Dr Paul Davis

This is the time to consider what are the best options coming into winter.

We had the experience of COVID.

It arrived in and immediately every educational institute responded really well with online learning.

with supports put in place, but it was rushed.

It was often people struggling to try to figure out what best to do.

Here we know we more than likely may have an energy crisis coming in.

And when we look at the financial costs to most education buildings, it's energy intensive.

Now, primary education, I think I said in the article today was, look, it's critical that that remains open.

Any move from physical presence, I think is both educationally and socially regressive.

Secondary education offers opportunities because there are years, maybe second year, whereby we could go online and we stop the ability.

Well, we're not stopped, but we actually look at cohorts going through and think about how to reduce their time in class.

And again, there's an energy cost to this.

There is the transport, there's the commute, but there's also the energy cost of having the classrooms open when maybe we don't need to.

But it's at third level.

Go ahead.

It did and it went into secondary and we're seeing the effects of it now in third level as well but this is where we have to consider cohorts who they are and plan for them rather than suddenly having an ad hoc arrangement hit us in September October

where suddenly we may be facing a crisis, but energy costs may still be increasing.

And again, these are all maybes, but we can plan for that now and then choose how we actually carry out our education system in advance, rather than waiting to react in like we did with COVID.

We've got a lot of lessons that we learned in COVID, and a lot of them were positive in terms of the ability of teachers and lecturers to be able to deliver online.

At very short notice, but who actually thought about what to do.