School Years Self-isolating

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Education – in the Senedd at 3:03 pm on 21 October 2020.

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Photo of Kirsty Williams Kirsty Williams Liberal Democrat 3:03, 21 October 2020

Well, Suzy, you have just outlined beautifully the disruption that is happening on a daily basis, in some parts of Wales, to children's education. In the light of experience of this first half term, we have worked with TTP teams and health protection teams to reflect on the feedback given by headteachers to develop new guidance so that we can reduce the number of pupils and staff who are having to self-isolate. As you identified, one way in which we are looking to do this is by making sure that we can focus on schools having the processes in place to capture information so that we can have more confidence around what constitutes a close contact and to work with those schools to identify—perhaps, in the first instance, a bubble is sent home, but then to work as quickly as possible, following the bubble being sent home, to identify the close contacts within that particular group and then bring more of those children back into school within those 14 days of self-isolation.

So, you're right: we need to give support and confidence to headteachers to make these decisions. And, of course, headteachers need to work with us to have processes in place so that they can more easily and readily identify those children who will have had a close contact with a positive case, rather than asking entire year groups, or very large bubbles, to miss school.