Lockdown, schools and children

That we treated them in this way is repugnant; that some wish we still were doing so is staggering.

On December 22nd, 2020, SAGE advised the Government to keep schools closed after the Christmas fortnight break. The Labour Party and teaching unions were among those who sought to prevent children from returning to school. The Government had set the precedent during the first wave. After Christmas the schools were open for a single day before the decision was made to shut them. They did not reopen until the middle of March. This was despite SAGE having conceded the previous summer that school closures during the first lockdown were a “mistake”.

Children were called “an important seed of community infection” by one scientist. The child-phobic mood was exemplified in February by a Head Teacher in Essex who said that schools should remain closed for “months”. A petition in Berkshire objected to the announced reopening to come in March, arguing that the educational shutdown should continue until May.

SAGE’s Professor John Edmunds asserted that an exponential rise in infections would be triggered by reopening schools, in a warning about the Government’s plan to provide proper state education again. In late February the Labour MP, Emma Lewell-Buck, said that the intention to reopen schools was “not safe”.

Yet when they did open in England, there was no viral resurgence. The claims of those who had tried to prevent schools from reopening turned out to be hyperbolic, irresponsible scaremongering. The opening and closing of schools during the entire UK coronavirus episode bore no relation to national infection levels, either when schools were locked down, or during the natural calendar of holidays once society began reopening.

When schools did reopen in March, pupils were subjected to incessant testing and were pressured to wear masks all day (the National Education Union desperately campaigned for masking children to continue when the rules changed). The testing was a noisy farce and the shrouding a quiet misery for children across the country. They were being treated like inanimate tools of Conservative Party policy, used to appease the competing interests of adults. Learning continuity was frequently disrupted by banishing ‘bubbles’ of children from school. In April 2021 The Times reported that 200,000 primary school children were to move into secondary education lacking basic literacy skills. It was a 30,000 increase on top of what were already shocking numbers. The Government could have legitimately adopted the slogan ‘no education, no education, no education’.

Home schooling was a brutal experience for many. Disengagement and inertia were rife. It was clearly less effective than normal schooling and drove children to despair. Just five per cent of state schoolteachers said that all their pupils had access to a device suitable for home-schooling.  A mere twenty-six per cent of children from working class households did more than five hours schoolwork per day, compared to over forty per cent of those from affluent backgrounds. Testing found that there had been a shocking decline in attainment in primary school pupils, with an observed performance drop of between five and fifteen per cent. ImpactEd, a not-for-profit organisation working with schools, found that GCSE and A-Level students suffered the most. Ofsted had already warned in the previous Autumn that the majority of pupils had fallen behind in their learning.

This is merely confirmation of something that is already very obvious. If children are deprived of normal schooling, they will be less well educated.

England’s Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, warned that the “invisibility of vulnerable children” was a “matter of national concern”. The Local Government Association informed us that children’s social care referrals went down by a fifth. Either lockdown caused a twenty per cent improvement in child welfare, or there were tens of thousands of children behind the scenes in a shutdown society, being deprived of the support they needed. It makes one shudder to consider what some of them must have experienced during lockdowns.

An Ofsted report published in December 2020 summarised that “repeated isolation has chipped away at… progress” and “many children with special education needs and/or disabilities are not attending school, are struggling with remote learning and are at risk of abuse or neglect”. They found that “children arriving at secure children’s homes are, in effect, put into solitary confinement” as if they were convicted criminals who had behaved badly during their prison sentence.

Bupa found that three in four teenagers have experienced physical issues related to poor mental health since the beginning of the pandemic. Half had turned to harmful coping mechanisms such as alcohol and drug abuse or self-harm. A consultant from the Bradford Royal Infirmary reported on an unprecedented wave of mental health issues amongst the youngest cohorts, with children as young as eight presenting with self-harming behaviours, something he described as “extremely unusual” prior to the pandemic.

This bottomless catalogue of damage done is nothing short of horrendous, the effects of which will stretch far out into the future of the lives of these people. That we treated them in this way is repugnant; that some wish we still were doing so is staggering.