Coronavirus: Special schools vaccine priority 'not supported'

Only certain staff in special schools will get priority for a Covid-19 vaccination

The Department of Health did not support a proposal to vaccinate all special school staff against Covid-19, according to the education minister.

Peter Weir said the executive had been "reluctant" to hold a vote on the plan.

As a result, only specific staff who care for clinically vulnerable children will be prioritised for vaccination.

Mr Weir also told Stormont's Education Committee that special school principals would have to decide which staff should be vaccinated.

Sinn Féin MLA Nicola Brogan asked Mr Weir why all staff in special schools were not getting priority for the vaccine.

"We've been contacted by a number of special school principals who have said since the announcement that they have been given responsibility to choose which staff within their schools received the vaccine," she said.

The minister agreed that special school principals had been put "in a difficult position".

"I think it would make sense to offer it to all staff, that would be my position," Mr Weir said.

Peter Weir took part in an online meeting of the Education Committee

"I put a paper to the executive which indicated that my preference was for all special school staff.

"Health made it very clear that they were not prepared to support something which they felt went against the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) which suggested therefore that they would be opposed to simply something which at this stage rolled it out across everybody.

"There was not, I suppose, across the full range of the executive a willingness to put that to a vote and outvote health in that regard, there was a desire to have consensus."

'I don't have a stash'

Mr Weir added: "If it was purely left up to me, would I vaccinate every special school staff member - yes I would.

"But I don't have a stash of the vaccine in that regard. We can only work with what is agreed by health."

But Mr Weir said that was a "better option" than having no special school staff vaccinated at all.

A Department of Education official, Ricky Irwin, told the committee that work to identify which staff would get the vaccine was ongoing.

"The staff that would receive the vaccine would be those who are directly involved in the care of children and young people with the most complex healthcare needs and who are deemed clinically vulnerable to the severe effects of Covid," he said.

"So it would be those who work in close proximity for prolonged periods of time providing a range of interventions which would include personal and intimate care.

"We have a list of those clinical procedures that those staff would be involved in. That is, at this point, a health-led process."

Worth repeating?

MLAs were also told that there was no evidence that it would be in the best interests of children for them all to repeat an entire school year.

It had been suggested by some principals and organisations as an option due to disruption to education caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The vast majority of pupils have only spent four months in class since last March.

Janis Scallon, from the Department of Education, told the committee that there had been "a lot of scoping done" on all pupils in Northern Ireland repeating a year.

"Educationally, when you look at international research and local research there is no concrete evidence base that would suggest that it would be in the best educational interests of all children to repeat an educational year in a wholesale type approach," she said.

"Some of that evidence would suggest that it could potentially have a negative impact. That's not to say that for some individual children it might be the right thing to do."

Mr Weir also said that the proposal would cause many problems but that parents could ask schools if their children could repeat a year - though it would be down to principals and boards of governors to make those decisions.

But the committee chair, Alliance MLA Chris Lyttle, queried the value of the research cited by Ms Scallon.

"I presume none of that research has ever been conducted on the basis of a global pandemic that has disrupted up to six months learning of an entire year cohort?" he said.