Government pre-pandemic planning advice to schools scaled back dramatically under Conservative-led government

Government advice available to schools and children’s services on planning for a pandemic was vastly scaled down during Michael Gove’s and Dominic Cummings’s time at the Department for Education, a comparison of two key documents reveals.

Guidance published in 2006, but taken down through the closure of a support website for schools after 2010, ran to 55 pages. Within it, local authorities, governing bodies and schools were urged to go in for detailed planning ranging from ensuring schools were well-stocked with cleaning products to making provisions for staff being sick.

By 2013, government guidance appeared to run to just a few paragraphs, within a 37-page document covering all services across the UK. This advice appears, too, to have been much more hesitant than its 2006 predecessor had been on the idea of school closures.

The comparison may add to concerns that the government has been less than well-prepared for coronavirus, both across all fields of its work and more specifically in relation to schools. The Department for Education pointed this website to detailed specific advice it has made available to the education sector, though most of that dates from on or after the day in March that schools actually broke up due to Covid-19.

The detail