23rd December 2020
INTO’s Northern Secretary, Gerry Murphy, has demanded Minister Weir join with principals and teachers who will be forced to work over the holidays to prepare schools for a safe re-opening in January given the emergence of the new Covid-19 variant.
Mr Murphy said:
“The Christmas holidays are now here and schools across the north have closed their doors for what should be a period of rest and recuperation for their hard-pressed staffs. The reality however will be very different for the principals and core staff teams. They will continue to struggle with tracking and tracing infections arising from the Covid-19 outbreaks that have spread like wildfire across the system in the last week of term one. On top of this, they are now saddled with delivering safe school environments for January in the face of the emergence of a new Covid-19 variant. This in the absence of any meaningful guidance from a Minister increasingly out of touch with the system he is charged with leading.
INTO has been advocating since March for the Department to ramp up its contingency planning for the inevitable evolution of the virus which it has singularly failed to do, and schools and society will reap that whirlwind in January. Rather than enjoy a break, as he plans over Christmas, the Minister should make himself available to work alongside his officials, those principals, teachers denied that luxury and their trade union representatives over the holiday period. It is only by working together that will we manage our way through this crisis.
Our collective task is to ensure schools are safe for teachers, non-teaching staff and pupils in January and that work is best done before the schools re-open. The Minister must reconsider his proposal around the partial closure of schools at the end of January and front load that closure to the beginning of the month. This will allow the preparations and revisions to be made to existing safety guidance and procedures before the children arrive back to school.
If he chooses to ignore this opportunity, we, at INTO, will remain available to assist those principals and teachers who are once again being forced to bridge the gap our Minister has left in preparing for the January re-start. “