Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Government’s Guidance for full opening: schools, what assessment he has made of the effect on teacher workload of the need for schools to regularly monitor and review their preventative and protective covid-19 measures.

The Government is grateful for the continued hard work of school leaders, teachers and support staff in their efforts to ensure that all pupils, in all year groups, are able to return to school full-time from the beginning of the autumn term.

On 2 July the Government published guidance on the full opening of schools, including a Public Health England endorsed system of controls which, when implemented alongside the school’s own risk assessment, will create an inherently safer environment for children and staff where the risk of transmission of infection is substantially reduced. The guidance recognises that schools may need to alter the way in which they deploy their staff, and use existing staff more flexibly in the new term, but is clear that any plans should avoid increases in unnecessary and unmanageable workload burdens.

To help reduce the burden on educational and care settings at the beginning of the outbreak, the Department for Education and its agencies cancelled or paused all but the most essential data collections, services and requests from educational and care settings until the end of June 2020. The Department published a master list on 20 April and promised to review those collections that were paused and extend the pause period if necessary. A review of the list has now taken place and the pause period has been extended to 30 September.

The Department also recently published a report by the Education Development Trust on school-led projects aimed at reducing teacher workload, which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reducing-teacher-workload-education-development-trust-report .

The success in participating schools using the workload reduction toolkit is an encouraging example of where schools can identify and address their particular workload challenges. The workload reduction toolkit is available here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit .

The Department has also published a range of resources, including case studies to support remote education and help address staff workload. The case studies can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/case-studies-remote-education-practice-for-schools-during-coronavirus-covid-19 .

Over the next few months, the Department will continue to work closely with school leaders, teachers and their representatives to continue to address workload and provide support for schools.