Kids still feeling the effects of lockdowns…

[sloanedanger]

I just got caught reading a really interesting thread on Twitter started by a teacher:

“Is anyone else thinking we are starting to see the impact of 2 years of disruption and time at home, due to COVID 19, in schools? Extreme behaviours? Some pupils very emotional and struggling to regulate? Low attendance compared to normal? Winter bugs hitting hard?”

A lot of the comments say Y3 is the worst, others saying Years 7 and 8.

My DS is in Year 2 and often struggles with emotions and self regulation at school. It’s made me think, perhaps there’s a reason why linked to the pandemic. Lockdown was hard, DP and I were home with very young DC, trying to work, poor mental health, emotions high. Very little patience.

Yes we mustn’t forget this. On this site people were defending isolating their primary school children for 10 days in their room. I liked to remind them that solitary confinement is a punishment for adult prisoners..

Was truly shocking. When your child is ill
you look after them and comfort them - who cares about themselves! Such selfish, batshit behaviour.

This will all make wonderful history lessons in the future. And those that put their children in isolation and left food outside the door - good luck explaining that to your grandkids.

Of course you want us to move on and forget about it. Because your behaviour was shocking and unforgivable. No, we shouldn’t forget. We need to discuss what the hell went wrong and how this can never happen again.

It absolutely should be analysed, and I said as much. In time we will know which decisions were right and wrong. But that analysis needs to be unemotional and scientific, not raging on here about kill a granny ads.

That isn't for you to decide.

People can submit their emotional as they like experiences to the consultation. It’s the only way the damage can be recorded then looked at overall.

@JenniferBarkley No, multiple, lengthy lockdowns were not necessary. Especially when many of the ‘rules’ made no sense.

Kids can’t go to school but men can go to the pub.
Groups of 6 can meet in the pub. Because the virus can count. As long as they are discussing business - because the virus can differentiate between business meetings and socialising.

No wonder so many broke the largely ridiculous rules.

What happened every time we opened up after a lockdown? Rates of Covid sky rocketed. You can’t control a virus like this. As we’ve all seen. We would have been far better to not go from one extreme to another. E.g straight out of months and months of lockdown in to ‘eat out to help out’

The only bit of government policy I agreed with was when they ended all restrictions and luckily stuck to their guns. Look at China to see how effective long term lockdowns are. Look at Sweden to see how to manage a virus without decimating your childrens’ childhood and education.

@somethinsomethin Funny enough this is how I feel. My kids both have Additional needs but always loved school.
The past year I'd say has been tough. They either can't get up in the morning for school because their sleeping is so bad or they just won't go. They are 6&7 and it's hard work. I am given a letter each month about their absence and they are down now as persistent absentees. But what can I do? I don't drive. They was fine before lockdown. And I can't physically drag them to school when they are like this. I too sometimes feel school creates more problems than I need and dream of escaping somewhere with them. You got my sympathies.
I honestly fear as they get older it'll get worse. Out of a normal school week they have at least 1-2 days off .

That’s just your opinion, I don’t think they were necessary or the right thing to do at all, they don’t work. All they did was delay the spread into a concentrated wave once they opened up. They were based off some idiot scientist’s models that have never worked for any disease he’s consulted on. I’m convinced the long term costs and excess deaths will outweigh any benefits or lives saved at the time. The whole thing was total bullshit and basically sacrificing the young for the old. Let’s see what the enquiry comes out with.

I am really glad I broke the rules at the time because it was necessary for my mental health which was in the toilet. I remember reading a thread about “are you going to visit your family over Christmas” and seeing the vile, vicious abuse at anyone breaking the Tier 3 travel ban - I decided not to post….

Of course the consequences of lockdown need to be analysed. Good and bad. We need to learn from our handling of the pandemic on a global level.

I understand that it's a bitter pill to swallow. We all made so many sacrifices, and for it even to be suggested that those sacrifices were in vain (in whole or in part) is really hard to hear. We, understandably, need to feel that it was all "worth it", that all that happened saved lives, or something.

But we cannot let that overshadow the facts. Or the need to scrutinise the decisions of those that rule us.

I agree with this and would add statistically these children achieved just as poor academic progress as the posters accusing WFH parents of not engaging with their child.

The data shows children REGRESSED on reading, writing and maths for primary so at best some children were treading water. This is why the government has had to spend so much on catch up in schools.

I've not read the full thread but what I have read has raised some interesting points actually.

