Gavin Williamson announced on Thursday, almost at the same moment schools were sending pupils home for Christmas, that the return to face-to-face teaching would be staggered in January to allow mass testing to be set up. 

All secondary pupils, with the exception of exam students, the children of critical workers and vulnerable children, will learn online for their first week of the spring term, with all pupils expected to be back in the classroom by January 11. 

Students will then be eligible for daily testing for seven days if they are identified as a close contact of someone who has tested positive. It means students won’t need to self-isolate if another student or staff member tests positive in their “bubble”, as long as they agree to be tested daily. Secondary school staff will also be tested weekly from January.

After widespread absences over the first term, a new testing plan has been widely welcomed. The hasty announcement and scant details on the rollout, however, have not. 

The National Education Union (NEU) wrote to Williamson on Thursday, arguing that asking school leaders on the last day of term to set up a mass testing system in weeks was a “ridiculous ask”.

So, what are the issues?

Overstretched teachers burdened with running testing programmes 

Many teachers, who have spent the past term handling social distancing measures, bubble closures and facilitating both in-person and online lessons, questioned exactly how they would manage the new responsibility of implementing a new testing programme in January. 

As one primary school teacher tweeted: “How are teachers meant to deliver live lessons, teach key worker and vulnerable children, and train how to administer and set up a Covid testing unit?”

The NEU have raised serious concerns about teachers being able to source appropriate volunteers to support testing programmes, highlighting the fact that many schools are already facing staffing shortages due to the pandemic. 

On Friday education unions stated secondary schools and colleges unable to set up mass Covid-19 testing of students for the first week of January should not be forced to.

According to the BBC, the Department for Education (DfE) have said staff are not to be responsible for administering the tests themselves, but they will have to prepare testing sites, recruit and organise volunteers and supervise testers if they don’t have DBS checks. 

There is currently very little clarity on how this should be organised or how thousands of volunteers will be recruited, with the government promising full guidance next week. 

The limited details which have already been released suggest schools, supported by councils, should “provide a small team to support the work” of setting up mass testing. According to the guidance, this should be “one to two” members of staff, with an unspecified number of team members made up of volunteers (governors are listed as an example), or agency staff brought in specifically for the purpose of coordinating testing. 

The advice also states that armed forces personnel “will support directly”, but no further information has been provided on how. 

The cost of organising testing 

In Williamson’s statement on Thursday, he said “reasonable workforce costs” incurred in the process of setting up and staffing testing sites would “be reimbursed”. 

But with many schools struggling to cope financially even before the Covid-19 crisis, serious concerns have been raised by the NEU over what this assurance from the government really means. 

In the letter to Williamson, the NEU wrote: “You say that reasonable extra costs will be met – but you have not even met the costs that schools have so far run up in supply staff, what is your definition of ‘reasonable’?”

One teacher tweeted: “Some staff will be 100% on testing. How will their normal duties be covered and at what cost? What extra funding is there?” 

While the government has not provided any further details about funding, teachers are expecting that more information will be provided in the full guidance. 

The definition of a close contact 

The NEU letter points out: “Given that students travel together both to and from school, mixing across year group bubbles and across schools, a definition that only includes those they sit next to in class may be deficient. Have you modelled various definitions of close contact?” 

With students returning home at the end of the day, often alongside siblings in other bubbles and to parents or carers who have also spent the day working in relatively close proximity to others, the question of how to monitor close contacts outside of the school environment has caused issued for teachers since the start of term. 

In theory, the new testing system in secondary schools means students will be eligible for daily testing for seven days if they are identified as a close contact of someone who has tested positive.

But with bubbles collapsing outside of the classroom, and “close-contact” being near-impossible to measure, teachers and school staff have been left questioning how exactly they’ll sort out who is eligible for daily testing and who is not. 

Again, full details are expected to be released next week, but with the clock already running down to January 4, when the first pupils are due to return, unions are already demanding clarity to help schools set up their testing systems. 

What has the government said?  

A spokesperson for the DfE pointed to Williamson’s statement for guidance and said there plans were moving “apace” to facilitate “a big cross-government” effort to roll out testing and help pupils stay in schools. 

But aside from saying the government and armed forces would offer support, they did not offer any response on concerns surrounding the plan or the way it had been communicated to staff.  

Instead, they pointed to schools minister Nick Gibb’s appearances across various media platforms on Friday morning for the most recent advice. 

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Gibb made no apology for the advice being issued to schools hours before the Christmas holidays, saying the country was facing “a fast-moving pandemic”. 

He added that the process of getting millions of testing kits out to schools in the coming weeks would be a “massive logistical exercise”, emphasising that further details would be published next week.

“It is very important that we’re testing five and a half million students twice, three days apart, to make sure that we are breaking the transmission of the virus,” he said.

“After the increased mixing over the Christmas holidays it is all about making sure we have more young people in the classroom in the spring and summer terms as we go forward. This is an amazing initiative to get these tests into schools. It is the way we tackle this virus.”

Gibb denied that teachers would actually have to carry out testing themselves, saying they “already had their hands full”, instead saying the recruitment of volunteers would be a “national effort”.