Issue - meetings

Consideration was given to the report of the Corporate Director of Education, the Head of School Improvement and Inclusion and Service Manager – Education Transformation and Business Change, which was presented to provide Members with the opportunity to scrutinise the updated Recovery and Renewal Action Plan (Appendix 3), and the updated One Page Overview (Appendix 4), which address the Education Directorate’s identified priorities for recovery and renewal, as part of the corporate response to the COVID-19 situation.

The Service Manager – Education Transformation and Business Change spoke to the report and highlighted the main points contained therein.

The Director of Education responded to questions raised:-

·        The latest position regarding Estyn regulatory activity was that local authority inspections would continue but school based inspection activity would not start until after February half term. 

·        With regard to local authority comparisons, due to the relaxation of performance measures they were unable to benchmark at this point in time and were not looking to currently provide performance information that would consider either family of schools or family of local authorities as that data was not readily available.

·        Currently absenteeism was approaching 6.5% of the workforce within schools but only a few Headteachers had been affected by Covid.

·        With regard to car parking at school sites, the Service Manager said there was a traffic management working group in place to look at key issues at individual school sites and schools were prioritised on the basis of risk and safety and were on a rota for the traffic enforcement process.  They worked closely with individual schools and Highways to look at traffic management plans and mitigation measures for each of those schools. 

A Member referred to page 74 - School Accountability Services and commented that EAS Challenge Advisors in schools had now been replaced with School Improvement Partners.  The Service Manager would ensure this was updated on future reports.

The Committee AGREED to recommend that the report be accepted and endorse Option 1; namely that the report, associated documentation and proposed course of action be accepted.