I have a year 3 child (as well as a year 5 and a reception aged child) and I've been saying for ages that I think she was the one most disadvantaged by the whole Covid shitshow. She lost so much invaluable time at school. It's all very subtle and thankfully she isn't struggling like some but it's there and part of who she is now which is sad. She isn't educationally "behind" as such and her emotional regulation isn't a cause for concern but there is just something in her demeanour? Something in her personality that comes from the dark covid days.

I could cry when I recall the God awful times of having the work from home (still do) whilst managing x2 out of 3 children's home learning and managing a disabled toddler my DP worked out of the house I am pretty sure I did more harm than good.

What absolutely makes my blood boil is thinking about how my dad was told he'd have to wear a mask at my mum's funeral. It wasn't enough that we couldn't have a proper funeral or any kind of commemorative event after her small cremation. It wasn't enough that the rules of the time prohibited us all being together as a family but to tell a man in shell shock after watching his wife drop dead, and he failed to resuscitate her despite trying for 20 minutes, that he had to wear a mask just tops it for me.

We all suffered, we all endured and we are all scarred.

It's such a shame that this thread descended into the same old unresolvable bickering.

I only know that we thought we were doing everything right, but a dead look came into my 9 year old's eyes that has never fully left her.

We will see the impact of lockdown on our children for years to come, at least a decade I would imagine and maybe longer.

The ripples from that time continue to radiate outwards. Children who coped with the lockdown will be impacted by their peers who academically, socially or emotionally struggled during lockdown. The education system, which was already under huge pressure, has been stretched to breaking. Support understandably goes to those who cannot read or write or add up at age 8, or who cannot manage their emotions. But this impact ripples out to the child who is coping, but their teacher no longer has time to challenge them and bring them on to the next level. Or their lessons are disrupted as their teacher tries to manage behaviour. That is before mentioning children with undiagnosed SEN, who do enough to get by just now and are coping emotionally, but their teachers have been too busy to realise something deeper is going on. Eventually a tipping point will be reached there too and that child will be struggling instead of just managing.

I consider myself and my children lucky, once I could see the above manifesting in their school, I withdrew them and we’ve been home educating since. I could not take them wasting more of their lives in school after wasting all that time during the lockdowns themselves.

Remember "just because you can doesn't mean you should"? People were allowed daily "exercise" but they were criticised even for that by some. "Just do Joe Wicks, you don't NEED to go outside". Someone on a local FB group said shopping once a week was too much and selfish.

This is a really good point. That "just because you can doesn't mean you should" was Nicola Sturgeon's catchphrase for months. It was designed to load a heap of guilt onto anyone who did anything fun or frivolous - if you were not in your house, on the sofa, with only your immediate family, you were doing it WRONG and you were a selfish granny killer.

When you live in a small community, where everyone knows everyone else you simply didn't have the freedom to think fuck it, and do what you liked or you'd be a social outcast. Our local facebook pages had pictures of groups of kids playing and posters trying to identify the "culprits". I am very glad mine were not in these pics as the abuse the parents got was awful. Any time we had the kids' friends over it was all "don't ring the bell, come round the back". My parents would not let me visit even though it fell under the remit of "care" as they live in a small village and the strange car would be noticed.

Horrible times.

Our local facebook pages had pictures of groups of kids playing and posters trying to identify the "culprits". I am very glad mine were not in these pics as the abuse the parents got was awful

Honestly, I don't know how more people pulling that kind of nonsense didn't get their windows put through.

Lockdown was vital at first whilst we figured out what was actually going on and how we needed to deal with the disease.

Why?

Well the mortality rate of SARS is 9.5% and MERS is 35%.

These are the closest related diseases we knew to covid.

We also suspect that the very first outbreak of covid in Wuhan was more deadly that the variant that eventually swept across the world and this was largely covered up.

The point was we had no idea what we were dealing with.

Can you imagine what would happen if they kept the schools open and the fatality rate amongst kids was 35%. Or God forbid even higher? (thinking of the mortality rate of ebola in this context).

Going forward to any future pandemics this holds true and we cannot lose sight of this.

Until we know what we are dealing with a lockdown is the most sensible initial response.

The question is actually more about a) how you convey this reality in a post covid world b) how long any initial lockdown lasts and who is required to not lockdown (and whether we have enough preparation to protect them properly with PPE during this period, which we absolutely did not have for covid) c) vaccine preparedness and production issues to shorten that period between a new disease and a medical protection.

