Did the benefits of lockdown outweigh the harm to children’s education?

[PoisedKhakiUser]

AIBU to ask whether the benefits of lockdown - saving lives and protecting health - outweighed the damage it did to children’s education and future life chances? I feel like kids lost out on so much during this time, and I wonder if the cost was too high.

There isn't really any good evidence yet that lockdowns were all that effective in terms of preventing illness. I mean, maybe they did something, but it is not so out of the ballpark that we can say that clearly it worked.

Closing schools however clearly caused huge problems for many children and it was pointed out by many people at the time this would happen.

The very initial weeks arguably there were too many unknowns so playing it safe was best, but it was very clear before long that children weren't that vulnerable.

I agree with everyone that has said that the children’s well-being suffered. I would say education would have suffered if you were in a critical year particularly.

We had a decent lockdown, but only because I really shielded my daughter from the bad press, we made the most of the bubbles when it was allowed and formed one with my family so we travelled to them and I got very involved in the lockdown initiatives happening in my local community including sewing PPE and there were some online initiatives. Mind you, it was just me and my daughter at home so we only had eachother.

If she was a teen I can imagine it being harder - I also think we haven’t considered the social media rabbit hole I am sure so many teens went down with phones - which is awful on your mental health. Plus if you aren’t friendly with anyone at home, that would be difficult.

I also want to add that teachers are humans too. My dds school was open to vulnerable families and key worker families but only the parents that looked into it knew.

At the time, we as individuals probably did what we thought for was best.

Maybe the lockdowns were necessary but the total abandonment of pupils by some schools wasn't. My children were in upper primary and didn't get set any work in the first lockdown. I think we received one phonecall in the six months they were off (March - Sept). Luckily things were better in the second lockdown.

Of course realistically a lot of children weren't going to do much but if they had at least tried to motivate children to keep learning I think it would have helped mental health as much as educational progress.. The message that education doesn't matter was hard to undo for some.

"Masks in my dcs' two secondary schools were compulsory for months"

Not true in a legal sense. Schools asked pupils to follow the guidance but it was never legally compulsory to wear masks in schools but it was voluntary in a legal sense so pupils could not be sanctioned for not wearing them.

Shops and hospitals it was legally mandatory to wear them at various points but this was never the case in schools.

18 people out of 60 in my mum’s care home died. I find your attitude incomprehensible.

Well, vaccinations…….

Just wow. And the boy lost his father.

Most kids of caring and involved parents were fine. The issue was that kids with complex SEN and kids who come from chaotic or uninvolved families were largely left to get on with it. No one really cared except to use these kids in debates to support their own argument. Look at people saying kids were unaffected by covid. Lots of kids with complex SEN were very vulnerable to covid AND lost out majorly from a lack of access to school, respite and therapies. Or teenagers in hostels confined to a tiny room with no or little outside support.
But the public largely does not care about these kids. Instead the focus is always on ordinary kids who are well supported by their parents.

Because a child is more important than a vulnerable person? No one , absolutely no one would wish a child harm but by what criteria do you make that judgement?

@Sharptonguedwoman a lot of people thought elderly and disabled people should be left to die.
I used to run a lot of voluntary activities for local families. After seeing on social media what some of them said about disabled people, my partner is disabled, I would never do anything that helps their family ever again.

Thanks. It’s quite hard seeing it in print in this thread, I found. I am clinically vulnerable and I know a fair few others . Being thought disposable by some has made me think. That must have been so difficult for you and your partner.

As an essential retail worker. I could not wait to get my mask off! Most customers only wore their masks 2-3 hours per week for shopping, collecting meds etc. We wore ours for 2-3 hours on top of our contracted hours.

Then there’s a large group where I live that were and still are deniers. They claimed to have asthma in order to escape having to wear masks. A colleague who is asthmatic herself found this very insulting. Plus some supermarkets were issuing out sunflower lanyards without question. There should be a system where ONLY the exempt people are able to obtain some kind of identification to say they can’t wear masks for medical reasons.

