Schools ‘have done everything that they physically can’ to protect against Covid-19 with community transmission driving issues

Councillors have been told ongoing transmission in the wider Wrexham community has affected schools in the area, rather than schools themselves driving an increase in cases.

The Lifelong Learning Scrutiny Committee met virtually yesterday to discuss a wide ranging update report into the impact of the Covid pandemic on education services locally.

The issue is highly topical with it announced late Wednesday afternoon that Wrexham will deviate from Welsh Government desires to reopen schools from the 22nd, with a more ‘cautious’ approach being taken locally (more here).

The report itself contains a narrative of work taken, with a range of supporting documentation.

The data before councillors included several tables showing dated snapshots of how many schools had positive cases, how many class based bubbles were ‘closed’, how many schools were closed – as well as the numbers of staff and pupils positive.

The report told councillors: “Due to the impact of community transmission, a number of schools were required to close contact bubbles as pupils and staff were required to self isolate.

“Several schools closed for a short period of time to enable a ‘deep clean’ to take place to provide further reassurance that all measures to ensure the safety of the school environment were being taken.

“In total, there were 185 bubble closures across 60 schools from the start of term to the end of term.”

Speaking about the data, Llay councillor Rob Walsh, said: “One thing that alarmed me was the number of staff who tested positive for covid, compared with the ratio of the pupils.”

Cllr Walsh pondered the reason for the stats and wanted to discover the reason for transmission, adding: “Now, there could be a reason because most most pupils are asymptomatic.

“Many would have had the virus and not been tested. But, what I want to know and I think it’s important going forward for schools is, those staff which have contracted Covid, did they contract it from the school environments, or was it from outside?

“We do need to know that if we can successfully reopen schools.”

Council officer Dafydd Ifans told the meeting: “I think it’s fair to say that what we’ve seen in schools has largely mirrored what we’ve seen in terms of the community transmission rates across Wrexham.

“We saw a fairly steady picture pre fire break, that increased just slightly before the fire break, and then again just as we saw in the community, the transmission rates lowered, and then they steadily rose.

“We saw an enormous spike really going into the Christmas period. That continued to rise after schools have closed. So the last piece of data you’ve got is on the 18th of December.

“We’ve carried on monitoring that all the way through to January. So even when schools came back in January, but didn’t come back, the the numbers were still very high at that point.”

“In general Cllr Walsh, we would say that it has been generally community transmission that we have experienced and manifesting itself in schools.

“There have been one or two cases where we believe that the transmission has come from the community into the school, and then being transmitted quite quickly through through the school.

“In those cases as well we’ve worked very, very closely with our colleagues in TTP, and with our health and safety colleagues, and then we’ve taken the decision to close whole schools or quite large sections of schools. We’ve gone in and had a look at the arrangements in terms of health and safety.

“What we found in all cases, the schools have done everything that they physically can, it’s not that they’ve done something wrong, it’s just with all the mitigations that got in place, it’s still impossible.

“For example, in one case the number of staff toilets were insufficient. So quite a few members of staff were using the same toilet, and all the regimes you put in place, you can’t completely clean a toilet down every time somebody uses it.

“It has been really difficult for some of our schools, but in general has been about community transmission coming in.”

Mr Ifans added: “Going into the situation, after half term, one change that we will have is that we are as a country offering lateral flow device tests to all education staff.

“So that will be available on a twice weekly basis to all teachers, teaching assistants, and those working in education settings.”

“That will probably give us a a fairly good picture of the impact of bringing schools back because as I’ve tried to point out, it’s been quite difficult to separate the community from the in-school transmission.”