I am the owner and headteacher of a rural preschool and daycare setting. On Sunday, with the emerging COVID situation, we asked our parent body whether they wanted us to open and got a resounding yes. In our industry we cannot properly socially distance and don’t wear PPE so that we can keep things as normal as possible for our little people. There are also no plans for giving us access to regular testing or early vaccinations. All my staff were understandably very anxious but willing to do their bit to support our little people and their families.
At the inset day on Monday we planned how to stay as COVID-secure as possible given this new situation and were ready for opening up again on Tuesday. Just as we were getting ready to leave for the day, we found out that Boris Johnson was going to make his lockdown announcement that evening. When he spoke, shutting all primary schools and secondary schools and placing the UK into full lockdown, it was as if early years was an afterthought. 'Everyone will still be able to access early years settings such as nurseries' he said.
This put me, as the owner of such an early years setting, into an extremely difficult situation. On the one hand I am proud that we are essential keyworkers, vital in supporting the mental and physical health of our very young children and their families. We are passionate about our job and proud to provide as much normality as possible for our little people during the pandemic.
On the other hand, my staff were already anxious, Boris had just told everyone to stay at home because this virus was spreading much more rapidly. I was going to have to ask my team to open up for nearly 80 children and their families in the morning without PPE, without social distancing, without testing, without a chance of an early vaccine when children sometimes barely a month older in primary schools had just been told to stay at home unless they were keyworker children.
In order to prepare for the new situation, I decided to delay opening until today (Wednesday).
We worked tirelessly over yesterday to find out which of our families still wanted to join us. I had to make decisions about what to do with staff who had underlying medical conditions and give others time to make arrangements for their own primary school aged children, not to mention having to work out whether we could weather all this financially. All this could have happened over the Christmas holidays if we had had more notice and would have certainly led to less anxiety as we would have felt prepared and ready to go.
At 4pm yesterday, just as we were ready to share our new plan of how we were going to operate with staff and parents, my manager, who had led the inset day with all staff present on Monday, received a positive COVID test. She had been fine all day, but felt a little bit woozy when she got home, no other symptoms otherwise. Just to be sure, however, she got a test.
Having spent Monday’s inset day together, my whole staff team are now considered close contacts and have to isolate for 10 days. There are no staff left to look after any of our children, let alone the children of essential medical keyworkers.
We are all devastated: for our wonderful manager who is mortified, for our team, some of which have underlying medical conditions or live with very vulnerable family members, for our little people who should not be bearing the brunt of this and whom we had been working so hard to protect, and for our families, whom we now feel we have let down, especially those of essential keyworkers.
The knock on effect does not stop there:
I own another preschool with an equally committed team. Teams from both preschools know each other very well and are friends outside of work. The news of me having to shut the first preschool spooked the other team even more.
As Boris said: preschools were supposed to open. As the principal and OFSTED registered person, I still intended to do this with our second setting. When discussing this with the manager there, however, I finally listened to the knot in my stomach that I have had since last Saturday. Anxiety levels of staff were through the roof and I made the decision that, to preserve the mental health of my second team, we were also not going to open the second preschool for at least another week. We just need time to breathe and get our heads together.
Please don’t get me wrong, I fully agree that we should not wear PPE, or socially distance from our little people and that we are a lifeline for our families. We love what we do, recognise that we are essential and will continue to operate like this because we know it is the right thing to do. We can’t do this without notice, however. We are only human. We are the women who look after the future of this country. All we want to do is help, but we also need help.
It is once again abundantly clear that early years are an afterthought for consecutive governments, including this one.
I am in tears.