Yorkshire MP's plea to government after revealing school in region spending £7,000 a week on covid

The call for action comes as Andrew Jones, the Conservative MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, revealed this week in Parliament that King James’s School in Knaresborough, is spending an extra £7,000 a week tackling covid.

Mr Jones has urged the Government to take into account variable infection rates when planning education budgets, ahead of today’s Spending Review (25 November).

Covid has imposed additional costs on all schools, such as paying for supply teachers to cover teachers who are isolating.

But the scale of the problem at the North Yorkshire school, was laid bare during a Commons education debate on Monday. (23 November).

Mr Jones said: "The highest levels of infection lead to the highest levels of people having to isolate, including teachers, so there are increased budgetary costs from having to backfill teaching staff.

"King James’s School in Knaresborough, a secondary school in my constituency, briefed me that this is running at £7,000 a week, so schools are facing a significant challenge."

Paul McIntosh, acting headteacher of King James’s School, urged ministers to help.

He told The Yorkshire Post: "In the present climate, it is unsustainable to keep spending the extra money on resources like additional cleaning and supply teachers in order simply to maintain the school functioning in a relatively normal capacity.

"We would greatly appreciate the government giving serious consideration to providing schools with additional funding in order to support us through these difficult winter months."

Gillian Keegan, the skills minister, told the Commons debate the government had provided £75,000 additional funding for “unavoidable costs that could not be met from their existing budgets”.

She added: "There will be a further opportunity later in the year for schools to claim for eligible costs that fell between March and July."

The plea also comes as a new study suggests marking and lesson planning are the key drivers of workload stress among teachers.

For every additional hour that teachers spend on marking, there is a significant link with a decline in their wellbeing at work, according to the University College London (UCL) paper.

But other aspects of the job - such as time spent teaching and working with colleagues - seem to have "little direct effect upon teachers' quality of working life", the report suggests.

Researchers warned that adding an extra hour or two of work on teachers who already work 60 hours a week could be the “straw that breaks the camel’s back”.

The study, which analysed data from the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Study, also included survey answers from 9,405 teachers in five predominantly English-speaking education systems from England, Australia, Alberta-Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

The report highlights that teachers across England work some of the longest hours in Europe and recent research by the UCL Institute of Education found that a quarter of teachers work more than 59 hours a week.

Lead author Professor John Jerrim, from the UCL Institute of Education, said: "Our study shows that it is not just a case of saying extra hours lead to extra stress among teachers, but what they are doing in those hours.

"We found that for every extra hour teachers spend on marking and planning, there is a significant association with decline in wellbeing at work. This is most likely because these are often tasks done at the evening, weekend and during school holidays."

A reduction of five or 10 hours among those teachers who currently work 60 or more hours per week could potentially lead to an appreciable increase in this group's quality of life, the report found.

Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), said: "Teachers are still working amongst the longest hours in Europe, and this is clearly linked to heavy workload of lesson preparation and marking, resulting in poor wellbeing rates."

She added: "It is not the core work which teachers find stressful but the piling on to the working day of a set of accountability requirements that exist solely to please Government and Ofsted and offer little educational value. They do however drive high stress and poor wellbeing levels in teachers."

"High workload also leads to retention problems in the workforce, which this Government has consistently failed to avert. The latest threat of a pay cap in this week's Spending Review adds insult to injury," Dr Bousted said.

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