Inquiry Told Schools Lost Track of ‘A Great Many’ Pupils in Lockdown

Schools did not know where "a great many" young people were or what they were doing during the era of lockdowns and restrictions, the Scottish COVID-19 Inquiry heard.

Teachers and support staff were far less able to perform their duty of "social care," in which they identified pupils experiencing problems outside school and put support in place when children were not attending class in person, the Edinburgh-based probe was told on Wednesday.

Graham Hutton, general secretary of School Leaders Scotland (SLS), told the inquiry, "One of the advantages of the school was that young people came to school, they were in the building."

He continued: "Hence, there was a point of contact there. If there was a concern, then case meetings would be set up, parental visits would take place, various other agencies would be contacted, and we would start to look at working around the child.

"That work started to fall away as soon as you could not get physical contact with people who were out there."

Jim Thewliss, retired SLS general secretary, echoed Hutton's evidence, saying that if they were not at school then young people were out in the community where they might be experiencing problems.

He said: "If they were in school for five-and-a-half hours a day, we knew where they were, and we knew what to do, and we knew that we could support them. It became a huge, huge challenge, and we didn't know for a great many young people where they were and what they were doing."

Hutton also described a number of lingering negative effects on families, in relation to the behaviour and attendance of young people, and a decline in parental engagement with schools.

He added that since the lockdowns, there had been an increase in "low level indiscipline" at schools, due to pupils not adjusting back into a routine of school attendance.

"Young people had been left in many ways to their own devices. They were lonely. They had a lack of social involvement. And therefore, when we came back into a routine, that was almost anathema to some," he said.

Thewliss concluded his evidence by saying the COVID-19 era had shown there needed to be a fundamental change in how education is delivered in Scotland, saying a model of education dating back to the Education Act of 1740 was unfit for the 21st century.

"We cannot carry on doing what we're doing just now in the way in which we're doing it," he said.

"And any good [that has] come out of this, what it has done, is made us look at, understand and reflect upon the quality, standards, effectiveness, relevance of education that we are providing in Scotland just now."

The long-running inquiry, separate from the UK probe, is currently hearing evidence about the impact of COVID-19 and the government response to it on education and early years learning.

PA Media contributed to this report