeism arising out of the pandemic.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And the proportion of persistent absenteeism having increased quite sharply, but I think from your evidence, some signs that that might be starting to recover; is that correct?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. We have three different measures we look at, three principal measures we look at on attendance. There’s overall attendance, which rose very significantly during the pandemic, and has since been coming back down again, including about five million more school days attended in total last year than the year before, which is one of the fastest year-on-year improvements on record.

The second is persistent absence and the definition of persistent absence is a child that is missing one school day every two weeks. So a tenth of their time in school. And that also rose very significantly during the pandemic, and that is also now reducing.

And the third is severe absence. And severe absence, we define as children missing more than half of school, and that is a much, much smaller number. So it’s about 2.3%, at the moment, of children miss half of school or more. But that is the one that is still going up. It’s not yet started to come down. And we know that when we have significant rises in persistent absence, we see that feed through into later severe – so again, like maths, as well as human behaviour says, it’s quite difficult to become severely absent if you haven’t passed through being persistently absent.

And so at the moment, that rise still looks like it’s the lagged tracking of the rise in persistent absence, and we hope that having turned the corner on persistent absence, we’ll start to see severe absence turn but we are working really hard to try to make that happen and schools across the country are doing so too. And again, the work that teachers, head teachers, and others have done during and after the pandemic to try to address some of these challenges is phenomenal and again I wanted to take the opportunity to say “thank you” on behalf of the department to them.

Lead 8: Thank you. Your statement is incredibly detailed as to elements of the effect on children’s attainment.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: And I – it’s not controversial so I’m not going to take you through the detail of that. But I think, broadly speaking, it’s accepted on behalf of the department that overall, the pandemic did harm the attainment of all pupils and particularly those who were subject to the disadvantage gap. Is that an overall accurate summary of what’s accepted?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. So it harmed education attainment for the average child but more for those from poorer backgrounds. It reversed, at a stroke, about a decade’s worth of work to close the gap between – in attainment between children who receive free school meals and their peers. With the determination and work of teachers and leaders, as I described, that is gradually recovering, but it has not yet recovered and it is being done with effort and difficulty.

Lead 8: The expert to Module 8 has set out in her evidence that her view is that, as a general picture, the disadvantage gap is still widening. Is that – the most recent statistics for the Department for Education, I think demonstrates that in fact that recovery that you allude to has started –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – and can be seen –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – reflected in the most recent –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – data; correct?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, again, the picture is very slightly different depending on which set of results you look at, but broadly speaking, we can see the gap now narrowing again. It has not yet closed – I mean, it’s not yet closed to where it was before the pandemic but it’s going in the right direction.

Lead 8: The other thing that the expert to Module 8 said was that there was a consensus that school closures triggered by the pandemic have had a severely detrimental effect on learning and attainment.

Again, I want to ask if you accept that, subject to the evidence of recovery in the most recent data?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Oh, certainly school closures impacted attainment. I mean, the pandemic is an incredibly good illustration of why we have schools.

Lead 8: Yes. I think it’s really her “severely detrimental effect on learning and attainment”, so I think it’s just –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: It had a much severer effect for some children than others, but I think we – I mean, it’s – I don’t – I’m not sure it’s profitable to have an argument about the word “severe”.

Lead 8: Do you accept, and of course there’s a differential in the experience of disadvantaged children during the pandemic, but do you accept that overall, for most children during the pandemic, that it had a severe impact on their education as well? I’m conscious –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.

Lead 8: – that there are children in private schools who may have had more access, obviously, to online education, so I’m talking about the mainstay of children in state schools.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. I mean, the only reason I hesitate on this – so I think it did have a severe impact on the education of children, including children whose education was relatively well served. I don’t think that remote education was a good substitute for face-to-face education. I think the pandemic demonstrated that, even when well executed, it was very hard to make it substitute. I mean, not least because school provides a lot more than education.

I would say that when you look at the performance in the state system, of children who are not from deprived backgrounds, that we’re – on many measures, we’ve recovered. We have not recovered for children from – from – vulnerable children from those more deprived backgrounds, and so that’s why I just marginally hesitated over “severe impact”. I think it did actually have a severe impact for everybody, but I think the lastingness of the impact was different across those different contours.

And the other thing I would say is we tread this quite careful line all the time between making sure we recognise impacts, disadvantages and vulnerabilities in the system and that we do not accidentally slide into reducing our expectations for children from those backgrounds.

Lead 8: Yes.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Because the literature is so compelling that the expectations teachers, parents and we as a society have are really material in how children do. So if we accidentally project the message that these children cannot recover their education, that they’re scarred forever, that – we risk actually making that more true than it would have been if we continued to realistically hold the highest possible expectations.

And again, I’m sorry to sort of harp on this, but head teachers I speak to, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, were thinking about this really hard and were trying to manage children’s aspirations and parents’ aspirations in an environment where a lot of people in the world were projecting this really quite strong message that, you know, all was lost for a generation.

And it’s not about being Pollyanna-ish or suggesting there wasn’t a problem – there really was a problem, it was really serious – but recovery for children is aided more by us asserting their entitlement to an education which sets really high expectations for them, and helps them to meet those really high expectations, than it is by a narrative that says that it’s hopeless or can’t be done.

Lead 8: Thank you.

I just wanted to put something to you from the Inquiry’s Every Story Matters report which brings together the experiences of people, including those who work in education, and one head teacher in England said:

“It” – referring to the pandemic – “developed a feeling that actually we can do just fine without school, and therefore I don’t really need to come. Attendance is at the worst ever nationally currently, as a result.”

I just wanted to ask you about whether you agree that one of the principal issues to come out of the pandemic is understanding that real relationship, I suppose, between continuing to attend school and the potential damage that can be done by disrupting that, and I think there’s a second part to that: the very long-term consequences it can have, as well.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yeah, I do agree with that. I think there’s wider and more multifaceted pieces of – I do think there’s been damage to that sort of social contract, but I think we’ve got incredibly good, very clear survey evidence that there are more parents who think that missing a bit of school doesn’t matter, and actually we also have incredibly clear evidence that every day really does count, that, for example, the difference it makes to your grades to go from being a 95% attender to a 90% attender is really significant, and actually is as significant as any other 5% gap, and re-communicating that and helping people hold on to that and understand it is a big job of work.

There’s also a huge impact on other people’s children when children are casually absent. So the teacher has to address time in catching up the children who’ve been absent. The class will often go back around things. So people also, I think, don’t necessarily appreciate that the impact on their own child may not just be about their own child’s absence, both their child’s absence can affect other people’s children and that other people’s children’s absence can affect their child.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, it’s almost, I think, time for the short adjournment.

Lady Hallett: Certainly. Very well, we shall return at 1.45. Thank you very much.

(12.43 pm)

(The Short Adjournment)

(1.46 pm)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: Ms Acland-Hood, I wonder if I could ask you about a different topic, please, which is that of ventilation in school. The Inquiry has a witness statement from a Professor Noakes. I think it’s probably in your bundle.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yeah.

Lead 8: You don’t need to go to it because I think I can just set out in brief terms what she says at paragraph 8.2 of her witness statement, which is this:

[As read] “My view is that while the evidence base around infectious disease is still weak, there is a growing body of evidence that indicates that enabling better ventilation and indoor air quality in school environments will have a positive effect on the health of children. This is in terms of exposure to communicable pathogens and other microorganisms such as mould, exposure to air pollution, and enabling thermally comfortable environments. Whilst ventilation or air cleaning is not a silver bullet and will not reduce transmission of Covid-19 or other respiratory infections to zero, there is some evidence to indicate a positive impact in schools and maybe enable environments to be more resilient to both seasonal infections and future pandemics.”

And she goes on over the page – I won’t go to this because it’s quite simple. She sets out that one of the steps that could be taken in the future is to improve schools’ knowledge base on the environmental impacts on health and wellbeing in relation to air quality, as well. And she sets out some recommendations about that.

Can I ask you, please, and I have some questions on behalf of the Core Participants about the position during the pandemic, which I’ll come back to, but may I please ask what the Department for Education’s – what work it’s doing at the moment or whether or not it is doing research in this field of ventilation across the school estate more broadly?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Thank you, yes. There’s some research under way which we’ve been following closely which is not yet published which essentially looks at the effect of – so it’s specifically air cleaning, which is not quite the same as ventilation but it has the same – it has the effect of removing particulate matter, and we are waiting for the publication of that research, which we look forward to.

In the meantime, we really welcome the joint work we’ve been doing with experts, including Cath Noakes, but we’ve been looking at our guidance on new build schools and the ventilation standards that they must meet. I think it’s not yet in the public domain but the new framework that we’ve put out around new build increases the and clarifies the standards, and having done that, we aren’t – and when we have the Bradford study publication, we’re going to go back round and look at our guidance and standards for existing schools.

Lead 8: I’m grateful, thank you. One of the questions that Core Participants have asked is why the Department for Education didn’t ensure mitigation such as air filters were deployed more widely during the pandemic given that they’re relatively low cost, and could have enabled safer attendance, particularly for children from clinically vulnerable families, whilst waiting for long-term building upgrades?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Thank you.

So, what we did during the pandemic – so, as soon as SAGE had given a clear opinion on this, which was in the early summer of 2021, we started the programme to roll out carbon dioxide monitors in schools. Carbon dioxide monitors are a proxy, they don’t tell you about the cleanness of the air but they do tell you how well ventilated your space is. And we did that because we wanted to try to make sure both that we were helping people do really low costings to improve ventilation, like open the window, which does work very well, and that where that wasn’t possible, either because of thermal comfort or because of the way the building was designed, we could then target the provision of the air filters at the spaces with poor ventilation.

You don’t get any benefit if you put an air filter in a well ventilated space because the air is moving anyway.

Lead 8: I mean, the question is asked whether it was adequate that the first significant action in relation to ventilation was the delivery of air units in 2022, so, in other words, at a very late stage in the pandemic?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So, as I say, we had a clear position from SAGE on this for the first time in – in summer 2021. We then – I don’t think we could have rolled out the CO² monitors more quickly than we did after that. And as soon as schools reported back to us on areas of the school where they couldn’t bring the ventilation down, we started shipping the filters. I’ll double-check this but I thought the first filters were shipped in ‘21. I can double-check that.

Lead 8: If it’s not immediately apparent, that can be checked.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. We prioritised special schools and alternative provision for the – both for the CO² monitors and then for the first delivery of the air filters. I can check that and come – I don’t want to tell you something that’s not right.

Lead 8: Yes. I’m grateful.

