Education ministry’s Covid-19 management review for the year 2021 |04 January 2022

After the school holidays for the beginning of the year, schools reopened on Monday May 31, 2021 and despite challenges, the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in place against Covid-19 in schools were constantly updated with regard to new information about the virus received from the Ministry of Health and case developments in the country.

It was observed that both students (not all are being vaccinated at the moment) and staff are contracting the virus in the community and are bringing the virus to the schools and it is very rarely being shared in the school compound itself.

All educational institutions, that is, day care centres, crèche, primary, secondary and tertiary, were managed under the newly created MoE Command Centre.

The command centre had health and safety staff along with volunteers within the ministry to assist with the smooth running.

Attendance reports were followed up, case report investigated and weekly reports were produced to give a good idea of how the cases were developing in the schools for both staff and students.

Also the command centre gave out quarantine certificates for parents, and staff that needed the documents for work, as long as the staff or students were recorded cases.

If parents did not report their child to be Covid positive they could not be covered with a certificate, thus parents were encouraged to inform the school for records.

The command centre also established hotline numbers (2811169; 2811159) for schools to contact it directly whenever there was an issue, as well as for the general public.

To note, a lot of meetings and trainings took place during the year to make sure we were on top of things and would flow with new developments.

Schools’ Covid-19 teams were created to follow up cases and screening teams were created to make sure all that entered the schools were screened before and findings recorded to be able to follow up after.

We also received a lot of donations that were very helpful to the schools.

The accompanying photos show some highlights of virtual and in person meetings, school vaccination programmes, donations and trainings that took place during the year 2021.

Contributed by the Ministry of Education