about how they should be given some kind of support to do this testing as the school budget isn’t enough to do this kind of testing. The NAHT is calling for the responsibility of the testing to be lifted off from the schools and to be taken up by healthcare officials.
The system is under a tremendous amount of pressure as it is with the fact that they have to now catch up to loss time and try to give the students the best possible education and keep them safe from getting the virus. Apart from all of this these educator are now being called every holiday and weekend to get notified about new cases and how it is not the teachers responsibility to make sure the trace is done responsibly so that a spread of the disease won’t happen.
The NAHT has made a claim that apart from the teaching they have also done an additional 44 hours of work since the start of school doing testing and tracing. This would average to about 7 additional school days for them. There have been logs of over a 100 hours by some teachers who have not stopped working as they have to bear the responsibility of tracing.
It was Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the NAT that stated in a press conference that “It was just assumed that school leaders would take on this additional duty despite the government spending billions on a national test and trace system. Not a penny of that money was given to schools. To begin with, schools accepted that they were the people best placed to track and inform students when there was a Covid case in their school, because they were the ones who had all the contact information. But it has been a full year now and absolutely no effort has been made to release school leaders from this burden, or to give them additional staff or resources to do it.”
