The overriding feeling of teachers during the Covid pandemic was that their lives and their health “didn’t matter enough, and that other things mattered more”, including political and economic considerations, the general secretary of Scotland’s largest teaching union has told the Scottish Covid inquiry.
Andrea Bradley, general secretary of the EIS union, said this morning that teachers’ “rational fears” around returning to work in August 2020 were “downplayed” by local and national government and that the educational needs of children and young people were given “primacy”.
She said teachers were keen to see schools reopen after lockdowns and they care about their pupils.
However, they were concerned about their own safety and the safety of their families, and they did not feel that those risks and fears “were being taken seriously enough by local or national government”.
Teachers’ ‘deep fear’ in Covid pandemic
Ms Bradley said: “Teachers at that time had a deep fear of being infected by this unpredictable virus. Many had underlying health conditions; even those with no underlying heath conditions knew how quickly the virus could turn when it took hold in a person who was otherwise healthy.”
She highlighted that secondary teachers could, in the space of a day, have up to 200 different young people entering their classrooms. On top of that were the interactions in communal areas such as corridors and dining rooms.
Prioritising the vaccination of teachers should have been “a no-brainer”, Ms Bradley said, after teachers in special schools were prioritised during the first phase of the vaccine rollout.
This would have made schools safer and provided “some relief for staff who were emotionally exhausted and had by that stage been working in challenging conditions for nearly a year”.
However, at the time this was an argument that the union did not win, even though, with the capacity to deliver 400,000 vaccines a week, every teacher in Scotland could have been vaccinated “in a matter of days”.
“We thought that was a no-brainer really - a straightforward thing that could have been done - but we never won on that one, we never got anywhere with that one,” said Ms Bradley.
Some schools ‘lacked soap and hot water’
This failure was then compounded, she said, by the failure to put in place “even those most basic of mitigations” [to protect against the spread of Covid in schools] such as enhanced cleaning, adequate supplies of hand sanitiser, appropriate signage and guidance on the size of staff meetings. Some schools even lacked soap and hot water, Ms Bradley said.
“There were other means by which education could have been - and was being - provided for young people. And so it wasn’t the be-all and end-all for school buildings to be open, although nobody is contesting that is the optimum,” she added.
“But from our point of view, you can only have that optimum in practice if the risks are sufficiently low or the risks are sufficiently well handled. And in the views of our members, substantiated by the wealth of data we have around that, they weren’t.”
On lessons for the future, Ms Bradley called for a national response in the event of a national crisis.
She was highly critical of council umbrella body Cosla for “dragging its heels” when the pandemic broke out and allowing different councils to take different approaches.
For example, she said some councils insisted that teachers attended school the week after they closed to pupils in March 2020, while others allowed teachers to work from home.
Ms Bradley also said that in the event of a future pandemic, “the protection of life and health” has to be “the ultimate and the first priority”.
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