My friend working in safeguarding has had a tough time trying to get in touch with the families known to be vulnerable. Sometimes school is the only place where children get healthy, hot food and get changed into clean clothes and are given a level of human respect.
SEN support has largely shut down. Families with no respite from difficult medical or behavioural care. Children that can't access the work set remotely falling behind their peers. Suspension of processes diagnosing SNs and drawing up EHCPs. Children developing anxiety and social phobias, especially if parents have been particularly risk adverse and they haven't ventured beyond their house- from some posts over the last couple of months, literally the house and not even in their garden (I sincerely hope that this has changed since early lockdown with the emphisis on meeting outside)
Children not being able to socialise in an age appropriate way. You can't play football or swap pokemon cards on zoom. Many children just don't have the small talk conversation skills to sustain a conversation with friends in the abstract context of a phone call. Children need other children to develop. SALT often uses group activities to develop age appropriate communication.
Other than trying to avoid imminent threat of death in a war zone, children have never been forced into prolonged social isolation. Current rates of Covid 19 do not compare to hiding from genocide.
Schools are for education. Childcare is structured around the existance of schools. Schools are for learning softer social skills. Even home educators do a lot of group working and socialising.
We will never clearly see the true toll of harm done to children by many months without school, but it will be worse than the direct toll of Covid 19. For decades there will be suicides with the roots sown in what is happening now, and the roots of mental disorders and existing problems exacerbated by poor support.
Teachers have worked through the whole pandemic, in some cases literally through their holidays too. They've been working with the children at highest risk of infection from key worker parents. I'm struggling to see how returning to school is so much more catastrophic now than it was teaching key worker children in April or whole classes in March. (When I offered my services to the headteacher due to my DBS with the school and PGCE)
I appreciate that different schools have different logistical challenges, but some schools have been appallingly alarmist and unprofessional, and there has been political game playing by certain unions and LAs which have undermined other schools and areas trying to be more pragmatic.