A YORK education leader says city schools are more united than ever and plans are in place for pupils to return next month.

John Tomsett, head teacher at Huntington School and chair of the York Schools and Academies Board, said there are challenges but teachers are looking ahead to “start doing some of the joyful things again” for their pupils.

“We’re planning that if we come back on March 8, which I’m sure we will do, if it’s just years 11 to 13 we won’t bubble, they would just go to their normal rooms around the school," he told a council meeting. "If everybody’s back we will bubble up to Easter, have three weeks and then after Easter we hope to be able to put on sport, to put on musicals.

“We’ve got to start doing some of the joyful things in school again, because what they miss most is their mates.

“But what’s frustrating is that you just can’t promise anything. If the South African variant takes off we’re in a different situation again, you can understand entirely why the government are very reluctant to put any dates on anything.”

York schools have been so successful at putting in safety measures that the public health team have confirmed no cases of transmission of the virus in schools.

It comes as Maxine Squire, assistant director of education, revealed school staff were “very anxious” at the start of January.

And schools have only been able to offer places to 70 per cent of pupils whose parents applied for a place during this lockdown as the list of jobs qualifying for key worker status was expanded. Teachers prioritised places for vulnerable children.

Teachers and support staff spent the Christmas holiday getting schools ready to carry out regular coronavirus testing only to find out on the first day of term that schools would close to all except the children of key workers and vulnerable pupils.

But schools were left without guidance on how to open to those pupils for the first week, including if class sizes should be limited as they were in the first lockdown.

A council report says: “The main reasons for schools being unable to offer places has been due to high levels of occupancy and concerns about the safety of going above 50 per cent capacity.

“Where schools have had concerns about capacity due to space and having sufficient staff to deliver remote learning they have prioritised places for vulnerable children.”

Ms Squire said: “Because of the York context in early January, schools were a lot more anxious than they’d been in earlier stages. It had really come home that the cases were accelerating in York. It did create greater anxiety within the staff teams in schools and obviously that led to some schools having section 44 [notices raising concerns about safe working conditions] being put in around health and safety.

“It’s important to remember that our schools were operating as fully open between September and December, using control measures which were very successfully controlling the spread of the virus.”

She added: “In the first week there was a fair amount of panic from parents because they knew the [key worker roles] list had been broadened and they were looking for a school place.

“The education team were taking a fair number of inquiries. Schools were initially working to March 2020 operating procedures which was that class sizes should be capped, because when this lockdown came in there was an absence of guidance from the Department for Education and and that didn’t arrive until the end of that first week.”

Mr Tomsett highlighted concerns about the grading process for exams and praised staff for working under “extraordinarily complex demands” with some teachers home schooling their own young children while delivering hours of remote classes.

Schools have been using funding to supply pupils with laptops, equipment and internet-connected dongles to ensure they can access remote learning. They are also printing out a week’s worth of work for some pupils and sending it to their homes, where students are struggling with access to classes online.

Ofsted will start to carry out monitoring visits to schools to evaluate the quality of their remote learning services in spring term.