Schools Health, Safety and Wellbeing service
Outcome/aim
To support schools in Leeds in managing the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The decision was taken to offer resources, access to support and guidance to all schools free of charge. This enabled us to work most effectively with local communities. We also provided further detailed guidance on a regular basis via over 70 detailed bulletins which explained changes to guidance and advice on issues that have arisen across schools in the city.
Background
Like many services within Leeds City Council, the last year has seen the majority of resources focused on responding to and managing Covid-19. At the start of the pandemic, in order to support all school and setting leaders through an incredibly challenging and unprecedented situation, we made the decision that we would offer our resources, access to support and guidance available to all schools free of charge regardless of their status and any Service Level Agreement they may or may not have had.
What has been delivered?
- Worked closely with colleagues in public health and children and young people’s teams to streamline process for all schools to notify LCC of positive cases in their settings so there was one common recording system used by all teams that met all our individual needs.
- Utilised Covid-19 funding to purchase a technology and an auditing package that allowed us to strengthen and streamline our proactive and reactive Covid audit process.
- Produced and provided the sample overall Covid-19 Management Risk Assessment .
- Produced and provided an updated Individual Risk Assessment taking Covid into account.
- Interpreted central guidance and converted into real world practice - Providing sample letters, flowcharts and all the updates following governmental changes to guidance and advice.
- Updated and provided 28 revised sample overall risk assessments and eight updated Individual Risk Assessment formats since May 2020.
- Produced further detailed guidance on a regular basis via over 70 detailed bulletins which explain changes to guidance and advice on issues that have arisen across schools in the city.
What was the impact/next steps ?
We have supported over 250 schools throughout the pandemic, below are just two comments of the fantastic feedback received;
“I just wanted to pass on a vote of thanks from the HTs at EPOS for your personal contributions to the support of schools during this pandemic. At our meeting this morning we agreed that whilst we feel continually under the cosh as HTs, your personal support has been unwavering and we didn't want this to go unnoticed.”
“Thank you for your continued support, expertise and guidance. I could not even begin to imagine how school leaders would sleep at night without the guidance and reassurance of specialists like yourselves.”
Increased efficiency greatly reduced the time being spent logging data across the three services and enabled us all to focus more on analysing and responding to the cases coming in. It also saved schools time completing their notifications and enabled them to keep their data in a consistent format that was easier to manage and interrogate. This system was shared with and adopted by the services supporting early years across the city so we could all support the adults, children and young people of our city more effectively. The data now feeds into the health protection monitoring system for the whole city.
The service has been part of key outbreak management groups with colleagues from health protection, Public Health England, infection control, environmental health, adult services and early years, and this has meant we have all been able to track and respond to the pandemic in a very timely manner and carry out collaborative early intervention support across the city.