Commenting as the Department for Education (DfE) announce new guidance on supporting children and young people with medical conditions and allergies, including a requirement for allergy pens to be stocked by schools for the first time, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said:

“This new guidance and advice is welcome as it provides more comprehensive information for schools to ensure they can continue to support all pupils in their education, including those with health conditions.

“Schools want to be as inclusive as possible whilst also ensuring they can continue to fulfil their safeguarding duty and keep every child as safe as possible whilst in their setting.

“However, while guidance and the right advice for schools is crucial, equally important is access to the right resources, including sufficient staffing capacity in the school to deliver their duties, and always ensuring access to specialist health support for pupils whose conditions require genuine expertise to keep them healthy and safe. Each of these things require funding to implement and schools cannot be expected to fund from their existing constrained budgets.

“There is also a major potential issue over clinical delegation, where a more complex health provision is required, because such specialist health support often cannot be safely delegated to school staff, even with training. We need urgent clarification over the legal status of health delegation in educational settings – all such children deserve expert-led health support in order to keep them safe and able to enjoy the full educational experience.

“Expecting schools to stock "spare" adrenaline auto-injectors for use in emergency situations appears a sensible step, as is training staff to use them effectively.

“However, the government need to be confident that there are sufficient stocks maintained across the country to ensure each setting can keep a sufficient share of adrenaline auto-injectors.

“In addition to their safe storage and ease of access, schools will need processes for ensuring adrenaline auto-injectors are discarded safely and reordered when they expire, so this needs to be carefully managed by central government. If schools are ever in the situation where they cannot access adrenaline auto-injectors due to limited stock availability, it cannot be left to schools to source other suppliers – government must do so and ensure only legitimate suppliers provide such resources to educational settings.”