The other question that’s asked is whether or not, beyond the extant Building Bulletin 101, with guidelines on ventilation, the Department for Education left the matter to responsible bodies for schools to address ventilation?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, so we – responsible bodies are so called because they’re responsible for all matters to do with their building, and so that is absolutely right. But in the same way that they’re responsible for maintenance of the building and other forms of upkeep.

Lead 8: Sorry, I was going to ask the follow-up question, which is whether or not you perceive a problem with that or whether you think that is the correct route to take?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So we get asked and think about this question in respect of quite a large range of issues related to buildings, and the trade-off is: do you try and kind of take all of that centrally into the delivery of the department and try to get right telling every school in the country exactly which bit of their building most needs fixing next, or do you take the position that the people closer to the child and the building are in a better position to do that?

And the department’s consistent position over a long period has been that it’s better for the responsible body to hold that. And we do have quite extensive guidance for responsible bodies on how to exercise those functions, we have various forms of support for them across different parts of the building, but fundamentally the duty sits with them.

Lead 8: I’m going to move on to a subject which has been raised by Long Covid Kids, and it’s this: you attended the Permanent Secretary Stakeholder Group meeting on education on Long Covid in children and young people – sorry, and children and – Long Covid in children and young people was discussed three times at that group, so in June, August and September 2021 and representatives from the Local Government Association, teachers unions, and representatives from school and educational institutions were in attendance.

Do you agree that the stakeholder group should have included input from patient advocacy groups like Long Covid Kids who were instrumental in the recognition of this new paediatric disease?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So I might just – in giving the answer to that question, I might just explain what the Permanent Secretary Stakeholder Group was and how it worked, because I think it will help – I mean, sorry, the answer is no, but I really want to explain why the answer is no, because it’s not because we don’t take really seriously the advocacy and work of such groups, and the risk to children.

So the Permanent Secretary Stakeholder Group was set up in January 2021 in the aftermath of the period we discussed around particularly the very difficult issues around 4 January. And we’d had a lot of feedback, including through that period, difficult period, on testing, about how we were engaging and communicating with some of our really core stakeholders who held responsibility for action across the system, and in some cases we hadn’t done enough. In other cases, actually we had done a lot of communication but for various reasons it wasn’t always being represented, and there was something about particularly we knew that the reopening of schools in March would be very difficult and it would require us all to work really closely together in partnership.

And so the Permanent Secretary Stakeholder Group was set up as a weekly meeting of those who had the responsibility to take the action across the system to make things happen together. And that was the kind of core framing. And it had a stable membership. We always had the same people at the meetings, and we shared the scientific advice, we invited people from PHE regularly to talk about different health aspects, in order to create a group who could collectively work in partnership on that reopening and then it was felt to be a very valuable group and it persisted beyond 8 March.

It continued to meet weekly, then subsequently moved to fortnightly. It still exists and meets monthly – actually, I think we have just moved to once every half term because in a slightly different time with a slightly different set of drivers, and the agenda was often driven by the membership. So members of the group would say, “We would really like to hear from an expert from PHE or the UKHSA about this particular issue” and that was a pattern we’d established particularly in looking at some of the kind of risks as we moved towards March reopening but then continued through the series.

We started every single meeting with what was called “the voice of the child and young person”, so a member of the group – in some cases we had children attending, in other cases people would bring direct voice of children into the meeting, so that informed everything that we did.

But we didn’t, I think it’s true to say, ever, invite people who were not part of that core delivery group, or experts from across government who could be held within that circle and that’s partly because we shared things with that group confidentially and carefully in order to make sure we were building that partnership for reopening.

So I think there is a different question, which is could we or should we as a department have had more contact with Long Covid Kids, but I don’t think for this particular meeting, set up in the way it was to do the thing it was set up to do, that we’d have been doing something very different from what we did in general in those meetings if we’d done that and it wasn’t a thing we’d done on other topics.

Lead 8: The evidence from some of the experts in the Inquiry, and indeed some of the witnesses, have reflected research that, unsurprisingly, children with Long Covid would like to be able to attend school but also are at risk of suffering disproportionate outcomes because of the nature of their illness, and I think in your report you’ve set out about young people with Long Covid being most likely to report changing their career plans due to the pandemic.

How did the department, at the time, deal with the specific issues and challenges faced by pupils with Long Covid? And there’s a second part to the question, in terms of what it’s doing now, as well, in terms of the ongoing challenges?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yeah. So I think the first thing I want to say is how sorry I am for any child who is suffering from Long Covid, and particularly for children like those whose voice we heard through the evidence in the video that was shown at the beginning of this module, for the parents of children who have been affected, and I know that for many there have been compounding challenges beyond those presented by illness because of the very wide range of symptoms and experiences, the difficulties in diagnosis, particularly in the early stages, which meant that some sufferers have not always felt or been taken seriously, and I say everything I say in that context.

As a department, we sought always to follow the scientific and public health advice and to reflect it in our guidance and we sought to do that in relation to Long Covid and we continue to do so, so that’s the sort of core of our approach.

We were helped by the appointment of Dougal Hargreaves as deputy Chief Scientific Adviser in August 2020 because he was involved in the Children and Young People with Long Covid study, the study known as CLoCk, and again, I think you can see in the documents, we were hearing from that and other studies and looking at that as we went through.

We wouldn’t generally, as a department, as it were, have our own view on a medical or health issue. We would usually take that from the Department of Health, PHE, and then reflect it. And it’s quite unusual for us to do guidance to schools on a – like, condition by condition, rather than thinking about how it might affect people.

So, again, there was a period where we were trying to work out whether we should give schools some guidance on it. I think we were quite keen to. We were trying to work that out with the Department of Health and PHE. In the end, we didn’t issue any specific guidance to schools, and that was partly because, I think, it was difficult in that engagement with DHSC and PHE to work out exactly what you would say that was specific to this, rather than reflecting wider advice about how you manage children with other types of long-term or chronic conditions. And we, sort of, particularly didn’t want to put ourselves in a place where we were encouraging teachers to do diagnosis.

Lead 8: I’m grateful.

The second issue arises in relation to clinically vulnerable children and the evidence that the Inquiry has heard, which is very specific to the pandemic period and to the return of children to school in September 2020, and what the expert to the Inquiry has characterised as a more punitive approach taken to attendance, in that period, in England as compared to other jurisdictions.

Does the Department for Education have reflections on that period and whether the right approach was taken to attendance and specifically to the position of those children who were clinically vulnerable themselves or who had a family member?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. So I think we saw the overall government advice on clinical vulnerability and clinical extreme vulnerability for children change a lot between the very initial stages of the pandemic, where – and I think it’s in evidence from some people who are significantly more medically qualified than I am, but that children were identified on a somewhat precautionary basis early on during that period of uncertainty. And over the summer, both the requirement for the clinically extremely vulnerable overall to shield was lifted, in August, and the vast majority of children who’d been previously identified as clinically vulnerable or clinically extremely vulnerable were effectively removed from that designation and told “We think it is now safe for you to attend school.”

There was a small number of remaining children under the care of a health professional who were told that they should have that health professional advice, and what we did was we reflected that position in our guidance and we sought to strongly encourage attendance for those for whom it was safe to attend. We did reflect in the guidance that position for children who were still under the care of a health professional. And we also reflected that there might be a period of adjustment for children, so there is advice in our guidance about managing that and encouraging head teachers and teachers to talk to families who might be anxious about it.

Lead 8: I think the issue has been raised that for children who had a clinically vulnerable parent, they weren’t dealt with in the guidance. And again, just looking at it from the perspective of a child and a family who might be very worried about a child going back to school and the risk that might present to the rest of the family, was that an area in which there could have been more guidance or more nuance?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. And again, I think there was, in the – in the central changes, there was advice that said families of those who are clinically vulnerable could go to work or to school. So, again, there was a position set out.

I completely appreciate that it felt very difficult to people, but again, I don’t think it was for us in the department to create a different set of rules than those that were being set out by our health colleagues.

Ms Dobbin: I’m grateful.

My Lady, I think those are my questions. I’ll just check.

I’m grateful, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Ms Dobbin.

Ms Hannett, who is just there.

Questions From Ms Hannett KC

Ms Hannett: Ms Acland-Hood, I appear on behalf of Long Covid Kids and Long Covid Kids Scotland.

You attended a stakeholder meeting on 9 June 2021 at which Dr Shamez Ladhani of Public Health England stated that children should not be labelled with Long Covid, ie, a medical condition, as this has potential to cause longer-term psychological harm. My clients’ experience was that the experience of Long Covid was minimised and disbelieved, including by their children’s schools, not over-diagnosed. DfE hasn’t produced guidance to advise schools on Long Covid, then or since.

Did Dr Ladhani’s advice minimising paediatric Long Covid affect the approach taken by the Department for Education?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So as I’ve explained, we invited Dr Ladhani, who was the sort of person PHE recommended that we have to the meeting in response to members of the meeting suggesting that it would be a good topic to discuss.

My recollection is that everybody listened to her attentively. I think that – I think that it’s true that the minutes slightly kind of gloss what she said, so I think she was talking a bit about the extent to which there’s – the heterogeneity of symptoms and the fact that there are a lot of overlapping symptoms with other conditions, but we wouldn’t, as a department, have taken an independent view on a health condition. We would have taken – and we wouldn’t just have taken our advice from one expert appearing as a Stakeholder Group. We would have taken our advice from DHSC and PHE as a whole on a medical condition.

So no, I don’t think her – what she said at that Stakeholder Group affected the way we behaved, and the lack of provision of guidance was about taking care not to step into that health space when we weren’t the best authority on that.

Ms Hannett KC: Just picking up the evidence you gave on guidance just now to Ms Dobbin, in terms of Long Covid in September 2021, you gave evidence that you wouldn’t ordinarily give guidance on a freestanding health condition. Do you accept that there was something different about Long Covid in the sense that it was a novel paediatric disease which significantly affected thousands of children quite quickly, and in those circumstances, DfE had a role, both to alert schools and teachers about its existence, but also to give guidance on what the schools could do in terms of its effect on attainment and attendance?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So again, it’s true that I would say it would be very rare for us to give condition-specific guidance. It’s also true that there are some circumstances in which we might, for example, in relation to an outbreak of a particularly disease, but we would never, ever do that without DHSC, PHE backing advice and I mean, it would be completely irresponsible for us, I think, to do that unilaterally.

Ms Hannett: Thank you, Ms Acland-Hood.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Hannett.

Ms Twite – she’s over there.

