Overview

• Sir Gavin Williamson acknowledged the Department for Education made many mistakes in its pandemic planning and early response.
• He testified that decisions were centralized in No 10 and the Cabinet Office with a clear instruction to keep schools open, leaving the DfE one night to devise a nationwide closure plan in March 2020.
• Williamson criticized Boris Johnson’s May 2020 phased-return announcement as unworkable under distancing rules and harmful for families by creating false hope.
• He accepted the 2020 GCSE and A-level grading algorithm was "quite clearly wrong," saying it failed to account for the impact on individual students.
• Messages shown to the inquiry recorded him telling the prime minister he was "completely fucked over" by the January 2021 closures and complaining he was not consulted on appointing Sir Kevan Collins as recovery tsar.