From what I've seen if the pandemic had been 18 months later we would have had the technology to roll out vaccines much much faster because the MRNA vaccines were just on the cusp of being ready but weren't quite.

We also needed to shut down faster than we did - there was a blasé attitude that the risk to the uk was negligible for a long time after that opinion should have been quoshed. It was apparent a lot sooner than we acted that that covid was different to other scares about a possible pandemic. No one wanted to make that judgement call - we need to get better at that as it has a massive impact on what happened next.

Then there has to be a better approach to communication over how the situation evolved over time. The early stage pandemic was very different to mid pandemic and in turn that was different to late stage pandemic.

The UK was actually the first country to get rid of the restrictions it had imposed. At the time, Johnson was utterly berated for this, but as it panned out it became apparent he could have easily gone a month earlier and it not really have made much of a difference.

And we could do with losing our racist attitude to doctors and scientists in other parts of the world who simply weren't trusted when they said omicron was mild.

The debate over when schools reopened fits into all this - but has to sit behind the point about learning what fatality rates look like.

Weirdly we probably got off lightly with covid. It was a rare pandemic that didn't affect the young in a hard way. Historically children have been amongst those most badly affected and most likely to die.

There is a certain irony here that whilst we debate the damage done to children's education, we must not lose sight of this point. In times past many of those children simply wouldn't survive to worry about mental health.

The psychological impact of covid and the possible implications for future pandemics is quite scary to think about if the next pandemic has a much higher mortality, particularly child and infant mortality.

Blanket statements about never doing another lockdown again are dangerous for this reason.

Ultimately it comes down to better understanding, being better prepared and being able to respond more effectively and in a shorter time frame. Hopefully covid does give us the framework to do this successfully.

Lockdowns themselves are not a bad thing. In the past we have ended up with defacto self imposed ones anyway. The issue is about duration not lockdowns themselves.

Fantastic post @RedToothBrush (not surprising as someone who used to dip in and out of your Brexit threads).

Our local facebook pages had pictures of groups of kids playing and posters trying to identify the "culprits". I am very glad mine were not in these pics as the abuse the parents got was awful

That is so sad. Makes me feel a bit ill that people were driven to extremes like this.

"Weirdly we probably got off lightly with covid."

The UK had one of the worst covid death records in Europe, I just don't know how you can say this about its management of the pandemic. Unless you mean generally and not UK specific?

The issue is absolutely about lockdowns themselves. They were new in 2020, the claims about de facto never hold up because we couldn't possibly have had a lockdown like we did until this stage of the internet age, and they had never been part of the pandemic planning before. That's why it's so very important that we get the best understanding that we can of whether they were the least worst option or not. I don't think there was any way we weren't going to have one given public attitudes, so at the time it was almost moot, but going forward it certainly isn't.

That aside, there are some good points in RTBs post. It's correct that the whole thing would've been much worse had children been at greater risk (and we did have a pretty good idea by March 2020 that they weren't).

I'm of the view myself that a lockdown wouldn't ever be possible if we got a really dangerous pandemic, because it requires such a specific combination of factors to be in place. Not just practicalities like a government willing to pay for it and a PM who wouldn't be kicked out if he attempted it, but also a disease that's nasty enough to scare people into behaving whilst also not being so nasty that people refuse to work and essential societal functions collapse. Had covid been one of those with a really high mortality rate, we'd be fucked by now.

This is why the government has had to spend so much on catch up in schools.

You what? The government has spent fuck-all on catch-up in schools. There's a lot of blaming lockdowns for the current issues with children's behaviour and education and very little wondering why, nearly two years on since schools last 'reopened', things don't seem to have improved at all.

Why, if children have been back in schools socialising with peers, being in classrooms, being taught face-to-face, are teachers reporting that kids are struggling with appropriate behaviour, have gaps in their education, and parents are reporting that they're anxious and demotivated?

Why hasn't any progress been made in those areas? And the answer is probably "because the government rejected Sir Kevan Collins' proposed £15bn covid catch-up package that included along with educational catch-up, social, emotional and physical catch-up activities". The only thing any money was provided for was a few sessions of catch-up tutoring of incredibly dubious quality, that schools had to also pay towards out of their own stretched budgets. The govt are now angry that in a lot of schools, this offer wasn't taken up. So no catch-up.

