To ask teachers and parents if Covid still has an impact on kids four years on

[Backtoit123]

Just that really. Four years on don’t still notice a major effect on children from the pandemic. I’ve heard teenagers say they feel a few years younger due to their ‘pandemic age’ but my DC are grown up and I don’t work in teaching so it’s hard to know. Do you recognise a major difference in kids now compared to kids of the same age before Covid? AIBU to ask if the pandemic still has left a legacy on children’s development?
YABU- no it doesn’t
YANBU- yes it does

Oh yes this is a big one.

It is shocking really that the government have done FUCK ALL to try to make anything better.

There should have been huge investment in recovery.

Maybe if we get the COVID fraud money back it could be invested in helping kids make up lost ground

I'm a primary teacher and I sometimes think too much is attributed to the pandemic. The current Receptions were babies during the pandemic, not really nursery age. My own child is the youngest in Y1 and they were too young in March 2020 to even realise life had changed. Nurseries also reopened in June 2020. They missed about 3 months of nursery but weren't even 2 so the time they missed was time many children aren't even in nursery if their parents don't work.

I do think some of the current Y4s and probably Y5s (so R and Y1 in March 2020) suffered by not being taught proper letter formation when they were learning at home. There are definitely some bad habits! Attitudes to attendance have also changed. But I think a lot of learning has levelled out now.

I'm agreeing with you, if you read my answers above.

The data is very clear.

Can you say more about this?

DD1 is nearly four and in preschool/nursery. To me she seems pretty well adjusted and she appears to be thriving. I’m curious about whether I’m missing something.

Apologies, so you are.

It just annoys me greatly when people say they see no impact etc. it's so obvious as you say that there is a lasting impact because of COVID and there likely will be for many years to come.

yep secondary
Children are less resilient- parents are sensitive to the tiniest thing and don't think their child should be picked up on anything
There is no middle ground- everything is polarised immediately
more parental complaints about nonsense than ever before- parents don't get the full story before attacking.

Buy all these responses are a tiny sample, and self selecting at that. Why is@24 less relevant than anyone else?

It’s still having an impact on both my kids even though they are both very young as there are still massive NHS delays in treatment as they haven’t caught up.

I have a lockdown baby who is due to start school in September 2024. Pre covid the under 5’s autism waitlist was under a year. Now it is 3.5 years. DS has also been on the waitlist for for speech and language therapy for 2 years. I am imaging there will be a lot of children born between Sept 19 and Aug 20 have not received early help and will be starting school not ready as a result.

A sample of just one parent and a few children is pretty irrelevant when compared to a class of children, several cohorts of year groups or even in my experience many kids of differing ages in schools across a whole city. Honestly unless you have the experience of teaching or being in close contact with multiple children pre and post COVID where COVID is the only real variable it's impossible to fully understand just how much COVID changed things.

I too work in a HE environment and totally agree with this. There is a reluctance for the young people to want to interact with you on a personal level. They would rather communicate via email (and they don't do that as well as they might). Personal responsibility for action/inaction is very low.

DD13 - was in year 4 and 5 when we had the Covid lockdowns. She's academically able and sociable. I think she's fine. She's doing well at Secondary School and is top sets so I think any learning she missed is now caught up with.

Her main issue with home learning was that it didn't stretch her at all. She'd start her set work at 9am and be done by 10am/11am. She actually liked lockdown and all the time it gave her to do her crafts, watch TV etc. She still quite regularly has a pyjama day at a weekend to just stay inside and potter about.

DD15 was year 7 and 8. She's autistic and had just started to settle into Secondary School when lockdown hit.

All I can describe it as is an absolute shit show. I don't know if it's post Covid or her ASD. I think mostly ASD but with Covid exacerbating things. She can't cope with busy places, struggles to attend school and is persistently absent because she can't leave the house/her bedroom, can't cope with the stress or academic demands of GCSEs (not academically very able and has short term memory issues). She's an absolute shell of her younger self and it's heartbreaking. I think we would have encountered difficulties but the current situation is off the scale. The mental health and educational support just isn't there either.

It was what I wrote my uni dissertation on right when people weren't quite prepared to talk about the issues it had caused.

On a personal level - it did lead (indirectly via clumsy handling by the school) to DD1 (who is very bright) being turned completely off maths and deciding she was crap at it (she's anything but) - return to school after the first closure period and the school did the end of year type assessments... obviously during the first closure the curriculum was suspended so the content hadn't been covered - and the result was DD1 got a low score, which she still bears a grudge against now (no one holds a grudge like DD1) which was fed back to the kids without the "you haven't been taught half of this" context... and she declared she was done with Maths. She's not been able to be done with Maths - but it really has impacted her self-confidence in the subject completely! Moving to a secondary where the Maths is at the top of the high-rise block has not further endeared the subject to her!