Questions From Ms Twite

Ms Twite: Ms Acland-Hood, I have a question on behalf of Children’s Rights Organisations about the remit of the Department for Education during the pandemic. And what we would like to understand is the ability of the department to influence decision making in some broader issues outside of schools or social care but which still hugely impacted children. And the sort of decisions that I’m talking about are: how health protection regulations that limited inter-household mixing were framed and whether children should have been treated differently, for example, under 5s were exempted from them in January 2021, whether playgrounds should have closed, whether the guidance should have clarified that play was exercise. Those are just some examples.

Quite apart from the rights or wrongs of those decisions, were these decisions the sort of decisions that the Department for Education would have been at all involved in, or had any ability to influence?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So the Secretary of State for Education does also have a named role as the government’s lead minister for children. It’s one of those interesting things, lots of people call for there to be a minister for children but actually, technically, there is one, and it is the Secretary of State for Education.

I think what I would say is the extent to which secretaries of state choose to step into and exercise that wider responsibility, and the issues on which they exercise it, tend to be a bit of a matter for them. So any time you have a cross-cutting ministerial role of that kind, and this goes for roles like – it’s quite common for a minister, for example, to have a role on a cross-cutting equalities matter as well as their core role – whereas in relation to your core role, you typically have standing teams existing, guidance, sets of levers, pieces of responsibility, when you exercise your cross-cutting role, some of those levers, teams and responsibilities sit in other people’s departments.

And if you want to, you can call on your cross-cutting role to have influence but you’re not, as it were, obligated to, and the system doesn’t necessarily push you to in the same way. So, again – sorry, this might sound a bit technocratic, but the minute – the civil servants in your own department will, kind of, feed you stuff to do all the time. Civil servants in other departments over whom you might have an interest in a piece of their policy, probably won’t. So you have to decide to go and get involved in that.

Now, I think, on the issues you describe, it would have been open to the Secretary of State for Education to get engaged to assert their role as cross-government Minister for Children, and there are some examples of that. So the example that I would give is the work on health, visitors and the under-1s: not part of the department’s policy, enormously part of the department’s interest in looking after the most vulnerable children.

And there was, again, you can see in the papers, a lot of activity to try to exercise our cross-cutting responsibility on that.

I have personally reflected quite a lot on those issues around family mixing, and actually particularly play, and where, sort of, the technical responsibility for play spaces was with MHCLG because of their responsibility for local government, but I think – I think I should have given or caused to be given to the Secretary of State more advice about intervening on those issues. And I take that responsibility.

Ms Twite: Do you think there’s anything structurally that could be done to make it easier, then, in a future pandemic, for those – I reflect on your answer earlier to a different question, that people at the centre often think they know more about children’s rights than perhaps they do, and whether or not that can be solved more by the Department for Education?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So I think there probably are some structural things that you could do, and indeed, some of the structures that we’ve put in place, as we’ve thought about mission-based government for this government, have created an architecture that give us more reach and more connectivity, and – and again – sorry, I’ve framed it a bit as the Secretary of State going and prodding other people but actually some of it is about creating common cause and common interest as well, and I do think those structures could have helped.

They’re particular to a sort of way of working this government has asked us to operate in, which is, (a), we could unilaterally choose to sustain some of those ways of working, and (b), we could be required to work more in that way across some of these areas of cross-cutting responsibility.

Ms Twite: Thank you. Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Twite.

Mr Jacobs, who is over there, right down the end.

Questions From Mr Jacobs

Mr Jacobs: Good afternoon.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Afternoon.

Mr Jacobs: Ms Acland-Hood, a question, if I may, on the role of public health and health services in supporting schools during a pandemic.

In December 2020 the National Association of Head Teachers said in a press release:

“What we have … is the education system supporting the public health response to Covid, when what we need is support from the health system to preserve the quality of education for young people. Teaching is the only profession that is being asked to do two things – preserve education for children AND play a part in the mass testing programme.”

Can I just ask for your reflections on that and whether you do think there’s needs to be more of an emphasis on public health and health services supporting schools on the, sort of, public health element of the response?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: So I have talked quite a lot about that specific testing period. And again, I think my sort of hierarchy of desirability would have been more people we could have wrapped around schools to help them do it, at the top, but not doing it at all at the bottom.

And I – you know, I do think there are other examples of many professions during the Covid period who went above and beyond what would normally have been expected, and it’s hard to say that that’s right or wrong. I think some of it represented a really deep human urge, that a lot of us felt, to do everything that we could do. And again, I will just say I think teachers and head teachers, teaching assistants, and actually children themselves, did the most extraordinary things during the pandemic.

I think if you’re asking a broader question, I think that partnership between public health and schools is incredibly important, and it works in both directions. I think there are a huge number of things that schools do as part of their daily business that are critically important to public health, to developing really good understanding of positive health behaviours, PE and school sport, school food plays an enormous role, but I also think public health has a role in supporting the education of children.

And I think where we see diminution or fraying of those relationships, we have a less good offer both for children in schools and for people in communities. And again, I’d say some of the work we’re thinking about as part of missions is about trying to think what is the overarching aim here and how do we wrap ourselves round that together?

Mr Jacobs: My Lady, one follow-up question, if I may.

Given the inevitable pressures on an array of services and the difficulties that you’ve described of trying to pull in support from Test and Trace or the army, whoever it may be, is it quite important, do you think, in pandemic planning to try to think through and have some sort of designated responsibilities for who is going to support schools in some of these – the public health elements of response, if I can call it that, rather than the Department for Education trying to create a very difficult solution in the moment, as it were?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. I mean, I hope it’s been clear throughout that I’m in favour of more planning on nearly everything. I think it can be very difficult to make a detailed plan that is going to respond to every possible version of an emergency that you might face, but I think you can create building blocks that are likely to be widely deployable.

And I also think we’ve got to be realistic about the extent to which, in a health-driven emergency, the people who do health might be quite busy. And so I think there might be something about having a standing expectation, and a set of variations to that, that tell you what to do if your plan A isn’t available.

Mr Jacobs: Thank you.

My Lady, my question on ventilation has, I think, been covered already, so I won’t cover the same ground.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Mr Jacobs.

Mr Jacobs: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Ms Douglas, who is there, I think. Yes.

Questions From Ms Douglas

Ms Douglas: Thank you.

Good afternoon, Ms Acland-Hood. I appear on behalf of CVF. CVF represents both clinically vulnerable children and children living in households with a clinically vulnerable family member. And you were asked this morning about absenteeism and you touched on the work that’s being done to turn the corner on rates of persistent and severe absence which arose during the pandemic.

You’ve explained in a little more detail in your witness statement about how the Department for Education monitors data on differences in attendance across pupil subgroups or with different characteristics.

In CVF’s experience, persistent and severe absence from school has been significantly higher among children in clinically vulnerable families than the national average or, indeed, other vulnerable groups, including children eligible for free school meals or with education, health and care plans.

I note that there is precedent for new data collection in this context and I think we’ve seen that in relation to absence rates among young carers. Would it be helpful to collect and monitor data on the levels of attendance and reasons for absence among clinically vulnerable children and children in clinically vulnerable families?

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: I think that’s a good question, and it’s definitely something we could take away and think about. I think the challenge would be that we – so at various points during the pandemic we saw the definition of who was considered to be clinically vulnerable and clinically extremely vulnerable change over time, and I think sometimes people continued to feel vulnerable, including clinically vulnerable, when they didn’t quite meet that designation as was being set out by the health authorities.

So I think there’d be something about – I am not sure about how far there is a stable health definition that you could use, particularly in the context where it depends what you’re vulnerable to.

Ms Douglas: I appreciate that there are a challenge perhaps in comparison to data on a child that’s eligible for free school meals, for example, but I think that, just by way of contrast with young carers, that data relies on sort of self-reporting –

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: That’s true.

Ms Douglas: – and declarations by parents or guardians, so perhaps there’s a bit of a – there’s a precedent there for collecting that kind of data.

Ms Susan Acland-Hood: Yeah, it’s certainly something we could look at.

Ms Douglas: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Douglas.

Ms Acland-Hood, that completes the questions we have for you. It’s been extremely helpful and you’ve obviously put in not just a great deal of thought but a great deal of work in preparing for today, and I’m, like I say, I’m really grateful to you and to all your colleagues who obviously helped, including the poor soul that put in all those tabs in your file.

The Witness: It was a team effort, the tabs, thank you.

Lady Hallett: But I am genuinely grateful to you all for your help.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Dr Treanor?

Dr Treanor: My Lady, the final witness today is Derek Baker.

Mr Derek Baker

MR DEREK BAKER (sworn).

Lady Hallett: I hope you haven’t been waiting for too long.

The Witness: No, thank you.

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Dr Treanor: Mr Baker, good afternoon. Thank you for your attendance today, and for the provision of your witness statement dated 28 August 2025, which is at INQ000588169. I think you should have that in front of you.

Mr Derek Baker: I do. I don’t have it on the screen.

Counsel Inquiry: Pardon?

Mr Derek Baker: I don’t have it on the screen but I do have a hard copy.

Counsel Inquiry: Oh, you have a hard copy?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Right. And can you confirm that the contents of that statement are true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Derek Baker: I can.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Baker, you were the Permanent Secretary to the Department of Education in Northern Ireland from February 2017 until your retirement on 27 November 2020; correct?

Mr Derek Baker: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And throughout your time, the Minister of Education was Lord Weir, who had been appointed in January 2020 when power sharing was restored; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And my Lady, you will recall having heard evidence from Lord Weir in the course of Module 2C.

Mr Baker, Lord Weir was later succeeded by Ms McIlveen in June 2021; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And in terms of your successors as permanent secretary, I understand that Lianne Patterson partially covered the role between November 2020 and February 2021, Mark Browne was then in post from March 2021 until December 2024, and Ronnie Armour has been acting permanent secretary since December 2024; is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And in light of that, Mr Baker, at the outset, I’d like to just take a moment to set out the consequences of events which has preceded your attendance to give evidence today?

Initially, the Department of Education had provided a witness statement signed by the current acting permanent secretary, Mr Armour, and he was invited to give evidence. The department then wrote to the Inquiry advising that during the specified period Mr Armour was the Director General of the Northern Ireland Prison Service and that you and Mr Browne would be better placed to give evidence, and following careful consideration, and mindful that you had retired from the Civil Service, the Inquiry then invited Mr Browne to attend and give evidence, but the department then wrote to the Inquiry again advising that Mr Browne was unable to attend and having made further inquiries and following careful consideration, the Inquiry then invited you to give evidence.

