The Covid-19 helpline launched by the Department for Education today is off to a bumpy start, according to reports.

According to one tweet, the helpline redirects callers to Public Health England, which then, in turn, asks callers to call the new helpline.

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Ian McNeilly, chief executive of The de Ferrers Trust, a multi-academy trust based in Staffordshire and Derbyshire, tweeted this morning: “We were one of the first to their new helpline when it opened at 8am. ‘Can you ring Public Health England?’ WHAT?! Voice message from PHE: ‘Please ring the new helpline.’ These incompetents wouldn’t last 5 minutes working for me.”

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The tweet gathered several responses, including one agreeing with Mr McNeilly’s tweet.

“Exactly the same for my school. DfE staff unaware that the PHE helpline directs callers to DfE,” a tweet reads.

Another response points out that this type of problem has happened before: “This happened many times in March before schools closed. Schools were passed between the DfE and local public health teams, wasting hours of time and raising anxiety levels to an unacceptable level.”

Mr McNeilly told Tes that he was alerted at 7 am by one of the headteachers in the trust that a member of teaching staff in a primary school had reported a positive test.

All the appropriate measures were taken, including contacting the local authority and alerting parents that children from that class would have to self-isolate, and then at 8 am the headteacher tried to contact the DfE helpline, to be first redirected to PHE, and then advised that someone from PHE would get in touch.

Mr McNeilly said: “As of 11.40 we haven’t had any contact back from PHE.”

And he added: “I worked for the civil service myself for a long time- I run an organisation now, I have resisted jumping on any bandwagon of criticism because I know it’s a difficult job and I know they [the DfE] are presented with difficult circumstances, but quite frankly, what we had this morning was totally unacceptable.

“To be informed yesterday that there is a new helpline to ring because Public Health England are under great strain, which is totally understandable, and then to be told to ring PHE anyway, and further to be then said ‘oh right, the solution is that someone from PHE will ring you back’, and they haven’t, it just seems chaotic, and it’s unacceptable.

“It’s more stress for school leaders that are already under a great deal of stress trying do everything they have to do.”

A Department for Education spokesperson told Tes that schools should still contact the hotline and press option one. The department is aware of the problem raised in the Twitter conversation and is looking into it.