The leader of one of England's largest academy trusts has described the Department for Education's failure to plan for school closures before the March 2020 lockdown as 'an extraordinary dereliction of duty'. Jon Coles, chief executive of United Learning, told the UK Covid-19 inquiry he was shocked to read a statement from then-Education Secretary Gavin Williamson saying no planning had been done because the priority was keeping schools open.
Coles, a former senior civil servant at the DfE, said he 'almost fell off his chair' when he read Williamson's statement. 'I think that's an extraordinary dereliction of duty by the leadership of the department – both political and civil service,' he told the inquiry on Monday. He noted that from early March, his trust was already planning for closures while trying to keep schools open.
In the absence of DfE direction, United Learning began running webinars on remote education and safeguarding, and pushed for free school meal vouchers. 'All of that was self-initiated,' Coles said. 'We had received no direction and we got on with planning, because that's obviously the right thing to do.'
Williamson's 2023 statement to the inquiry said he did not ask for an assessment on closures because advice at the time 'was not recommending closures' and No 10 had not commissioned it. He described a 'discombobulating 24-hour sea change' in March 2020, with opinion shifting from keeping schools open to closing them within a day.
Coles also raised concerns about plans to award GCSE and A-level grades using an algorithm based on past school performance, which he called a 'slow-motion car crash'. The inquiry continues, with module eight scheduled to last four weeks.
