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Gillian Keegan says she hopes much-delayed trans guidance for schools in England to be out before Christmas

Sally Weale

The long-awaited transgender guidance for schools in England will be published before Christmas, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, has promised.

It was originally expected earlier this summer but has been dogged by delay and disagreement, to the frustration of headteachers, who are struggling to negotiate complex issues with pupils and parents without adequate support.

Asked by reporters at an AI hackathon to test how artificial intelligence can reduce teacher workloads and drive up standards in schools, Keegan said she did not want teachers to spend Christmas worrying about the still unpublished guidance. She said:

I have been working on this for a long time, but yes, I very much hope it will be there by Christmas. I know it’s much awaited and I know everybody’s very keen to get it. We’ve been working so hard … It’s very tricky. It is very difficult.

It is for consultation because we’re sure there’ll be lots of opinions around this as well. But you know, we will get it out before Christmas and then we’ll have a long consultation because I don’t want teachers to spend their Christmas worried about it.

The guidance is expected to advise on issues relating to transgender, non-binary and gender-non-conforming pupils, addressing what schools should do if a child wants to change their name or use different pronouns, and advising on issues like sport, toilets and changing rooms.

Keith says Boris Johnson received a note about Covid on 30 January. And he got an update on 3 February.

There was an update on 8 February, and a meeting on 10 February, Keith says. After that Johnson went to Chevening.

Keith says at that point, if what the chief medical officer and the chief scientific officer were right, it was obvious the virus was going to spread around the world. Why was the PM not told?

Cummings says no one in Whitehall thought that the UK would be in the biggest crisis since the war within a month.

People thought it would take much longer for the crisis to hit the country, he says.

They thought this was a problem for May/June, not March, he says.

Q: But on 6 February you told people in a WhatsApp group that, according to the chief scientist, the virus was going to sweep the world?

Cummings says people thought at that point the future was murky. People were not ringing alarm bells. They were going skiing.

Q: Why did you not tell the PM containment has failed and the virus is coming?

Cummings says he did tell Johnson that.

Q: But there is no record of it.

Cummings says not everything is written down.

Q: Do you accept that there is no written record of anyone telling the PM at this point that containment has failed?

Cummings implies he does, saying Keith has access to the documents.

Cummings says during February he began to realise that the pandemic plans that Matt Hancock had told him existed did not actually exist.

In No 10 they were told on 16 March that the civil contingencies secretariat did not even have these plans centrally. That message was such a shock that people thought it was a spoof, he says.

Cummings says until March 2020 people did not even think that lockdown would be an option for a country like the UK.

He says originally the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and Sage were saying the real danger was a second peak hitting the country in the autumn. That was what was also known as the “herd immunity” approach.

Q: At what point did people in government realise that without an effective test and trace system, there was no point trying to control the spread of the virus?

Cummings says at the end of February and the beginning of March people were not anticipating test and trace on a mass scale.

Around 12 March test and trace was in effect stopped.

Q: If an effective test and trace system had been put in place in January, February and March, could a lockdown have been avoided?

Cummings agrees.

He says from the end of December flights to and from China should have been stopped.

He says there should have been a hardcore testing system at airports, and a massive ramping up of testing infrastructure, with millions of tests available, and strict border controls.

If that had happened, there would have been less need for lockdown, he says. He says that would have been a better approach – although he accepts that it would not have been possible to produce this testing capacity “out of thin air”.

Cummings says the UK should have a Singapore-style test and trace capacity.

He says if the country did have that capacity, then the case for border controls is stronger.

Cummings says the UK did not have the capability to close its borders.

Even if it did, the advice was that it would only hold back the virus for a short time.

And there was also an assumption that closing the borders would be “racist”, he says.

He also says if the strategy was to go for a single-peak pandemic (see 2.26pm), then closing borders would not help with that.

Cummings says even of the week of 9 March, Downing Street was told that the Sage scientists were in favour of a “mitigation” strategy – which would involve delaying the peak of the epidemic and then relying on the population having “herd immunity” to keep this under control.

He suggests later Sage scientists claimed this had not been their consensus view.

In January and February he says No 10 was told that the biggest threat was from a second peak in September. That is why the single peak strategy was favoured.

Q: If you were not being given an accurate view of what Sage was recommending, why did you not change the Sage structure.

We did, says Cummings.

He says he set up a group to “red team” Sage, and criticise its advice.

Q: How did you get Sage to change the way it presented its advice?

Cummings says he set up a group to interrogate the Sage advice.

It was not his job to tell Sir Patrick Vallance how to manage Sage. His view was that No 10 needed its own people with the skills to handle this data.

Keith says Cummings has described No 10 has a “hopeless structure” for dealing with a crisis like Covid.

Asked why, Cummings says No 10 is not configured to be “the nerve centre of a national crisis”. It is not set up so people can liaise with each other physically, he says. And it is not good for handling data. Also, the real power is in the Cabinet Office, he says.

Cummings says he wanted Michael Gove to deal with the leaders of the devolved administrations, not Boris Johnson, because he thought Gove would handle it “10 times better”.

Keith shows an email from Cummings saying he thought Cobra meetings were “hopeless” for decision making.

Dominic Cummings is giving evidence again. Hugo Keith KC is asking him about Cobra, the government’s emergency committee.

Cummings says Boris Johnson was not keen on attending Cobra meetings.

In his written statement to the inquiry, Lee Cain also said that Boris Johnson was influenced by the desire to appease anti-lockdown rightwing papers such as the Daily Telegraph – even though the evidence suggested their anti-lockdown views were wrong. Adam Bienkov from Byline Times has posted the screengrab.

Yesterday the inquiry released extracts from Sir Patrick Vallance’s diaries. In one entry, on 28 October 2020, Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said: “The rightwing press are culpable and we have a weak, indecisive PM.”

UPDATE: Harry Yorke, who is now at the Sunday Times, says this is the Telegraph splash that Cain was referring to.

In his evidence to the Covid inquiry this morning Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s communications director during the first phase of Covid, said that he found it hard to support the “eat out to help out” subsidy scheme for restaurants in the summer of 2020, and the government’s attempt to get people back in the office at the same time. Cain said:

I, and particularly the other communicators as well, were just finding it very, very difficult because a huge part of what our role and responsibility is at that point is ‘what are we signalling to the public?’

At this point of developing policy, we are indicating to people that Covid is over – go back out, get back to work, crowd yourself onto trains, go into restaurants and enjoy pizzas with friends and family – really build up that social mixing.

Now, that is fine if you are intent on never having to do suppression measures again – but from all the evidence we are receiving, from all the advice we are receiving, it was incredibly clear that we were going to have to do suppression measures again.

We knew that all the way through, that was the strategy from the start.

So to then move forward and say: ‘Hey we’re going to get back into work’ when business wasn’t even asking for people to come back into work – in fact they were encouraging their employees to stay at home still.

It was government that seemed to be on its own demanding people go to work when the research we had was still quite cautious, businesses were feeding back they didn’t want to do it, the scientific opinion was we were going to have to have another lockdown.

So to me it made absolutely no sense whatsoever why we were talking about getting everybody back to work and they were the stories that ended up being on the front pages.

Plans to close railway station ticket offices in England have been scrapped in a government U-turn, Gwyn Topham reports.