Why haven't they 'caught up' in school? Well, since schools reopened fully in Sept 2020, the situation in them has been pretty grim, and something that itself will need 'catching up' from. Lack of effective measures to stop covid spreading in schools led to an untenable situation Christmas 2020 and schools re-closing Jan 2021. From Sept-Christmas 2020, it was incredibly difficult to teach with any consistency when absence (pupils and staff) was off the scale. March-July 2021 was slightly more settled, but absence in the summer term was increasingly an issue.

2021-22 - Remember the call for volunteer teachers to prop up schools in Jan/Feb 2022 due to staff absences causing schools to close or classes to be doubled/tripled up and taught in the hall? Again, not much in the way of consistent teaching was to be had then. Another really grim time for education.

Sept 2022 - now. Staffing is a real issue. Not really covid this time (although that continues to cause problems), but school budgets, staffing cuts, and an inability to hire teachers, any teachers to fill certain roles. Same for teaching assistants. I know of sixth formers having to teach themselves their A-level courses because the school can't hire, and KS4 having strings of supply teachers. Primary school kids are being taught by teaching assistants.

At a time when money should be being pumped into children's services, SEN services, mental health services, instead they are being utterly starved of cash. School funding, despite being post a pandemic, is, per pupil, lower than it was in 2010.

In terms of the fatality rate, yes we got off lightly.

See my point about the mortality rate of SARS, MERS and ebola particularly with regards to child and infant mortality.

If you want to split hairs and argue the toss, you are missing the point I was making in the context of children.

And as i said before (if you had bothered to read), historically in a pandemic young children have been much more likely to die. Covid appears to be something of an anomaly in this regard.

You are trying to suggest I'm minimising what happened. Which is bullshit. Lots of people died. It's awful they died. But a lot more could have and the demographics of who died could have been different and a lot harder to process psychologically in a society so unused to children dying.

This isn't something we should just ignore because we want to make a point about how badly the government did. Which is what your post is actually about. Its tedious and unhelpful.

(and actually I'd argue that the government were always on a losing battle because the levels of inequality, poorer underlying health particularly obesity compared to other Western countries and our ethnic makeup as a nation meant we were far more exposed and at risk regardless of what the government did once the pandemic broke out - who and what is to blame for that and how we rectify it, is another debate we should have but that's not about lockdowns and the duration of lockdowns).

@RedToothBrush Ok, so you meant we got of lightly in terms of the virus and its mortality rate. Not the UK got off lightly compared to the rest of the world due to its measures.

"You are trying to suggest I'm minimising what happened. Which is bullshit. Lots of people died. It's awful they died. But a lot more could have and the demographics of who died could have been different and a lot harder to process psychologically in a society so unused to children dying.
This isn't something we should just ignore because we want to make a point about how badly the government did. Which is what your post is actually about. Its tedious and unhelpful."

Errr, no, that's not what I am suggesting and that was not what my post was about. That was an awful lot to read into a question I asked to re what you meant by that statement.

And I did "bother" to read your point about child mortality. But I am not sure what your point is with it? That we should be grateful that our children are just mildly traumatised/ behind socially and educationally because historically they would have died?

For the record, I don't think a lockdown was a mistake per se. I do think, in hindsight, it was mismanaged at points. I do think that we need to learn lessons from it that take into account all the harm it does (as well as the benefits).

I think by the time we did the first lockdown it was too late - if you are going to use lockdown as a tool then you need to be quite decisive about it. Not hold Cheltenham races then big European football games then a week later lockdown. It’s the worst of both worlds. There was evidence the first wave of the virus had peaked by the time we locked down - then we just stayed locked down too long. Making kids suffer the worse. No thought or science behind what was open and what was not.

This virus was always going to have waves with peaks. Trying to manage those waves was a bit futile in my opinion. Quite often we just pushed the peak in to the winter. You’re delaying the inevitable- which when you’re waiting for a vaccine is fine but after that?

The “it could have been a 35% death rate” is also bullshit. We knew from statistics coming out of China, and (if you don’t believe China) the Diamond Princess that the death rate was about 1% max. It was clear it mainly affected old people. And this was in March 2020, before any lockdown!

Even if we excuse the first lockdown as “we didn’t know about the virus and needed to act quickly”, you can’t excuse the later ones. So many people at the time on here were saying that children are resilient, they’ll cope and that they’d be much more traumatised by their grandma dying. I think a child not being allowed to socialise properly for the best part of 2 years will have much more profound negative long-term effects than their grandma dying.

It became so emotive didn't it. If you even dared question whether anything that was done was proportionate to impact of covid you were accussed of basically wanting to throw the CEV and elderly to the wolves. Again, the granny guilt.