I can't speak for schools as you may well have your own formal agreements. But in general its entirely up to you what you classify as sickness absence. I'm rather curious as to why you wouldn't record Covid - 19 because you say, correctly, that its an infectious disease. Does that mean you don't include ordinary flu, common cold, or any other disease under sickness absence - and thereby comming within the scope of the Bradford factor?

In reply to David Perry:

The Green Book and Burgundy Book (the national agreements on pay and conditions of service for school support and teaching staff) both reference that contact with infectious disease shall not be reckoned against the employee’s sickness entitlements. However, I am trying to get more information on how this operates in practice (and whether it relates to pay/BF or both) as I certainly would not expect more more general illnesses to be excluded.

We very quickly established our absence reporting procedures in that staff were either fit or not fit for work. Any self-isolation (and reasons) were recorded but again whether staff were working from home or not. As a LA maintained school the guidance followed a few weeks after closure so certainly ahead of the game. We have still awarded compassionate leave in line with our normal absence policy (up to 10 days) and have actively encouraged staff to take time if needed. Our key message was that we would support any decisions staff had to make over absence.

In reply to Melissa:

I don't pretend to understand schools - it seems that they operate on their own planet sometimes in relation to HR (I say this as someone who has a parent who works in a school and often asks me for HR opinion on things and I'm usually a bit baffled by the schools approach) - however I can see where David is coming from. Infectious disease or not, sickness absence relating to COVID is still a sickness absence, so yes I would definitely count in absenteeism figures. Whether you chose to count it towards someones Bradford factor score would have be at your discretion I would think. If I was looking at someone with an attendance problem and saw that one of those absences was due to COVID I may advise that we discount it because they were following government advice in the midst of a global pandemic. If however they had "self-isolated" several times in the space of a few weeks, my view might be different and I would encourage managers to be asking some questions/seeking an OH opinion.

I would have to question, much the same as David, if you're discounting COVID do you then discount the common cold and seasonal flu - despite the fact that we live with them yearly and we all get it from time to time, they are still an infectious disease? So surely they should be your guiding point here initially, albeit with a little bit of wriggle room for the current pandemic and government advice on self-isolating?

I suspect in the future, we are likely to end up living with COVID for some time to come much like we do with the common cold and seasonal flu and that we will all have to change our approach to how we manage these types of absences - I am guessing, but I think we may see more "self-isolation" in the future when someone develops cold and flu symptoms as a form of "best practice" because we won't truly know if it's COVID or it's a common cold/flu and I believe this pandemic has made most of us more aware of just how easily we can spread colds and flu and how that impacts not only us, but our families, friends and colleagues.

I'm certainly going to over the next few weeks be looking at our absence policy and our approach to infectious diseases such as cold and flu.