So Mr Baker, that sets out the basis upon which you’re being put forward as a witness by the department; is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: I wasn’t privy to all that correspondence but I understand it to be the case.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Now, Mr Baker, at the outset I’d like to ask you a bit about the role of the Department of Education in Northern Ireland in relation to children and young people, because I think there are some important differences as compared with England, Scotland and Wales.

So the Department of Education is one of nine Northern Ireland Executive departments and we understand from your statement that responsibilities in relation to children and young people sit across virtually all of those departments; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: Some expects of responsibility for children – legislation and policy in respect of children, straddle the interests of quite a few departments, that’s correct, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: What particular responsibilities does the Department of Education hold in relation to children and young people?

Mr Derek Baker: The Department of Education has policy and legislative responsibility for three broad areas: one is children’s education in primary and post-primary but no responsibility for further and higher education. It has responsibility for youth services and it has responsibility for childcare.

And all of those matters are devolved to the Northern Ireland administration, so whilst we would have regard to what is happening in our – in other jurisdictions, we have full responsibility for all of those issues.

Counsel Inquiry: And I think it’s right that the Department of Education would have overall responsibility and accountability for the quality of education in schools?

Mr Derek Baker: It does.

Counsel Inquiry: And just so that it is clear, in contrast to the position in England, the Department of Education in Northern Ireland does not have any responsibility for children’s social care in Northern Ireland.

Mr Derek Baker: No.

Counsel Inquiry: That sits with the Department of Health; isn’t that right?

Mr Derek Baker: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And again in Northern Ireland, unlike in England, Scotland and Wales, local authorities have no role in the provision of education?

Mr Derek Baker: Correct. Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Baker, I’d like to begin by looking at the department’s pre-pandemic planning with you. In your statement, and this is at paragraph 597, for your reference, you knowledge that the department failed to identify as a risk the possibility of schools suddenly having to close and you explained that that was because, and I quote:

“Officials considered that such a prospect seemed too apocalyptic to be realistically included in a risk register.

And you say that:

“As a consequence, officials had to react urgently to an entirely unforeseen and extreme set of circumstances …”

Is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: That is correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Baker, I think you accept in your statement that the department had done very limited planning for an emergency of this scale prior to 2020; is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes, I would fully accept that the department was neither psychologically nor practically prepared for huge swathes of the education system closing down in March 2020.

Counsel Inquiry: And you make the point in your statement that the only prior planning and testing was in respect of bird flu or human influenza planning which was pre-January 2020; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: It was a long time before that, actually. I think the guidance was issued in 2009, 2010, but I would not wish to place any particular store by that guidance in respect of the Covid crisis which befell us in 2020.

Counsel Inquiry: May I ask why, Mr Baker?

Mr Derek Baker: Because I think the previous flu guidance that was issued in 2009, 2010, anticipated at worst, perhaps individual schools having to close periodically for a short period, but it did not foresee in any respect the circumstances which we faced in March 2020 with whole swathes of the education system closing down. So I think, in many respects, that bird flu guidance was irrelevant to the Covid-19 crisis.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. Well, perhaps we can take a look at the pandemic flu plans that the department held prior to 2020. If we could have on screen, please, INQ000617116, and just pausing at the cover page, Mr Baker.

This is a Department of Education document; correct?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And we can see that it’s a contingency plan both for the department itself and for the wider education sector, so for schools and education settings; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And in your statement, you explain, and this is at paragraph 80, that schools and arm’s length bodies are responsible for contingency planning in their respective roles but I think it’s right that ultimately the department has oversight of that contingency planning; is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: I think, for any contingency planning that relates to system-wide emergencies, you’re absolutely right: the department should be taking the lead in such emergency planning. Individual schools would have a responsibility for issues which would affect them on an individual basis, such as an exceptional closure, you know, issues, maybe such as a burst pipe, such as snow, such as bad weather or an outbreak of some particular disease, but at a system-wide level it would be for the Department of Education and the Education Authority.

Counsel Inquiry: That’s helpful. Thank you.

Now, Mr Baker, the department has provided this plan to the Inquiry in draft form, and in your statement you explain that this is the version that was held within the department at the time prior to January 2020. But I don’t think that we need to be too concerned about this plan being a draft.

If we could look in the box at the bottom – thank you – at the bottom right-hand side of the screen, we can see that this version 6 and that it had been issued in December 2017; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: I would question that and I do apologise to the Inquiry for that, because I made some enquiries myself having read the department’s corporate witness statement again, whilst a final version was produced in 2009-2010, subsequent to that, my understanding is that it was being revised in the department, and there was a revision under way in 2017 as shown on the screen, but that never was completed, to the best of my knowledge.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. But this is guidance – and we will see some tracked changes throughout where perhaps revisions were intended, but this is guidance that nevertheless had been issued at some point –

Mr Derek Baker: In 2009/10, yes, that’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, okay.

And perhaps we could look at page 20 of this, please. So this is a section entitled “Possible/Probable Closure of Schools”, and if we look at paragraph 20.1, it suggests that:

“… schools may be an exception to the general ‘business as usual’ message that underpins Government guidance to other sectors in relation to a … pandemic [because] there are … specific issues to consider concerning children.”

Yes?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: If we could look at paragraph 20.4, please. This paragraph says that:

“Schools have been advised to plan both for staying open during a pandemic and for the possible closure to children of schools, if the Government proposes such closure, at a national level …”

It suggests that:

“Closure could either be very localised and brief … or more widespread and for a longer period …”

Depending-on national public health advice.

Mr Derek Baker: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: So we see here, Mr Baker, schools being advised to plan both for staying open and for possible closures. Was the department’s own internal planning also predicated on the basis that you may need to plan for both eventualities?

Mr Derek Baker: It’s difficult to answer that question because I’m not sure the department had any internal planning for any of these eventualities. I think the key point in that advice is that it’s contingent on public health advice coming to the education sector, and, I have to say, at that time, in February, early March, 2020, there was no public health advice that the department was aware of that indicated that we should prepare for the whole-scale closure of the education system.

Counsel Inquiry: May I just ask you about that, Mr Baker, before we continue to look at this document.

What scientific advice or briefings was the Department of Education receiving from the Department of Health in that initial period?

Mr Derek Baker: Through the month of February, when Covid started to become an issue, there was considerable engagement between the Department of Health and the Public Health Agency, on one hand, and the Department of Education on the other. And I think the Inquiry has at its disposal a kind of chronology of events affecting education during that period, and you will note that, during the month of February, a number of pieces of guidance were issued to the education sector but mainly about public health issues, about social distancing, about keeping safe, about isolation.

The contact with the Department of Health were really about staying safe in the context of a pandemic. But there was no engagement with the Department of Health or with the Chief Medical Officer, either directly or through the medium of the Executive Committee – that’s the equivalent of the cabinet of ministers – which suggested that we needed to prepare for the eventuality of closing the education system.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Baker.

Before we leave this document, there are a few more paragraphs that I would like to take you to. If we could look at paragraph 20.5, please. So this paragraph appears to expressly recognise the impact of school closures for those we would come to know as key workers; yes?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And if we look at paragraph 22.2, we see here express acknowledgement that:

“… if schools [in the Republic of Ireland] were to close because the pandemic had arrived, schools [in Northern Ireland] may [need] to close … even if there were no cases at that stage …”

Isn’t that right?

Mr Derek Baker: That is correct.

Counsel Inquiry: If you could look at paragraph 26.1, please.

The first sentence of this paragraph acknowledges the possibility of multiple waves in a pandemic, possibly weeks or months apart; yes?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: I’m almost there. If we could look at paragraph 28.1, please.

This paragraph relates to remote learning. And it says that this is an area that needs further work, because:

“During a pandemic … it might … not be possible to provide the usual full education service for children … if [children] are unable to attend schools …”

And it says in the last sentence:

“Plans to provide remote learning could include the possible use of on-line material, where pupils have Internet access.”

So whilst not setting out any detailed plan, recognising here the possibility of a need to educate children in their homes in the event of a pandemic; yes?

Mr Derek Baker: Uh-huh, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Then finally, at paragraph 28.3, this paragraph says:

“[The department] will need to consider … what scope there is to provide curricular support at national level in the event of school closures … this issue has been mentioned in the schools guidance, with an indication that further advice will issue in due course.”

Mr Baker, to your recollection, did the department ever issue any further advice on remote education to schools prior to January – prior to, sorry, March 2020?

Mr Derek Baker: To the best of my recollection it didn’t, and I would have to concede to the Inquiry that when Covid struck in March 2020, I wasn’t even aware of the existence of this guidance.

Counsel Inquiry: How can that be, Mr Baker, when this was Department of Education guidance that had been produced by departmental officials?

Mr Derek Baker: I think that would be explained simply by loss of corporate memory. I think everybody who might have been in a position of authority when the guidance was originally produced, in 2009/10, and issued, had probably moved on, and that those who had been working on redrafting it had moved on. But it certainly wasn’t drawn to my attention that it existed when I took up post in 2017 and through the Covid period.

Counsel Inquiry: And, Mr Baker, I think in an earlier answer you had suggested that the guidance was being revised in 2017.

Mr Derek Baker: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Nevertheless, that wasn’t something you were aware of at that –

Mr Derek Baker: I wasn’t aware of it and I don’t think that process was concluded.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. Now, Mr Baker, earlier I referred you to the suggestion in your statement that officials had to react to an entirely unforeseen set of circumstances. It might be suggested that this plan had rather accurately forecast the circumstances that the department would face in March 2020 in the course of Covid-19; would you agree with that?

Mr Derek Baker: I wouldn’t entirely agree with it. I think the set of circumstances which we faced in 2020, in which – and I use the shorthand phrase, you know, school closures – couldn’t really have been anticipated. I think the flu guidance to which you’re referring was more likely to be focusing on individual schools having to close, but the whole-scale closure of the education system was, in my view, wholly unprecedented and wholly unforeseen and unpredicted by anybody.

And, you know, I say that – and forgive me, I didn’t mean to cut across you there – but, you know, I did reflect on this point at the time, but more recently, when I knew that I was going to be invited to give evidence, and I looked back over the minutes of various fora which existed at that time, and where one might have expected such circumstances to be predicted, like departmental board meeting minutes, the minutes of our weekly meetings with the minister, and probably most importantly, the minutes of the weekly meetings that all permanent secretaries had, where we ranged over and discussed issues of common interest.

And right through the period January, February and into early March 2020, there was no hint or suggestion that we were facing into the whole-scale closure of large elements of society.

Covid was certainly on the agenda but it was very much in the context of it being a health-related issue, which was going to place huge pressures on the health service, but nobody was gearing up for closure of other sectors of society, be that hospitality, tourism, business, public transport and education.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Baker.

