Teachers testing positive for Covid-19 (FOI)

Request

Please advise how many teachers have tested positive for Covid-19 by school if possible, from September (beginning of term) to current date. Please also give the total number of staff so that we can see the percentage of teachers. Please advise whether it is believed the teacher caught Covid-19 in school or elsewhere.

Response

The requested information can be found in a previous response published here:

Pupils and Staff testing positive for Covid-19 (FOI)

Please note that these figures include all school staff and not just teachers. They also include staff in private schools.

School COVID-19 statistics are now updated daily on this webpage since schools re-opened in January. This is available at the following link:

School COVID-19

The number of staff in schools as at 31 January 2021 was 1,630 and 201 at Highlands College. This represents only Government of Jersey maintained and fee-paying maintained schools, it does not include private schools.

Once a positive case is identified, the individual is interviewed by the contact tracing team to attempt to identify where the infection may have occurred. As the place of work is not always the only place where the individual has interacted with others, it is not always possible to determine where the person may have contracted the virus.

The information collected during this process is held in individual case notes and to collate the information held it would mean researching each record which we estimate would take in excess of the prescribed 12.5 hours to locate, retrieve, and extract. Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has therefore been applied to this part of the request.

Article applied

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving, and extracting the information.