A senior academy trust leader has delivered devastating testimony to the COVID-19 inquiry, branding the Department for Education's failure to prepare for school closures as an 'extraordinary dereliction of duty'.
Complete Lack of Pandemic Planning
Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis academy trust, told the inquiry that the DfE had 'no plan at all' for the possibility of mass school shutdowns when the pandemic struck. The revelation exposes critical failures in the government's emergency preparedness that affected millions of children across England.
Schools Left to Fend for Themselves
According to Chalke's testimony, schools were essentially abandoned to create emergency systems from scratch when lockdown was announced in March 2020. The department's planning appeared to focus only on individual school closures rather than considering nationwide shutdown scenarios.
'It was an extraordinary dereliction of duty not to have a plan for mass school closures,' Chalke stated bluntly during his evidence session.
The Devastating Impact on Education
The consequences of this planning failure were severe and far-reaching:
- Millions of children experienced significant disruption to their education
- Schools struggled to implement remote learning without government guidance
- The digital divide left disadvantaged students further behind
- Teachers faced immense pressure to create emergency systems overnight
Avoidable Damage to Learning
Chalke emphasised that proper contingency planning could have significantly mitigated the educational damage caused by the pandemic. Instead, schools were forced into reactive crisis management without adequate support or frameworks from the department supposedly responsible for their oversight.
The testimony forms part of the ongoing UK COVID-19 Inquiry's examination of education sector preparedness and response during the critical early stages of the pandemic.
