'Early years is an afterthought in Test and Trace guidance'

The significant increase in isolations, alerts and positive cases in individuals linked to our settings has coincided with this week’s change to the regulations and guidance, the equivocal nature of which has added to the burden of responsibility felt by providers attempting to maintain an appropriate balance between doing the right thing and keeping everyone safe whilst attempting to continue to provide service to our children and their families.

The blurring of the lines between statutory requirements and best endeavours based on a sense of civic duty and frankly guesswork, has brought utter confusion and more anxiety to already overstretched teams.

There is a sense, as has been felt so often over the last 18 months, that Early Years has once again been overlooked; is an afterthought and is just expected to muddle through the next month until 16 August when we can be the guinea pigs for the rest of the education sector before it returns in September.

In the meantime, service is significantly impacted by the rising number of isolations and positive cases and providers are uncertain whether they are following the correct procedure – do we phone the DfE? Apparently, depending on who you talk to, it is possible to get several different sets of ‘official’ advice as to what to do. Do we still report cases to Ofsted, our local authority? – yes to both apparently.  

For each and every individual case reported to us – and they are coming thick and fast this week, we have to interpret the guidance based on our best guess. Hardly a robust public health framework that provides assurance that our children and team members are being fully protected and that consideration has been given to the importance of maintaining both the childcare service we provide to parents and the safe and nurturing envionments so important for young children’s welfare and development.  

Oh, and we have team members who are concerned that they face repeated periods with a potential, substantial loss of income and as providers, we also have 1 or 2 bills to pay.

As regards bubbles, we abandoned any rigid form of separation of children right back at the start when it became evident that it was totally impractical to do so, dependent on the layout of each building. Our watchwords continue to be practical and proportionate. We have to live and work in these conditions – adults and children. What is best for all of them?  We need to be as safe as necessary not as possible. Some of our settings lend themselves to separate groups e.g. on different floors, in individual room bases. We have attempted to keep these separate to mitigate the effects of cases potentially causing isolation. In some cases this has worked but not all.

My feeling is that Test and Trace will not now being contacting the setting to follow up contacts of positive cases, as a matter of course. So effectively, the need for bubbles has already gone.

My interpretation of the scientific evidence is that covid is airborne. We are therefore focused on good ventilation. We are leaving it up to parents and individual team members whether they wish to use masks at the door but we are not enforcing this.

I am unaware of any studies of empirical evidence on the efficacy of masks in preventing transmission by aerosol, outside laboratories but I am willing to accept that they could have a role in providing some protection against the distribution of droplets.

As I understand it, there is no evidence of transmission via fomites in real life situations and the risk is deemed to be so small as to be insignificant. I cannot understand why the guidance has not been changed in the light of this. We are maintaining practical and proportionate cleaning and hygiene routines. We are using all our resources and operating normally.

We continue to wait for the next notification and react / respond / guess what to do next. After the year and a half we have all just lived through, it continues to be draining and a distraction from other work both in terms of the time it takes up and mental capacity.