And for completeness, if we could perhaps quickly scroll through to the end of this section at page 27, we can see that there is some brief mention of headline issues. So boarding schools, special schools, exams, recovery arrangements?

Mr Derek Baker: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: What we don’t see in this document, Mr Baker, is any consideration of the potential impact of school closures on children themselves; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: Sorry, I haven’t got the particular paragraph in front of me. Which paragraph are you referring to, please?

Counsel Inquiry: I’m referring to the document generally, Mr Baker?

Mr Derek Baker: Oh, the document as a whole, sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: We can check it afterwards.

Mr Derek Baker: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: But I think you can take it from me that there is no –

Mr Derek Baker: That’s okay. That’s okay. I won’t argue with you.

Counsel Inquiry: I’m grateful.

That can come down, thank you.

Now, Mr Baker, I think you suggest in your statement that it was the department’s expectation that schools would have had plans for possible closure based on this plan that we’ve just looked at in this subparagraph 115. Beyond the guidance that we’ve just looked at, did the department have more detailed plans that schools could take and implement, or was it, rather, a case that the individual schools would have to come up with those plans themselves?

Mr Derek Baker: I think the expectation would have been that individual schools should have their own business continuity plans to deal with things like exceptional closures, but that would have been the height of it. Certainly I would not have expected schools to have plans in place for the long-term closure of the education system.

Counsel Inquiry: So those plans would have been for things like inclement weather rather than –

Mr Derek Baker: Yes, I agree.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Baker, I think it’s right that on 9 March 2020 the minister asked officials to seek assurance from the department’s arm’s-length bodies that they had appropriate contingency plans in place.

Firstly, can you help us with that, contingency plans for what?

Mr Derek Baker: Now, could you please help me, did he say contingency plans or did he say business continuity plans?

Counsel Inquiry: Contingency plans.

Mr Derek Baker: Did he? I think what he was referring to was the business continuity plans which every body corporate has to have in place, and they were largely internal documents for the department and its arm’s-length bodies. If, for example, we had staff going off on sickness absence or for some reason we could not use our own premises. But I don’t think it related to the wider education system closing down. And we did actually ask our arm’s length bodies if they were gearing up for the possibility of losing staff through sickness to Covid.

And we also dusted down our own major emergency response plan and business continuity plan, which we eventually had to activate on, I think, 19 March.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. And you mention there that you did speak to the arm’s length bodies. To what extent was the department assured through that process that children and young people would have continued access to education throughout the pandemic?

Mr Derek Baker: No, I would not – I would not want to suggest for one moment that we had assurance that children and young people would continue to have access during the Covid period. And I think we always made it clear – and I would refer to our opening statement, which counsel submitted to the Inquiry when he quoted, I think, what we said to the Education Committee of the Assembly on 18 March, the day the announcement was made – that the closure of schools was simply a bad thing, there was nothing positive about it, and the best that we were in was mitigation of these very negative circumstances.

Remote teaching and learning, and the closure of schools, was no substitute in any way for classroom-based learning. It was always going to be a very, very second best, and we acknowledged that in our guidance to schools. It could never be a substitute for classroom-based learning.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Baker, I will come on to look at those mitigations with you.

Mr Derek Baker: Okay.

Counsel Inquiry: But before we do, I’d like to ask you a bit about the department’s role in the closure of schools and that decision.

Mr Derek Baker: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: If we could have on screen, please, INQ000289859.

Mr Baker, on 12 March you attended an all ministers and all permanent secretaries meeting which had been called in response to the Taoiseach announcement that schools in the Republic of Ireland were closing, and if we zoom in at the box at the bottom, we can see that at the time the Health Minister wasn’t recommending the closure of schools but that the SAGE advice that when school closures are considered appropriate, it should be for 15 weeks was being conveyed; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And if we could look over the page, please, and if we could look at the last paragraph, we see a contribution from you, Mr Baker. You say:

“300,000+ children in schools – any decision would need to include primary and post-primary. Childcare implications huge for local economies. Power to close schools in place and can be used at any stage. Biggest issue – impact on exams and consideration of those eligible for free school meals.”

So this is a discussion, it seems, Mr Baker, about the impact of a potential decision to close schools in Northern Ireland; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: Not entirely. I recall the meeting. I don’t actually remember contributing to the meeting but it was over five and a half years ago. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but there was a very robust discussion amongst ministers about the fact that schools had closed in the Republic of Ireland and whether or not that had any implications for Northern Ireland, and that’s correct. But there was no clear agreement amongst ministers as to whether that should influence the decision in Northern Ireland whether or not to close, and I do recall from that discussion that the First Minister, the Health Minister, the Education Minister and the Chief Medical Officer were adamant that schools should not close.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, Mr Baker. I don’t mean to suggest that any decision was made at this meeting, but when we see a reference to “any decision needing to include primary and post-primary”, that is a decision about a potential closure of schools; is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: It was a discussion about a potential decision, but I can confirm that the notion that schools might be closed was dismissed by the various individuals whom I’ve just listed.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Derek Baker: And the policy to the department was very clear: schools stay open.

Counsel Inquiry: Perhaps we’ll come back to that policy, but I think it’s right that your key concern, certainly at this point, were the impact of any potential decision on exams and on free school meals; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: I honestly can’t confirm that because I don’t remember what I said. I mean, I would say that the note of that meeting, I think, is a very shorthand note of what was a very long and robust discussion. So I’m not going to demur from what is recorded there. If I said that I said that. I may have said more than that. I can’t really confirm otherwise. It is too long ago for me to remember, I’m sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay, and jumping slightly forward then – that document can come down, thank you – to the decision to close schools. In your statement you have said that until the First and Deputy First Minister’s announcement of school closures on 18 March, it was the Department of Education’s understanding that schools would remain open?

Are we to understand from that, Mr Baker, that the Department of Education was taken off guard by the decision to close schools in Northern Ireland?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes. And I was taken off guard.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. And the Inquiry is aware from Module 2C that on 16 March, so two days before that announcement, the Executive Committee had voted in favour of closing schools essentially when the Chief Medical Officer advised that it was appropriate. Were officials in the department aware of that decision at the time?

Mr Derek Baker: Not on 16 March, no.

Counsel Inquiry: So is it your evidence, Mr Baker, that the first that the department learned of this decision was through the media, essentially, at the same time that –

Mr Derek Baker: No, I was probably informed of it towards the late afternoon or evening of 17 March, which was a public holiday with us, Saint Patrick’s Day, as you know.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Baker, the Minister of Education was at that meeting and had participated in that vote. Why would officials in the department not have been aware?

Mr Derek Baker: I don’t know.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. Perhaps we can look at what you’ve said about the department’s position at that time.

If we could have on screen, please, paragraph 108 of Mr Baker’s statement, page 29.

So Mr Baker, you’ve said here that the department hadn’t been informed that schools would be closing prior to the announcement we’ve discussed “whilst an indication had been given that schools may have to close in the future”.

Pausing there, when was it first indicated to the Department of Education that there may be a need to close schools in Northern Ireland?

Mr Derek Baker: Well, as you mentioned earlier, there was this discussion amongst ministers on 12 March. I think that was a Thursday. And it came as a bit of a shock to everybody, I think, when the Republic of Ireland announced that they were closing schools. So I think that was the first time it ever entered our consciousness that something like this could conceivably be possible. But the clear direction following that meeting was that schools should stay open. And that was still the position when we got to Monday, the 16th, and it was only during the course of the 17th that suddenly it became apparent that there could be an announcement that schools would close.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. And you continue here that:

“The public announcement of closures came within days of schools being made aware of the potential.”

Is that a reference of the minister’s letter to schools of 16 March?

Mr Derek Baker: It is.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. And you say then:

“Whilst [the department] and schools were starting to build resilience into plans, the sudden announcement by the Executive did not allow sufficient time for this work to be fully completed.”

Can you help us with what that means, Mr Baker? What does it mean to build resilience into plans?

Mr Derek Baker: I had mentioned – well, you quoted the notes of the meeting that had taken place earlier with ministers, and the comments that I made about free school meals, for example, and examinations. At that time – and it was only days before the announcement was made – I know that some of my colleagues in the department were starting to think: what will we do about public examinations, the summer 2020 exam series, for example, if schools close, or if we are not able to hold examinations the way we normally do?

We were also thinking about how best could we deliver free school meals.

But I would have to confirm that we were in no more than the foothills of considering those issues when the announcement was made on 18 March.

Counsel Inquiry: Just moving slightly further down the paragraph, you say that:

“[Department] officials did not give specific advice on whether schools should be closed, nor were plans drawn up in the eventuality that all schools would close. [Department] officials were not involved in the decision to close schools or the timing of the announcement …”

As you’ve said.

Mr Baker, stepping back, we have the 2017 plan, which had conceived of a potential need to close schools possibly at national level, possibly on more than one occasion, possibly for a long time. On 11 March the World Health Organisation had declared Covid-19 a pandemic. On 12 March, the Republic of Ireland had closed its schools and you were in that meeting at which the SAGE advice was conveyed. The Minister had written to schools to advise them that there was a possibility that schools in Northern Ireland may need to close. Why would the Department of Education not have drawn up plans in the eventuality that schools would need to close by that point?

Mr Derek Baker: Schools would only have closed for one reason, and one reason only, and that is if the Department of Education and the Minister of Education had received clear and unequivocal public health advice that schools should close, effectively to save lives. No such advice was received in that period.

You mentioned the meeting that took place on the 16th. Schools closed four working days after that. I really don’t think there was time to make proper preparations for the closure of schools in that period. It would never have been enough.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Baker, throughout the course of your evidence you have said that the department was operating on the basis that schools would remain open and that that had been the department’s position until 18 March, when this announcement was made; is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: That is correct.

Counsel Inquiry: So where do we see the department’s plans for schools remaining open that had been made in that period between January and March 18th?

Mr Derek Baker: I don’t quite understand a plan to remain open. That was the status quo, supplemented by the public health advice, which had already been issued to schools, about staying safe, issues around distancing, issues around cleansing of equipment and so forth, issues around isolation.

So the advice to schools was in and around the public health advice, but we didn’t have a separate plan for schools staying open because that was de facto the status quo.

Counsel Inquiry: So, in that sense, it was business as usual, was really –

Mr Derek Baker: Well, it wasn’t business as usual, because obviously schools had received a lot of advice and were receiving a lot of advice from the Public Health Agency as to how they could stay safe and, above all, how pupils and staff could stay safe.

Counsel Inquiry: And given that the Department of Education has a role in overseeing schools’ contingency plans, where was the Department of Education at that time, in terms of assisting schools with implementing the guidance they were receiving? Did the department have a role prior to 18 March?

