Hansard

I know that I speak on behalf of us all when I say thank you to every teacher, member of school staff, pupil, parent and carer for their efforts over the past eight months. Our young people’s education has unquestionably been damaged, but disruptions and closures have far wider impacts on mental health and social development and, for some, the loss of the stability and security of school has been a direct risk to their health and wellbeing.

The decisions that are made here cannot be binary choices between total closure and just pretending that schools can go back to normal. Everyone in our schools—staff and pupils—deserves a safe environment. The Greens have brought the proposals in the motion to Parliament today because that is simply not the case across Scotland.

It is clear that schools are struggling. Several have had to partially close already in the past week, such as Aboyne primary school and Milne’s high school. Although I do not believe that a significant gulf exists between the Government and Opposition parties on the issues, I have to be blunt with the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills and say that the descriptions that he and other ministers have given in recent days of life in our schools just do not match the reality that hundreds of teachers describe.

I raise with genuine regret the specific issue with which I start. I can no longer totally believe the official statistics on self-isolation and transmission in our schools. I do not say that lightly; I say it based on what school staff have told me. Multiple teachers have described how senior managers prevented them from fully listing the number of their pupils who were considered close contacts, because the school wanted to keep self-isolation numbers low. In one case, a teacher who tested positive followed the guidance, listed their whole primary class as close contacts and was then told that they could pick no more than a third of the children in the class.

In other cases, teachers were not consulted at all when one of their pupils tested positive, and were unable to identify either themselves or other pupils as close contacts. A number of teachers reported that pupils who were not asked to isolate subsequently became ill. One teacher told me that the pupils at their school, who were identified as close contacts in the morning, were told to attend class for the rest of the day and not to tell their teachers that they had been confirmed as close contacts.

Some cases appear to be due to rigid systems of decisions around close contacts, based on limited information such as fixed seating plans. In other cases, schools fear parental backlash if they ask large numbers of pupils to isolate or if they do so in the middle of the day, when a parent would need to collect them.

In a number of instances, staff should isolate but have been prevented from doing so because the school is worried about staffing pressures. A consistent theme on track and trace was that of teachers who felt that they, or the school, were doing it alone—without support from, or connection to, local public health teams and the wider track and trace system.

I am not here to tell the education secretary why that is the case, but I tell him that it is happening. I urge the Government to urgently review whether track and trace is working in schools, and to do so by speaking directly to the overworked teachers who have to take on the role of public health officials, on top of delivering in-person and remote learning.

If councils and school management are telling Mr Swinney that the system is working, I must urge him to hear the reality from the front lines. Across the country, more than 2,500 school staff are off due to Covid, alongside roughly 26,000 pupils; however, from what I have been told, that is an undercount. Pupils and staff who should be isolating are not doing so, which is driving transmission. In at least one case, teachers have told me of their school marking some self-isolating pupils as being absent for other reasons. Although I do not understand why, it is happening, and the correspondence that I am getting is too widespread and too consistent to write off as being about isolated incidents.

We are all aware that teachers in a number of areas were told to switch off the protect Scotland app, even when their phone was with them all day. Multiple members of staff have reported to me that they have even been told to ignore notifications from the app to self-isolate if they think that they were sufficiently protected. Given that the app does not tell people who they came into close contact with, that is a frankly dangerous suggestion. I urge the Government to review every council’s guidance. In at least one case, that guidance suggests that staff do not need to self-isolate if they were wearing a mask while in close contact with a positive case. I can find nothing in the Scottish Government’s guidance or clinical advice to support that, and the equivalent guidance in England suggests—correctly—the opposite.

The motion calls for urgent action to protect vulnerable teachers in particular. I am aware that at least 1,000 teachers have had requests to work from home rejected in recent weeks. Following the education secretary’s invitation, I have raised the cases of two constituents with him in the past couple of days. It is clear that a number of councils are insisting that extremely vulnerable teachers and other staff continue to teach in classrooms or to use up their sick leave entitlement.

I have been contacted by teachers with vastly reduced lung capacity due to conditions such as cystic fibrosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart conditions, and severe asthma. They were all previously shielding and all of their general practitioners recommended that they work from home, as do specialists, occupational health officials and others. Every one of their requests to do so was rejected. Those teachers are terrified—with justification—that going to work right now could kill them. In an increasing number of cases, the behaviour of their employers has escalated to bullying, and unions are now involved.

The Government must act to ensure that clinically vulnerable staff are supported. That means ensuring that they can work from home or in a safer alternative environment; where that is not possible, they should be supported to go on leave without loss of income. I urge the education secretary to immediately clarify the guidance for previously shielding staff in level 4 areas. The First Minister announced yesterday that shielding pupils should not attend school in person in those areas, but a number of staff immediately got in touch with me as a result of that to ask about the circumstances for them.

Some councils have been quite open about the reason why they are preventing staff from working from home or self-isolating: there are not enough other staff available to keep schools open. Not only is that grossly irresponsible towards those who are clinically vulnerable—who, frankly, feel that it has been decided that they are expendable—it is short sighted and dangerous when it simply leads to infectious individuals staying in school and transmitting the virus.

The Educational Institute for Scotland wrote to the First Minister over the summer, calling for 3,500 additional teachers to reduce class sizes and increase social distancing. Around 1,400 posts were funded and recruited; the motion therefore calls for an additional 2,000 teachers to be urgently recruited. Given the current staff absence rates, which is before flu season begins, additional staff will be critical to simply keeping schools open, never mind reducing class sizes.

The final proposal in the motion is for regular testing to be available to all staff and senior pupils. At present, it is not available to asymptomatic pupils, and staff must actively seek it out. That simply is not delivering the scale of testing that we know, from international evidence, can be effective.

Vulnerable teachers and support staff across the country are watching this debate, expecting that Parliament will step up to protect them this winter. I hope that colleagues will agree that, between the motion and the Opposition amendments, we are able to do so.

I move,

That the Parliament believes that education is best delivered in the classroom, but that making schools safe for pupils, teachers and staff must be a top priority of government during the pandemic; notes that, as of 10 November 2020, 29,486 pupils and 2,615 staff were absent from Scottish schools for COVID-19-related reasons, with absence rates affecting areas with higher levels of deprivation more; expresses concern regarding reports that some school staff have been instructed to turn off the Protect Scotland app when in school and may have felt under pressure to continue to attend schools even when notified by the app of a potential exposure risk; considers it unacceptable that some clinically vulnerable teachers have felt pressured to return to in-person teaching against specific advice from their GPs to the contrary and in the absence of an overall national strategy on how to deal with school staff with chronic or underlying health conditions; calls on the Scottish Government to work with local authorities to ensure that any vulnerable school staff member who is medically unable to attend school in person without being placed at unacceptable risk is better supported to either work from home or in a safer alternative setting, or, if this is not possible, to potentially be placed on leave without loss of income; expresses disappointment in government efforts to adequately prepare resource levels for COVID-19-related staff absences; calls on the Scottish Government to deliver funding for the purpose of recruiting at least an additional 2,000 full-time teachers to ensure that all schools can maintain safe staffing levels while managing absences due to COVID-19, and further calls on the Scottish Government to make regular voluntary COVID-19 testing widely available for asymptomatic staff and senior pupils across all of Scotland’s schools.