UK Covid Inquiry asks Swinney about ‘urgency’ over school closures

John Swinney failed to show “urgency” in protecting schoolchildren from the pandemic, the UK Covid Inquiry has heard.

FM Swinney was education secretary in the early phases of the health crisis and oversaw measures to keep pupils learning.

He said his team “took the best decisions available to us at the time to protect the wellbeing of children and to ensure that their education and their welfare was supported”.

But inquiry counsel Clair Dobbin KC said Scottish Government messages to councils in spring 2020 failed to show the “urgency” of the developing situation.

She showed the inquiry an excerpt from an email which cautioned that school trips may have to be called off due to health risks, telling Swinney that “despite the fact Covid-19 was in Scotland, there doesn't seem to be any understanding on your part that overseas travel was now becoming completely, vanishingly unlikely and unrealistic”.

She said the focus did not “impart any urgency or any sense of the gravity of the position that schools were now facing”.

Swinney said he had been highlighting the advice available at the time, and that though he had initially hoped that schools could stay open for longer, the “situation changed dramatically” in mid-March, with classrooms shut within days.

The SNP leader said there was a “very short window” between the emergence of the first confirmed Covid cases and the closure of schools.

Dobbin suggested “all governments of the UK needed to start at a much earlier stage” in planning for the impacts of the pandemic.

Swinney said that was “fair”, and that steps taken to check the spread of the virus “were not effective”. And he said he had been trying to work in partnership with schools on the matter, because the authority to shut down classes was in the hands of local government.

The first minister said the government had learned lessons on the use of remote learning since the start of the pandemic, and that he had been “conscious of the potential damage to the wellbeing of children and young people” that could come from closing schools.

He said adaptations to the system had been a “joint endeavour” with councils and that the “sustainability of education” was his priority.

Referring to the SQA grading row, which happened after exams were scrapped on public health grounds, Dobbin said the steps put in place had been a “disaster”. Swinney said he accepted the findings of the Priestley Review into the circumstances that saw thousands of pupils having their scripts downgraded. Swinney said he had offered “a direct apology” to pupils involved and “rectified the situation” in a move that saw widespread changing of marks.