Fintan O’Toole: To keep schools open, the Government needs to start learning quickly

My grandson is 19-months-old. He is half Danish and lives in Copenhagen with his parents. And he has been back in kindergarten since April 15th. That’s more than three months of normal life for him and of relative freedom for his mother and father.

He’s had two short spells at home because there are strict rules in place: any sneezing or coughing and you’re removed from the class. But the difference to the quality of life and to the health of the economy is incalculable. The Danes managed to begin opening schools on a rolling basis – starting with the youngest children first – just five weeks after they had locked them down. By the end of May, the oldest high school students were back in class.

International comparisons of responses to the pandemic can be invidious. Denmark’s big neighbour, for example, is Germany, which was dealing very capably with the crisis. Ireland’s is the UK, whose government has been the least competent in Europe. These things count.

Even so, the difference seems vast. Ireland shut down childcare facilities and schools on March 11th. Only this week, on July 27th, did the Government finally publish its plan to open schools again at the end of August. It is, most people agree, a good plan. But it will be fiercely difficult to implement it in four weeks.

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If you knew it was imperative to reopen Irish schools in August, surely you would start organising all this stuff in May

Everything that needs to be done in a mad rush during August was entirely predictable three months ago. Let's accept that in the first shock of the pandemic, it was hard to think beyond the next few weeks. (The initial announcement by then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar suggested that schools were closing only until March 29th.)

But from April onwards, it was abundantly clear to everyone that the coronavirus was not going to just disappear at some point. Schools would have to reopen in a different world and therefore they would have to be different places.

There was no great mystery about what that meant: more teachers, more cleaners, new spaces, better hygiene and toilet facilities, isolation rooms for suspected cases of Covid-19, staggered arrivals and departures, enhanced use of digital learning.

From the middle of April, ministers and officials could see a live experiment unfolding in Denmark and they could see the granular detail of what it demanded: handwash stations outside the school, extra sinks with taps changed from manual to sensory operation, reallocation of toilets so each class had one to itself, constant wiping down of all contact points such as door handles.

If you knew it was imperative to reopen Irish schools in August, surely you would start organising all this stuff in May. To take the most obvious example, one of the things the Department of Education should have been doing is ordering huge numbers of prefabs to provide temporary classrooms. But it didn’t – and it’s now far too late.

Deirdre McCabe, director of one of the main suppliers of prefabs, told Jack Power in the Irish Times on Tuesday that she had received a spike in calls from school principals in the last two weeks. Why only in the last two weeks? And why do individual principals have to do this when a co-ordinated national effort is so clearly what's required?

And in any case, she had bad news for them: most of the supply of prefabs is already taken by other organisations, including another arm of Government, the HSE. Even if schools can get a prefab, there is another barrier. According to Ms McCabe “If a school rang us today, I would tell them they need planning permission – for that, six months would be the norm.”

So at best a school might just be able to get a prefab classroom in place by the time pupils come back from their Christmas break in January 2021. Was nobody thinking about this two or three months ago? Is anyone even thinking about it now?

The documents released by the Department of Education tell us effectively nothing about what a school that needs prefabs is supposed to do. Or about who, if anyone, is installing new sinks with automatic taps. Or how many of the 1,080 new secondary teachers are already vetted and how quickly the Garda can process the rest.

These are all hard questions but they are known knowns. When schools do reopen there will also be the unknown unknowns, the problems that arise just because that’s what happens in real life with something as large and complex as this. But while the difficulty of dealing with the unforeseen eventualities is understandable and forgivable, the inability to get to grips in a timely way with the foreseeable ones is perplexing.

Perhaps some of this is about an inherent culture of caution, the Careful Now! sign that hangs over every departmental office

The pandemic has exposed both the good and the bad things about Irish governance. The good side is the absence of malice. Perhaps we should be able to take it for granted that individual office holders and civil servants are doing their honest best in pursuit of the public good, but we have only to look either east or west of us to see that this assumption can be foolish.

When it comes to the pandemic, nobody in Irish government is acting maliciously; nobody is blinded by ideological zeal and nobody seems to be feeding lucrative contracts to their friends.

But the bad side is very slow decision-making and an often tenuous connection between high-level policies and their implementation on the ground. The system was very slow to recognise the awful reality of what was happening in nursing homes and residential institutions. It was very slow to take obvious decisions, such as requiring the use of face masks on public transport. The plan to reopen schools has been weirdly tardy. It’s so often a case of doing the right thing – eventually.

Perhaps some of this is about an inherent culture of caution, the Careful Now! sign that hangs over every departmental office. Ruairí Quinn, when he was minister for education, complained of his officials that (as recalled by John Walshe) “their sense of time was different from his”. It seems in many cases to be different from everyone else’s.

But in the case of education it is also about something more fundamental: a lack of ownership leading to a lack of responsibility. The Irish education system (including the childcare system) is based on the notion that the State does not provide education – it provides “for” education. Those three letters (written into the Constitution) were the guarantors of Church control: the State’s job is to come up with the money, not to create and sustain a public educational structure.

Now that the Church has largely withdrawn from the frontline of education, who is really responsible? Neither Church nor State, but principals and boards of management, left to keep the show on the road in overcrowded and chronically under-resourced schools. We end up with four weeks to make schools ultra-clean, when for decades teachers have been bringing in toilet paper and soap because the system somehow can’t supply them. It is quite a leap.

All of this has to change very rapidly. As the schools reopen, we will start to find what works and what doesn’t. To enhance the first and diminish the second, Government will have to respond at the pace of real events, which is quick and sharp. Slow learners will fail this test.