DD2 was incredibly affected during the lockdowns - to the point of losing a lot of speech, being terrified of any specks of dust floating in the air and being heart wrenchingly depressed - she's bounced back better, but it's taken a good couple of years and a lot of input from home as well as at school in order to get her back academically on track as much as she has been - and I still think she's slightly behind where she would have been, especially since it was her year 2 where she had an incredible year group team, proper SEN support in place, and just was in a really really good place that got curtailed dramatically.

It's had a dramatic and lasting impact on the client group I work with who have learning disabilities though - we have people who still have not got over their daily routines (which is a huge huge huge part of how they function through life) being disrupted for so long off and on, or stopped attending placements, or are still too worried to leave their homes - we see placements that broke down and if I had money for every time I go to see someone and we talk about the distress behaviour with their carers and the sentence starts with "well the behaviours started during lockdown..." I'd be on a beach in the Caribbean right now.

I have two DS aged 9 and 5. 9 yr old never mentions it and the 5 doesn’t remember it.

DS is in p5 (his p1 and p2 were disrupted by lockdown) but he’s ahead for reading, spelling etc and where he should be for maths. We did dedicate a lot of time to him during the pandemic with home learning. Not easy with a full time job and then toddler but we managed.

the 5 yr old has no memory of it and absolutely no effects of it.

anecdotally none of my 9 yr old’s friends ever mention it (parents have asked in conversation.)

I’m in an education-adjacent role, and speaking to primary school teachers they do feel it’s affected children, especially in the cohorts that were in pre-school and reception during the lockdowns - their whole educational foundation was disrupted and teachers are seeing the impacts further down the line.

Oh yes. Definitely. Children seem far more immature socially and emotionally. Parents are far less engaged in school life. It's hard to get children excited about learning something new - I often feel like the most enthusiastic person in the room.

I completely disagree current reception wouldbe anywhere near as affected (if at all) as years above specifically y3+

But the oldest of that year would have done say 4m in nursery then whenever nursery reopened maybe jun. So the challenge for those working woth an under 2yo. The aug borns the parent would have been on mat leave till sept 2020.

So its whether that is worse than older kids missing what ended up as about 90% of a school year altogether..

For older kids behaviour and bullying is awful currently.

Dc activity have had to chat to them all.
I think that maybe because say all the guides would be oldest now seem to have left already. So y7 are oldest.

Strikes definitely didnt help behaviour as here gangs of kids were roaming about in a way that they hadnt been and dont at weekends.

Sporting ability and fitness will all still be lower.

Dc2 in y3 has had 1 trip in primary.

Obviously it's appalling but have to say, I don't find it at all shocking. Not with the government we've had during the period. I never thought lockdown with investment in recovery to mitigate the effects was one of the options we were choosing from. The Tories simply weren't going to do it.

Yes definitely noticed the impacts on my year 1 kid who I struggled to parent whilst also working in lockdown.

And I feel like I'm only just personally coming out of burnout caused by the stress of trying to do everything in that period.

I have two DC who are now 7 and 5 and I am a teacher in a secondary school and yes, the effects are still very much felt.

This. I don't know a single person with children who are still using this as an excuse.

There can be no doubt that Covid has had an impact on children. However, I think it also used as an excuse a lot of the time too and we don’t encourage resilience enough.

Why did they close the schools? I live abroad - schools didn't close here, but we had lower infection rates that the UK

I don't feel like DS1 (almost 5) has been impacted by it, but DP was on furlough so really he just had the benefit of 6 months extra one on one time. Having said that, he's currently off sick, and a third of his class were off earlier in the week, so I wonder if there has been some issues with immunity that they would otherwise have built up.

I can't imagine how awful it would be for him to be in lockdown now

My DS13 is very different to the child he was pre pandemic . His innocence was stolen before it should have been . He is less happy less energetic . Not helped by the precarious state of the world at the moment . His older brother (15) is OK but he always was a sturdier character .

I completely disagree current reception would be anywhere near as affected (if at all) as years above specifically y3+

Current reception, year 1 and those going into reception in September are very affected simply because any of them who needed early support didn't get it. There's several kids who I know who start school this September who are still waiting for SALT for example.

I do anecdotally find the current year 1s and 2s the most obviously affected when visiting schools. A significant majority of them are so obviously behind where they would have been.