Mr Derek Baker: I don’t think the department would have a role insisting individual schools to implement guidance. I’m not really too sure how we could have done that. There are over one –

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Baker, I’m sorry to cut across you. It’s not individual schools; it’s all schools in Northern Ireland.

Mr Derek Baker: Yes, but there are 1,000 schools in Northern Ireland. I don’t think the department would ever have been in a position to assist 1,000 schools to implement public health guidance. That was a matter for school leadership teams to do themselves and make sure that they were complying with the guidance issued by the Public Health Agency. The department could really not have gone into schools and marked their homework in that, I don’t think so.

Dr Treanor: Okay.

My Lady, I know we’re a few moments off the break. This might be a convenient place.

Lady Hallett: Of course, certainly.

I shall return at 3.10.

Dr Treanor: Thank you.

(2.56 pm)

(A short break)

(3.10 pm)

Lady Hallett: Dr Treanor.

Dr Treanor: Thank you, my Lady.

Mr Baker, I promised to return to the issue of mitigations with you, so we’ll start by looking at the first mitigation that the department introduced which was the policy of operating school clusters so that vulnerable children could attend. At the point of the decision to close schools, what level of understanding did the Department of Education have about the likely numbers of vulnerable children who might be attending school?

Mr Derek Baker: We didn’t have any real information about how many children would attend, either vulnerable children or the children of key workers. We just did not know. So – well, I don’t want to proceed to answer another question but the concept of clusters was a contingency in case some schools closed, and there would be no school or educational institution in a particular locality to provide a base for the children of key workers or vulnerable children.

You’ll understand that in Northern Ireland we have some exceptionally small schools with maybe only two or three teachers. So if those teachers were ill or shielding or vulnerable, those schools could have closed in their entirety. So we needed to put in place some kind of contingency arrangements to make sure there was a home for those pupils in every locality. Although in the event, clusters did not become an important feature of keeping some schools open for vulnerable children.

I think, at any given time, according to the daily information that we received from schools, there were never more than about 30 or so clusters in Northern Ireland, and that’s set against typically 400 schools being open on any given day.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Baker, I’ll ask you in a moment about the numbers of children who were attending, but before I do, just on the point of data, you’ve indicated that really, the department, I think you’d said had no real information about the numbers of vulnerable children.

I do see, at tab 5, and I’ll not put it up on the screen, but for the transcript, it’s at INQ000087625 and it’s at page 3, the minutes of a contingency planning update meeting on 19 March, and in the course of that meeting it suggested that 156,000 children were expected to be accommodated with an additional approximate 17,000 statemented children and 6,000 social work related?

Can I ask you, what was the basis for those figures? Do you know where they came from?

Mr Derek Baker: Well, the latter two figures you mention, I think are self-explanatory. The first figure, I think, would have related to the total number of children in receipt of free school meals, which we were using as an extremely loose proxy for potentially vulnerable children but at that stage we had absolutely no idea how many children might attend schools during this period.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. And the former Children’s Commissioner for Northern Ireland has made the point that during the pandemic there was a considerable lack of disaggregated data available on children by age or other characteristics that made them particularly vulnerable, so for example, disability or care experience?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Do you recognise those sorts of gaps in Northern Ireland’s data collation?

Mr Derek Baker: We issued a survey every day to all schools asking schools: which schools are open? How many pupils are attending? How many teaching staff are attending? How many non-teaching staff are attending? And that was broken down by phase, pre-school, primary school, post-primary, special school and so forth. And occasionally we supplemented those daily surveys with information about vulnerable pupils so we would have up-to-date data for the top management in the department and the minister about what was happening out there.

But I fully accept the comments by the former Children’s Commissioner that we didn’t go right down into disaggregating the data by all kinds of different vulnerable children. I think, from our guidance on vulnerable children, we identified 12 different categories of vulnerable children, and we certainly didn’t ask schools to fill in that data on a daily basis.

I think, in due course, school leaders and school principals found the imposition of a daily survey quite difficult, given all the other things they were having to cope with, and later in the crisis we reduced the daily survey maybe to a weekly survey.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Baker, I just want to clarify something that you said in the course of that answer, I think you said that that survey data was broken down by primary, secondary, special school, but in your statement at paragraph 78, and this is on page 21, just for your reference, you say that:

“A survey of pupil attendance was issued to all educational settings from 23 March 2020 to 29 June 2020, but a breakdown by school setting type was not possible.”

Can I just clarify whether it was possible, to break that down by setting?

Mr Derek Baker: Yeah, I am bemused by that because I have actually seen copies of the reports, and I do apologise if in any way we have misled the Inquiry, but the breakdown does show individual phases of schools.

Counsel Inquiry: And in your statement you also point up data quality issues in relation to those survey responses. Is it right that there were issues with the quality of that data in terms of the ability to validate it?

Mr Derek Baker: There were, and I did probe that again, on re-reading the corporate witness statement, and we engaged with our statisticians. We were getting daily returns via the Education Authority, from schools, as I’ve just explained.

Our statisticians are quite precious about the quality of data and they want to make sure that everything is properly validated and I think there was one field in the data which sometimes wasn’t properly completed, and they were concerned about that, and they felt that that could call into question some of the validity of the data, but that was fixed after a week of the daily surveys, I’m given to understand.

I don’t think it was a major issue, but the daily survey would not have measured up to the Kitemark of official national statistics which, as you know, our statisticians are quite precious about.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. Is it your position, then, that notwithstanding any limitations, that that data was sufficiently robust to allow the department to rely upon it for planning in this context?

Mr Derek Baker: Well, I think it was more for reporting and knowing what was happening out there, and we used that data to feed through to the central Civil Contingencies Group in the Executive Office, who also wanted to produce daily reports for ministers and for the Executive as to what was happening outside in the world, in terms of, you know, business and how many people were moving around and what was happening in schools. So I think, for the times that we’re in it, that daily survey was sufficient for that purpose.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. And a few minutes ago, Mr Baker, you mentioned that the numbers of vulnerable children attending school in Northern Ireland were very low. Was that an intended outcome?

Mr Derek Baker: No, it wasn’t. And the minister was actually concerned about that, and I think the Inquiry has evidence of a letter that the minister sent to schools to remind them that he was concerned by the low numbers of vulnerable children attending school, and he urged school leaders to get in touch with the parents of vulnerable children to make sure that they were aware that schools were open to provide services for them.

I think that probably, given the overriding message that was coming from the government at the very – you know, at the most senior levels, from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom down, which was ‘Stay at Home’ to stay safe, it was very difficult, simultaneously, to be encouraging the parents of some children to send them to schools. I think everybody followed the predominant message ‘Stay at Home’, whereas we were trying to encourage some parents to send their children to schools. And that was a difficult tension. There’s no question.

Counsel Inquiry: Can we have on screen, please, INQ000308437 at page 19. And it’s the message from Mr Baker at the bottom I’d like to look at.

Mr Baker, this is a WhatsApp message from you to the PSS Covid-19 group chat. I think this comprises the attendees of the permanent secretary’s stocktake meeting; is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And you say here that:

“Anecdotally the key worker arrangements in education settings are operating generally without major incidents. The ‘last resort’ messaging over the weekend appears to have worked, and numbers in individual settings are low and manageable. For example, a 1350 pupil school in South Down has 6 pupils and 17 staff attending. Neighbouring 500 pupil school has zero pupils.”

And it continues to discuss data collation issues.

You say here, Mr Baker, that “the ‘last resort’ messaging” seems to have “worked”.

Worked in what sense, Mr Baker, if not to keep the numbers of children attending school low and manageable?

Mr Derek Baker: That is exactly what it was intended to do.

I think you need to go back to the context at the time. We – as soon as it was announced that schools were closing, we had pretty intensive discussions with the teaching unions, who obviously were very concerned about the safety of their pupils and indeed their own members, and pressed us very hard on what we meant by schools remaining open for the children of key workers in particular.

There was quite a long list of key professions whose children needed to be accommodated, and I think the teaching professions were concerned that schools would open and very large numbers of pupils would attend. And naturally enough, there was a fear factor around that. So it was a relief to us that when schools did open, low numbers of the children of key workers actually did attend, and it didn’t impose a burden on the schools themselves, or create a major safety risk.

So, as far as I was concerned, and I think the minister was concerned, and the teaching unions were concerned, that was a positive outcome.

I think the context of this particular comment is about the children of key workers, and not vulnerable children.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. Thank you.

And can I just clarify then, Mr Baker, had the department set any internal target or maximum number of children who could safely attend school?

Mr Derek Baker: No, that was left to individual school leaders, because the logistics in every school are different. It depends on the premises, the size of the building and so forth, and who and how many could be safely accommodated. So, we weren’t going to set a target of 5%, 10%, 50%. I think that would have been wholly inappropriate.

Counsel Inquiry: And you made clear in your answer a moment ago that the focus was really on the children of key workers, and their attendance at school, and keeping that manageable; is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: That particular comment that you referenced, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Derek Baker: But it was made clear that schools were to remain open for the children of key workers and for vulnerable children. And the minister did press that latter point in his letter to all school principals.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Baker, I won’t turn it up. For your reference, it is at tab 10 of the bundle.

And for the transcript it’s at INQ000617935.

And this is the department’s 31 March 2020 guidance on Covid-19 clusters. And in that guidance, it makes it clear that the provision in hubs was for those key workers who had no alternative. Is that an example of the ‘last resort’ messaging you were referring to just a moment ago in the message that we looked at?

Mr Derek Baker: No, I think the reference to clustering is about making sure that there was somewhere for those children to go, if all of the other schools in the locality were closed.

Counsel Inquiry: Sorry, Mr Baker, I perhaps didn’t phrase that correctly.

Mr Derek Baker: Okay, apologies.

Counsel Inquiry: My question was, rather, about whether this was an example of the ‘last resort’ messaging that you referred to in that exchange.

Mr Derek Baker: Could you remind me what the exchange was? I don’t have it on the screen in front of me.

Counsel Inquiry: Could we have back on screen, please, INQ000308437, at page 19.

Thank you.

So you referred here, Mr Baker, to the ‘last resort’ messaging.

Mr Derek Baker: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And if you look at the tab 10 of your bundle, see the clustering guidance that I referred to, it says:

“This service is only for those Key workers who are unable to find a viable alternative option …”

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: So that is a reference to that messaging?

