An open letter to Islington’s teachers, school staff and early years practitioners

Your dedication, creativity and determination to support and inspire Islington’s children and young people is something we are extremely grateful for.

Over the past nine months, you have shown exceptional leadership, compassion and unwavering commitment to Islington’s children and their families. You have worked hard every day to teach and care for our vulnerable children and the children of key workers, when our schools and early years settings remained open during the first lockdown earlier in the year. Whilst also having to create new ways of teaching for those learning from home.

Since then, you have continued to show selfless dedication, adapting quickly to new challenges, supporting our pupils receiving exam results through a distressing process in the summer and continuing to provide an outstanding education for Islington’s children and young people. Then this term having to manage new restrictions, responsibilities, financial pressures and responding to rising incidents of positive COVID results within your schools – we genuinely know how hard this has been for you.

We know that you need further support from Central Government to continue your brilliant work supporting our borough’s children and keeping school staff safe. We are working with other London boroughs to push for more funding for schools, to manage increased costs such as cover for self-isolating staff, appropriate PPE and additional cleaning, as well as access to the same Covid-testing capacity as NHS staff and improvements to test and trace systems. To ensure children don’t fall behind, we are also calling on the DfE to honour its promise to issue more laptops to children and support families with Wi-Fi access to prevent digital exclusion.

We know the pandemic has introduced unparalleled professional stresses and challenges for you. As a council we are determined to do all that we can to assist you to continue to do the outstanding job you are doing. We care about you and will do whatever we can to support you in looking after you own health and wellbeing.

All of you are an inspiration not only to children and young people, but to all of us at the council. We hope you will have an extremely well-deserved break with your families and loved ones over the festive period.

Our warmest wishes,

Cllr Richard Watts
Leader of Islington Council

Cllr Kaya Comer-Schwartz
Deputy Leader and Executive Member for Children, Young People and Families

Carmel Littleton
Corporate Director, People