Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming in. I will focus on schools. As a society, we have prioritised getting schools back and all the way through the roadmap, one can see the priority is keeping schools open for the obvious psycho-social and educational benefits for children of attending school. Testing and tracing in my area has not been fast enough in respect of schools.

I will raise a couple of specific issues to highlight them for the witnesses in case they are not already there, though I have also raised them via parliamentary questions. For example, a schoolteacher in my area who was a suspected Covid contact over a weekend waited up to five days. The impact of that as an individual is one thing, but there is also an impact on her school. It was in the second week of September with the children trying to come back to school and develop relationships with that teacher, which is significant. It is also significant for the school and school management. I do not believe it is an isolated incident or that the five-day wait is absolutely unique. In the course of prioritising testing, clearly the acute setting is prioritised and there is serial testing in a number of settings, but we have prioritised schools and it is very important to make sure that teachers have availability to test quickly. I ask the witnesses to prioritise that further than has been done.

I would also like to raise a concern related to tracing. A child tested positive in a school in my area. My understanding from the school is that they were clearly told by NPHET and the HSE to leave the tracing process to the HSE. They would be the people who would take charge of it and deliver it. That was the school's and the principal's understanding. However, in this case, there was no contact with the school from the HSE. The parent rang the principal to inform him of the positive test and, but for this, the rest of the child's pod would have come back into school the following day. The school is very distressed about the way in which it had to manage that and concerned about what else is happening. But for that parent contacting the school rather than relying on the HSE to do so, there could have been a much broader problem.

It has been raised with me that there is an inconsistency in the response received by schools. There may be a good reason for this, but, in some cases, it is advised that the pod should stay home while in others the whole class should stay home. That may depend on the size of the school or certain technical issues but from the perspective of schools, they are seeing inconsistencies and it is making it difficult for them to plan and manage.

It has also been raised with me by two schools in my area that the HSE spreadsheet, which has been sent to schools to input the information is extremely difficult to use at a most basic level, where there is not even an appropriate data input in the Excel spreadsheet for phone numbers, for example. That has been raised independently by two schools in two different parts of my constituency. It is clearly a problem.

I have raised all these points in one go, which takes most of my time, to get the witnesses' sense of the issues. In particular, what is the situation regarding prioritising schoolteachers for getting tests, recognising the impact on school management, classes and children? What is the position on tracing where there is a positive test in a school? Is it up to the school or the HSE?