Mr Derek Baker: It is. It is, thank you, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And just on that guidance, Mr Baker, while we’re here, on its face, it purports to address both the children of key workers and vulnerable children. And I think when you look at it, you look at the substance of the guidance, it really seems to focus on key workers, which I think is aligned with what you’ve just said, but my question to you is: do you think there’s a risk that that ‘last resort’ type of messaging may have, even if inadvertently, dissuaded vulnerable families from making use of the provision that was being made for their children?

Mr Derek Baker: I don’t think so because the minister made it absolutely clear to all school principals that he wanted them to consider very carefully the position of vulnerable children, of whom they were aware, and schools would have been aware of vulnerable children. It’s what they do. They have a designated teacher to look after the interests of vulnerable children, and he was encouraging school principals to reach out to those families to ensure vulnerable children knew that they could attend schools.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. Well, I’ll move on then, Mr Baker, to the second mitigation, which is the provision of remote learning. I think, consistent with the evidence that it hadn’t planned for closures, before schools closed, the Department of Education had not carried out any assessment of how schools could deliver remote learning; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And prior to March 2020, the department hadn’t undertaken work to regulate or develop standards for remote learning; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Baker, given that the plan that we looked at, and accepting all of the caveats around the pandemic influenza plan, but given that it had identified school closures as a possibility, and pointed to a potential need to deliver online learning to children in the event of mass school closures, why would that sort of assessment or planning for delivery of remote education not have been done?

Mr Derek Baker: Notwithstanding the earlier guidance, the simple fact is that remote teaching and learning was simply not part of the education system in Northern Ireland, or anywhere else, so far as I knew. It simply wasn’t what we did.

There was never any requirement for schools to maintain a parallel online or digital learning system. They didn’t do it. And we wouldn’t have expected schools to do that.

I think to have maintained such a system could have been extremely expensive, and it would have required a lot of time and effort, but it simply wasn’t part of our system. It’s not how teaching and learning was done.

Counsel Inquiry: And on 10 May, the Education Authority initially estimated the number of devices required across schools in Northern Ireland to be around 11,500, and in your statement, and this is paragraph 237, you have confirmed that no devices had been allocated to children prior to 22 May 2020.

Mr Baker, the schools were closed in March. Why, given the pressing need that had been identified, had no devices been allocated to children before the end of May?

Mr Derek Baker: Well, I don’t think that’s quite right. We’re talking about two different things here. Many schools had their own devices that they distributed to their own pupils. Many pupils that their own devices at home which they could use. Schools had one-to-one device schemes which they were able to use to give to pupils.

So, I think what you’re talking about is the procurement of additional devices, which the department undertook as a project on foot of some work that it did with all schools to assess what the need was for pupils who couldn’t get access to either their own devices at home or devices which were lent by individual schools.

So the project to procure devices was based on that submission and got under way at that point. And I think ultimately, by the end of 2021, or midway through 2021, about almost 25,000 devices were procured and distributed at a cost to the department of £5 million. But schools were already lending their own devices.

We were a little bit concerned at the start that maybe all schools were not lending all of their devices. They might have been a little bit reluctant to do so for whatever reason. But, again, we encouraged them to do so. There needed to be a little bit work done occasionally before you would distribute devices to pupils to make sure that they were properly configured to make them safe, and that could hold things up from time to time.

But I don’t think it’s right to say that no devices were distributed before May 2020.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Baker, that is what you have said in your statement, at paragraph … oh, forgive me – at paragraph 237. You say that no devices had been allocated to children prior to 22 May.

Mr Derek Baker: I think – well, schools were already distributing their own devices to children. I apologise again if that is misleading. I think what we’re talking about there is devices distributed on foot of the project to procure and distribute additional devices over and above those held by schools.

Counsel Inquiry: I do appreciate the distinction you’re making, Mr Baker, but is it not the case that the reason there was a need for that procurement exercise was that schools couldn’t meet the need themselves through the loan of devices?

Mr Derek Baker: Absolutely. And we established that need through the work that was done with every school during the course, I think it was, of April 2020. The Education Authority engaged with all schools and asked them: Right, how many schools do you need, and for which pupils?

And the culmination of that work was the submission I think you’re referring to of May 2020.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. And moving on then, Mr Baker, you also explained that it was not until July 2020, which is after the school term had finished, that the department launched a scheme to provide free wi-fi and mobile connectivity. Does it follow from that, Mr Baker, that a number of the children who had been allocated devices prior to that point would still nevertheless have been unable to engage in online learning because they didn’t have Internet access?

Mr Derek Baker: I – yes, I mean, I think that’s a fair assumption to make.

You will be aware of the remote nature of parts of Northern Ireland where wi-fi connection is difficult, and we realised that, in addition to making sure that advices were distributed, we would have to assist some families or some specific pupils to gain access to wi-fi, and we worked with companies like British Telecom to try to support that. And I think over the course of the next year, about 10,000 solutions were issued, such as, you know, wi-fi vouchers and so forth, to assist connectivity for such pupils.

Counsel Inquiry: But was that gap between the provision of devices and the provision of wi-fi, was that something that the department had appreciated at the time that they were making the devices available, in May and June?

Mr Derek Baker: I think the department appreciated that there were definitely going to be connectivity gaps in Northern Ireland, but by the time we had negotiated arrangements with British Telecom and so forth to set up the schemes of assistance, it took some time.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Now, it has been suggested, Mr Baker, that some children in Northern Ireland still did not have access to the equipment they needed during the second set of school closures in 2021. Can you help us to understand why it had not been possible to address the level of need by that stage?

Mr Derek Baker: I do know that there had been an order placed for additional devices, which was expected to be delivered in September 2020, but for reasons of supply and demand, and you will appreciate that it seemed at that stage that the whole world was chasing after the same devices, they did not get delivered until early in 2021, and that delayed our ability to distribute some devices. But there was a market supply and demand problem for devices, I mean, even the whole Civil Service was looking for advices, the public sector and the private sector.

So it just wasn’t easy to get all of the supply that you wanted immediately when you wanted it. We went through standard public procurement procedures. We might have short-circuited those but I have to say that my colleagues in the department were protecting me, as the accounting officer, through the procurement of that. There have been procurement issues around some of the issues during Covid, but we went through sort of Crown Commercial Services framework contract to get these things as fast as we could, and it didn’t always happen.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Now, Mr Baker, I understand from your statement also that the department wasn’t monitoring the quality or amount of online learning take place; is that correct?

Mr Derek Baker: Yes and no. And I know that’s not the answer you want to hear. The way that we in the department would monitor and assess the quality of teaching and learning is through school inspection, as you might imagine. And typically, what happens is a school inspection team would go into a school, would talk to school leaders, teachers, governors, pupils, and observe the delivery of teaching and learning and observe the receipt of that teaching and learning by pupils, and assess some of the work being done. Clearly, inspection was impossible during this period. We weren’t going to send school inspectors into the homes of teachers. Many teachers were at home delivering online teaching and learning, and we certainly weren’t going to send inspectors into the homes of pupils.

The second point is that immediately upon the closure of schools, and I use that phrase as shorthand, we suspended school inspection and we repurposed the whole inspection team – it’s not a huge resource, but from recollection it’s about 60 to 70 staff – to go out there and operate as link officers to support individual schools in any way that they could during this difficult period, and specifically using their knowledge and skills and pedagogy to assist schools in remote teaching and learning, to signpost them to sources of advice, and materials on teaching and learning, to share group practice, both within and across schools, and to gather case studies and to feed that back to the department.

So to the extent that we had our school inspectors in schools supporting online teaching and learning, we had good feedback material coming to the department and the centre which supported us in developing the guidance that was ultimately issued on remote teaching and learning.

So it wasn’t without a quality assurance process, but I would say this: I think it was a much more productive use of the time of our inspectors to go out and support schools at this really difficult time than to try and engage in inspection.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Baker.

I’d like to move on, then, to ask you about the further school closures in January 2021.

Now, when schools closed in the week before Christmas 2020 as usual, I understand, from your statement, that it was the department’s expectation at that point that they would reopen in 2021; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And is it right, then, that the department was not anticipating any further school closures at that stage?

Mr Derek Baker: The department, at that point, was anticipating schools opening again as normal in January 2021, and for obvious reasons: because we were all aware of the negative consequences of closing schools on pupils. We wanted schools to open but, as no doubt you’re coming to, the Minister for Health and the Chief Medical Officer were starting to get very concerned about spikes that were rising in the incidents of Covid and engaged with the Education Minister at that time, and they were making it clear that in their view, to stop the spread of Covid, schools really could not open as usual in January 2021. Bringing 350,000 children and 20,000 teachers, and so forth, together into confined spaces would be really dangerous for public health.

And I think that was a big difference between the second closure and the first closure.

Counsel Inquiry: And I think it’s right, Mr Baker, that the exchanges that you’re referring to, they come slightly later in December, is that right, towards the end of December?

Mr Derek Baker: They did, and it was coming up towards New Year’s Eve and the New Year period, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And just taking a step back if we could. You’ve indicated that the department was anticipating that schools would reopen in January 2021, and in your statement you said that no epidemiological advice was sought by officials at that time. Is that because you weren’t anticipating further school closures at that point?

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct, but whilst we didn’t seek any epidemiological advice, we received epidemiological advice from the Chief Medical Officer, and you will see from the note of a meeting which the Health Minister that with the Education Minister that the Chief Medical Officer was saying that the latest science was showing that children under the age of 17 were more likely to pass the virus on to others, and that no doubt was one of the reasons why the advice from the Department of Health was: please don’t open schools as normal come January.

Counsel Inquiry: And just taking a step back again towards the start of December, given the rise in case numbers in late 2020, were any alternative scenarios to reopening, so, for example, partial closures or staggered reopening, were those being actively planned for or modelled or discussed within the department?

Mr Derek Baker: They were. I think there’s documentation from the Minister of Education, who was setting out various options for opening which wouldn’t represent a full opening of all schools, but a sort of graduated opening of schools, and they were proposed. And I think that was his first – that was the Minister of Education’s first proposal to the Minister of Health.

Counsel Inquiry: And just a point of clarification, in your statement, and this is at paragraph 473, you say that:

“… stakeholders considered it to be an open or close scenario as partial opening … was not considered viable at that time …”

Can you help us to understand what led to that conclusion, that partial opening was not viable at that time?

Mr Derek Baker: We were – by “partial opening”, we were considering whether you could have some pupils in one week, and maybe another group of pupils in another week and staggering it like that, and it was felt that that simply would be impractical, and unworkable, and logistically impossible. So it was either open or close, with mitigations, and obviously with the exceptions for vulnerable children and special schools which under any circumstances, were to remain open.