I think people are minimising the risk of Covid because we are living with it now post vaccination. Lockdown was right early on and when it looked like the NHS was about to keel over. A lot of it was never about individual risk but about the health care system being overwhelmed. I suspect the inquiry will find that a shorter sharper lockdown could have actually saved a lot of the problems later on with the repeated waves as might have tougher border controls and trace testing (which seemed to be abandoned pretty early on.We still don’t know the long-term effects of so many people having been exposed to Covid and may not for decades.

Were children harmed?, yes. But equally and especially that first lockdown people feared the illness and rightly so. Key worker usage of school places was minimal. By the end everyone was desperate to get kids in and the definition of key worker was stretched to breaking. But don’t think that children wouldn’t have been harmed if the healthcare system had collapsed. If that had happened children would have absolutely been harmed.

How many people usually die in care homes? How many are still alive now, just 3 years later?

I’m findinding the callousness of this thread eye opening. I asked the care home. In any given year, maybe 2 or 3 maybe. In that particular care home. So death increase x 5 or 6. The staff were reeling. My mother is still alive.

And a vulnerable person is not more important than a child, especially a vulnerable child, but this is how it worked in practice. The risks should have been meted out fairly, but they were not. No thought was given to the effects on children.

No

Ageism it may be but the advice should have been anyone over 67 or whatever or CEV isolate everyone else carry on

We have instead long term harmed the youngest generation in favour of those that it would have no long term effects on ....

All the people I know who are over retirement age think the same BTW

So the lockdowns didn't work at all and it was pointless isolating old people from their families.

I think that's a fair point. I'm just reeling at the 'well granny was going to die sometime' attitude of some of the contributors.

I was, in a former life, a teacher for a very long time. So I'm aware of how many people in the average staffroom are in some form, vulnerable. I'm struggling to see how sending children back to school could have been managed without putting others at risk. Teachers have children and parents and partners and are not cannon fodder. That said, if pubs were open then possibly schools. Dunno.

I think what happened was bad enough. No lockdown for the elderly-might it have helped? Would it have just increased the carnage? I'm not sure we'll ever know.

Well possibly. But how? Any form of transport would have been hazardous, shopping etc how? Before you say online, I know some slightly older than me luddites who won't pay for anything on line. Still not sure why you think Covid wouldn't have rampaged through the general population causing unknown harm.

I don't think there were any benefits of lockdown. More could have been achieved by protecting the vulnerable. Therefore no - children were sacrificed and I'm not sure what for.

Another one. Wow. I try not to hate anyone because I'm not 6 but I find that remark shallow and unpleasant.

"Retail workers kicked off when wearing masks were made optional in shops."
All of them? Perhaps it was a case of only those who said the "right" thing were heard? If the BBC had anything to do with it, they would have showed one retail worker after another saying "I want masks to remain compulsory", and nobody saying the opposite. One shop (now out of business) had this little shrine to Saint Boris: needless to say, I did not spend my money there. Other shop keepers reported their pulses racing every time somebody walked in wearing a mask, because robbers wear masks. And I bet even more shoplifters than usual got away with it, as they had their faces covered. The BBC didn't tell us that. Indeed, it's been revealed that Boris Johnson was persuaded to wear a mask by his own Ministry of Truth behavioural team: he was shown a montage of world leaders all masked up, then a picture of himself, without one.

As for masks "not really being compulsory" in schools: I worked in a secondary school in 2021. As well as the absurd bubble regimes, teachers were yelling at pupils all the time "masks on! masks on!". I don't believe masks did much good anyway, and I haven't forgotten that no less an authority than the Health Secretary said "masks are counter-productive", then, in true Boris Johnson fashion, the government U-turned when it suited them, when they realised that mandating masks was an easy way to maintain the state of fear, and it made it very easy to spot who was resisting the fear narrative: only the most hardened sceptics dared to bare their faces amid the mass hysteria. Nowhere in the world was there a correlation between mask mandates, and infections reducing. And before Covid became the Fear of the Day, it felt like only the day before that somebody was lecturing and moralising about killing the planet with disposable plastic waste.

To add to the debate... the young, previously healthy teacher DD was supposed to have in Yr4 (September 2021) was off school recovering from Covid until November 2021. She caught it in May.

So would there have been enough teachers to keep schools running fully?

Covid damaged our children's education, not just closing the schools. It would have been damaged with the schools open.