The Department for Education did not have detailed plans in place for introducing school closures during a pandemic prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus, a new report has found.
The report from the National Audit Office reveals that the government was “unprepared” for a pandemic on the scale of Covid-19.
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Its National Security Risk Assessment, updated in 2019 and in place since 2005, recognised that an influenza-type pandemic could disrupt energy supplies, food supplies, education, finance, communications and transport services.
But the report says that departments did not have detailed plans in place for “managing mass disruption to schooling on the scale caused by the pandemic”.
The Department for Education’s emergency response function was designed to manage disruption at a more local level such as flooding.
And its guidance on an influenza pandemic, published in 2011 and 2012, stated that “it is unlikely that widespread school closures will be required except in a very high-impact pandemic”.
But a 2014 review of the impact of school closures on an influenza pandemic carried out by what was then Department of Health found that school closures should be considered as a way of mitigating an influenza pandemic.
The 2014 review noted that “policy may need to be responsive to the particular features of any future pandemic virus” and school closures may negatively affect disadvantaged families more than non-disadvantaged families.
The report finds that, since 2008, the government’s National Risk Register had identified an influenza pandemic as the UK’s top non-malicious risk and that government had prepared for a flu pandemic and “an emerging high-consequence infectious disease” - a very infectious disease that typically causes the death of a high proportion of the individuals who contract it, such as Ebola.
“This meant that the government did not develop a specific pandemic preparedness plan for a disease with characteristics like Covid-19, which has an overall lower mortality rate than Ebola or Mers and widespread asymptomatic community transmission,” the report says.
It also says the government did not heed warnings from pandemic simulations carried out prior to the spread of Covid-19 which highlighted issues around planning and coordination.
The NAO recommends that government strengthens its preparations for future emergencies - for example, it recommends that the Cabinet Office should establish who leads on system-wide risks.
Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said: “Successive governments’ failures to plan properly for an expected pandemic have obviously contributed to the Covid crisis.
“The bigger problem, however, has been the litany of failings on the part of this government once the pandemic struck.
“This started with the failure to lock down quickly enough and continued through the premature lifting of restrictions to the current situation where simple measures such as face coverings in secondary schools and other measures to control the spread of the virus from schools into the community are still being resisted.”
Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: “This pandemic has exposed the UK’s vulnerability to whole-system emergencies, where the emergency is so broad that it engages all levels of government and society.
“Although government had plans for a flu pandemic, it was not prepared for a pandemic like Covid-19 and did not learn important lessons from the simulation exercises it carried out.
“For whole-system risks, government needs to define the amount and type of risk that it is willing to take to make informed decisions and prepare appropriately.”