Counsel Inquiry: As you’ve already alluded to, Mr Baker, at the end of December, matters moved apace and the decision to keep schools closed after Christmas was again taken at Executive Committee level at a meeting on 4 January 2021. To what extent did the Department of Education have advanced notice of that decision on that occasion?

Mr Derek Baker: I think we were well – well, first of all I have to enter the caveat: I wasn’t there at the time, and I’m – so I’m speaking on the basis of conversations with my former colleagues and reading the documentation, but I think the department was well abreast of that decision, and I don’t think there was any difficulty with that decision at all, because the Education Minister was fully involved and he was relaying those issues back to the department. So communications at that point were good.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Baker, you’ve indicated that various options were under consideration within the department. Can you tell us a bit about the work that the department had been undertaking between schools reopening in August 2020 and December 2020 in preparation for the potential or the prospect of further school closures?

Mr Derek Baker: When schools reopened in September 2020, we’d obviously been through a period of closure and our guidance on things like remote learning had been refined and updated. So when schools reopened in September 2020, we had laid down pretty clear expectations to schools as to what we expected from them in the sense of any individual closures or if individual pupils had to isolate or groups of pupils had to isolate, individual classes or bubbles. We had pretty detailed guidance for what we called new school day guidance in September 2020.

I think by that point we were in pretty good shape for offering schools guidance regarding the closure in January 2021, in particular in respect of our expectations on remote teaching and learning. The guidance was there. It had been updated. It had been refined in the light of experience, and in the light of feedback from our link officers, and it was ready to go in advance of the closures of schools in January 2021, and indeed, I think the Inquiry has received confirmation in the witness statements of a couple of school principals for Northern Ireland that such guidance was actually welcomed and in much better shape obviously than it had been during the first closure.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Now, Mr Baker, before I move on to take your reflections, I just have one more topic I’d like to ask you about, and that is the enduring impacts of the pandemic on education in Northern Ireland.

Now, I understand from your statement that the Department of Education has not commissioned any reviews, nor conducted any assessments or monitoring in relation to the long-term impacts of the decisions made in relation to education during the pandemic; is that right?

Mr Derek Baker: That’s correct, as far as I know.

Counsel Inquiry: And if we could have up on screen, please, INQ000588022 at page 101.

Mr Baker, I’d like to very quickly look at some of the contributions from participants in Northern Ireland to the Inquiry’s Every Story Matters record. And if we could look at the third quote, please. Thank you.

This is a quote from a secondary teacher in Northern Ireland:

“We have schools now that maybe have 70% attendance, they just don’t come to school because they’ve got into the habit of not going to school in Covid and they’ve never returned.”

And if we could look over the page at the second quote, please:

“Attendance is definitely down. Punctuality as well, it’s just, like ‘I’ll go in when I feel like going in’. More and more parents were ringing up to get children out of school [and] children texting their parents ‘Ring up and get me out’. We would have an element of it before but it’s definitely on the increase. For some, the value of education has definitely diminished and people’s priorities have changed.”

Mr Baker, in your statement you characterise this issue as a significant concern, and you point to a 123% increase in persistent absence since the pandemic. So I think this is an issue that you would recognise as an enduring impact on Northern Ireland.

Mr Derek Baker: It is, and I think the data collected by the department backs that up. It is an issue which the department and the minister is acutely aware of. It is a major problem.

And I think, in fairness, it is an issue – and again, I’m speaking from secondhand knowledge – it’s an issue which the department is committed to address, and I think, as we speak, the current minister is considering a new strategy on promoting attendance amongst school pupils. I think that draft strategy is called Attendance Matters.

Now, obviously I can’t pre-empt the minister as to if and when such a strategy might be launched, but it is an issue of considerable concern because attendance has definitely got worse since Covid.

Counsel Inquiry: And in light of that considerable concern, can you help us to understand why the department has not sought to commission any formal assessment in respect of pupil attendance since the pandemic?

Mr Derek Baker: Well, I think the department has. I think, you know, when the strategy – let’s go back to the department has not commissioned any work on the impact of Covid. It has looked at certain elements, there has been a lot of work done on pupil attainment. Northern Ireland has participated in international studies. There’s been a lot of work done by the Education and Training Inspectorate on the impact of Covid. The Education and Training Inspectorate, you know, produced a report on pupil attainment, wellbeing and teacher practice. But specifically, as part of the strategy of – for attendance, it has looked at attendance, it has looked at the impact of Covid, and all of that will be factored into the strategy if and when it is published. And measures will be taken to address that problem.

Counsel Inquiry: So, Mr Baker, is it the case, then, that at paragraph 551 of your statement, wherein it’s indicated that:

“Since the specified period DE has not commissioned any formal impact assessments on the impact of pupil attainment or attendance … on children in pre-school settings.”

Is that –

Mr Derek Baker: In pre-school settings specifically?

Counsel Inquiry: It’s specific to pre-school settings. Thank you.

Mr Derek Baker: Sorry, I wasn’t answering your question. I was just querying whether you meant pre-school settings.

I am sorry, if I have said that in the witness statement, it must be true. I can’t recall specifically – (overspeaking) –

Counsel Inquiry: No, forgive me, that was my mistake. It does refer to pre-school settings.

Mr Derek Baker: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Baker, you say in your statement, and just so we can have clarity on this, you say the department did consider commissioning a specific Northern Ireland assessment on the impact of the pandemic on literacy and numeracy, but that due to practical barriers and the existence of a body of international evidence, that didn’t proceed.

I want to ask you, at other stages in your statement you point to the availability of international evidence and independent research in explaining why the department hasn’t sought to commission certain pieces of work. To what extent do you consider that those provide a proper basis for gaining a thorough understanding of the impacts in Northern Ireland and a proper basis for future planning?

Mr Derek Baker: Yeah, I think officials in the department did consider very carefully the international evidence that was produced about what was happening to literacy and numeracy and so forth during Covid, and there was also a fair body of research produced by local higher education institutions about Northern Ireland, and they concluded that the position in Northern Ireland was unlikely to be much different. But that is not to say that there weren’t – there wasn’t some work done that gave departmental officials an indication of the state of literacy and numeracy.

Northern Ireland participated during the Covid period in some international studies. They go by fancy acronyms, like PIRLS, I think that’s Progress in [International] Reading literacy Study. That focuses on literacy amongst 10-year-olds.

And then there was another study called PISA, I think that’s Programme for International Student Assessment, and that looks at pupils in post-primary schools aged about 15, focusing on reading, on science, and on maths. And we were able to use – or sorry, I wasn’t there at the time, but they were able to use those studies to compare how things were before and after the pandemic, and whether things had declined.

And indeed, subsequent to that, there have been key stage assessments done in schools, typically at ages 8, 11 and 14, on literacy and numeracy. And sadly, that found that three out of ten pupils leaving primary schools were not at the expected level of literacy and numeracy. And I know that the department, through the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment, is commissioning system-wide assessments which will give good quality, hard information about educational attainment and what has happened during the Covid period, so hopefully corrective action can be taken.

Counsel Inquiry: That’s very helpful. Thank you, Mr Baker.

And finally, Mr Baker, you’ll be glad to know we’ve come to your lessons learnt and recommendations.

Now, in your statement at paragraph 567, you’ve said this:

“There have been no formal lessons learned exercise commissioned as the initial decision to close schools and a lot of the other decisions around societal impacts were driven by the [Executive/Chief Medical Officer/Department of Health], and [Department of Education] had to react to these, rather than implement what it considered to be its own decisions. DE officials continue to work on policy areas throughout Covid-19, and whilst conscious of the impact, policy areas were not specifically reviewed to complement the specific unique circumstances.”

Is it the department’s suggestion there, Mr Baker, that any lessons to be learned are perhaps for others, the Executive Committee, the Chief Medical Officer, the Department of Health, rather than the Department of Education?

Mr Derek Baker: No, I don’t think so. And I would say to the Inquiry that if I had to draft that statement again, I wouldn’t present it in such stark terms. I think it would be more nuanced.

During Covid and in our immediate response to Covid, we developed a Covid response plan which had a number of workstreams in it, about six workstreams, I won’t go over them. And that metamorphosed quite quickly in May 2020 into an education restart programme which, again, had a number of workstreams.

And whilst it is true to say that there was no single overarching lessons learned exercise on the totality of the Covid response, the individual workstreams within both the Covid response plan and the education restart plan were subject to either independent evaluation, post-project evaluation, or inspection by the Education and Training Inspectorate and I can give you examples. For example, you will recall the difficulties we had around the awarding of grades for public examinations in the summer 2020 series. That was subject to an independent review by an outside consultancy firm, I won’t mention their name, but those lessons were learned and they carried through to the subsequent awarding arrangements for 2021 and 2022.

The Engage Programme, which we put in place to support pupils who had suffered loss of learning was subject to an evaluation and lessons learned by the Education and Training Inspectorate. The food programme which we put in place was subject to independent evaluation. The devices procurement project was subject to a post-project evaluation, and so on and so on and so on.

So the individual workstreams were subject to detailed evaluations which exist and I’m sure that lessons have been learned from them.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Baker, in that answer you’ve pointed to reviews looking backwards. Looking forwards then, in your view, is there anything in practical terms that the Department of Education or practical learning that the department might take away from its experience of implementing these decisions –

Mr Derek Baker: I am –

Counsel Inquiry: – during – (overspeaking) –

Mr Derek Baker: I am sure there is no end of practical learning, and the department has learnt from them, I’m quite sure, having spoken to my former colleagues. I know that the department is enhancing its capacity in the area of emergency planning and contingency planning and has put in place dedicated resource for that. The department is working with all of its arm’s length bodies to set up a strategic steering group on emergency planning so that it is better placed to respond to such emergencies. It is participating in, if I can use the term, war-gaming exercises, and there is one going on as we speak, which you’ve probably heard about, which focuses on the potential for a pandemic, and there are lots of lessons learned. And from all of the plans that were put in place at the time, and all of the individual workstreams, there are lots of lessons learned for the future which I think the department can benefit from, if, heaven forbid, there is any repetition of this.

Dr Treanor: Thank you very much, Mr Baker.

My Lady, those are all of my questions. Have you any questions?

Lady Hallett: No, I have no questions.

Thank you very much, Mr Baker. Thank you for your help, and I appreciate not that easy when you’ve retired and somebody suddenly passed the parcel to you when the music stopped. But thank you very much for coming to help us. Are you going back to Belfast?

The Witness: This evening, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Well, have a safe journey and – (overspeaking) –

The Witness: Thank you very much. Goodbye.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, bye-bye.

10.00, please, tomorrow.

(3.55 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10.00 am the following day)