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.

I think there's a bigger picture.
If the pandemic had rolled through faster, more people would have died earlier and hospital care been non-existent.
No one was vaccinated early on so it was less clear who was vulnerable. Perfectly health people with no underlying conditions died in their thousands.
Sweden's not always a good comparison as more people live alone and the population density is lower per sq km.

So you send Henry to school, fine. Henry's teacher is asthmatic- what happens to her?
Henry brings covid home and the baby catches it.

And so on and so on.
Perhaps you were lucky and healthy, as was your family.

No one knew what we were dealing with and we were woefully unprepared.

So because they don't want to pay for things on line, let's lock down the country?
Where I live volunteers shopped for people, medication, free food parcels and meals on wheels were delivered for free.
Why wasn't that enough?

I agree with you @Drawfulofbitz. I feel that children and continuously ignored by the government in this country. From a sharp rise in child poverty, to lockdowns, going back as far as closing Sure Start centres, and crumbling schools. It's just dire and hard to believe really. It can be done, just look at Estonia: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/27/free-lunches-brain-breaks-and-happy-teachers-why-estonia-has-the-best-schools-in-europe

My theory is the class system prohibits any progress in this area. Those at the top mostly don't care as they have been through the private system and put their kids through the same. All I hear about is protecting pensions and winter fuel payments, what about our children? It's so short sighted, they are our future after all and we broke it. I had high hopes for the new Labour government but now not so sure..

To go back to the OPs question, yes I think 1st lockdown was ok but the rest was not necessary. There should have been restrictions in place (e.g. travel), targeted rules for the vulnerable etc. The schools and universities would still be impacted, but not to that scale. We did a terrible damage to our children and young people and will suffer the consequences for decades to come.

We did know early on what we were dealing with. The age profile risk was known

Interesting. They are the two year groups that didn't take year 6 SATs. Not holding up SATs as something worthy and amazing but normally there is a focus on ensuring continuing progression in these years that was dropped somewhat in the pandemic.

Also the loss of school visits, workshops and events when they were in school meant both there wasn't anything in the way of fun or enrichment and there was a disconnect with parents who also weren't allowed into school. The now year 10s at our school were able to have their parents attend a show they put on at the very end of year 6 and the change in the demeanour of the children was palpable - from sullen and cynical to enthusiastic kids proud to and happy to have their parents there. It brought home to me even more that schools and home really need to have a relationship for the benefit of the children.

It was only meant to be two weeks, and that wouldn't have made much difference. The fact it went on for months does. The fact that whole classes would be sent home durimg later waves because one student had covid was stupid.

It was a shambles and cost children dearly.

Agree many retail workers and those in other public facing professions found mask wearing for such long periods hard. It was a lot to ask really.

However, an exemption system was never at all realistic. We didn't have the resources, and additionally there was no way to police the trauma exemption anyway. It's not like a health condition where there'd normally be some kind of paper trail.

It was also a lot to expect supermarkets to police this for such a long period, particularly given the potential discrimination law implications if they got it wrong. I wasn't at all surprised that so many of them said nope, no longer our problem when masks were briefly reintroduced in December 2021.

No, there was no benefit to my children. We both had full time jobs, no ability to take furlough, and literally lost our minds trying to do our jobs and look after a baby and pre-schooler.
I think it very much depends on the circumstance. I know a lot of people who were furloughed who had several wonderful months at home with their kids.

Yes, we knew full well in March 2020 what the death profile in Italy had looked like. I have what's app messages from the time talking about the risk being highest for older people and lowest for children, and my circle didn't have access to any privileged information.

We knew even earlier than that. There was comprehensive data from china right at the start. I remember looking at that at the time and it was crystal clear that much of the population were at very little comparable risk.

Nonsense. We had no idea. We were planning for mass fatalities (which we got), but we definitely did not know which age groups would be worst hit. Classically children under 5 & pregnant women are very vulnerable to infectious diseases- remember Zika virus? We were damn lucky we didn't have thousands of dead children.

But we did know this because other countries were hit before us and kept good data

And we made a lot of people vulnerable by confining them to their homes, of course.

I wish we wouldn't conflate vulnerable with covid vulnerable, because they are not the same thing. I'm guilty of it at times too. But the fact that there were multiple vulnerable groups with competing interests is the absolute crux of the point here. Protecting the vulnerable was never one of the available options. We had to choose which ones we wanted to protect at the expense of others. The framing of the issue at the time as protecting the vulnerable was misleading and harmful.

Totally agree with this, there was only one kind of vulnerable that counted

No!!! Children are still struggling now from lockdown.

I feel the lockdown had significant benefits in terms of saving lives and protecting public health, but it

This, it saved lives. Education was disrupted not disappeared.I am in Ireland so our experience was different.

Education has taken a lot of innovative steps to support the learners get back on track. Education is a lifelong process.

I don't have capacity to ever compare an unfortunate education experience which is always salvageable to the loss of individuals.

And I really don't want people who think like that anywhere near decisions that could cost lives.

I agree with this comment. Whether people were allowed to wear masks or not in primary schools could heavily depend on the head teacher’s view of mask wearing as the DfE guidance didn’t support it at primary level.

We were not allowed to wear masks in our classrooms at all where I worked, only in the corridor or staff kitchen where it wasn’t crowded anyway due to one way systems in place and social distancing. This was before vaccines and during the 2nd and 3rd lockdown where you were required to wear masks in most other public places.

In the 2nd lockdown we had 30 people in a classroom all unmasked and essentially carrying on as normal within the classroom with just the windows open and a bit of hand gel. Not many people had conditions like that in their work place at the time. The result was that staff and pupils kept getting ill. Luckily for me, I avoided long Covid but other previously heathy people had lasting damage.

Yes we just created other vulnerability and damage and then everyone shouted you can’t talk about that

On here, and generally

Absolutely!! And oh the names children were called! 'Germ carriers! Disgusting breeding ground for the virus!' And so many more.
People advocating for us to follow spain/Italy, was it that had children banned from being outside at all, because THEY WANTED/NEEDED to be out and about and were clearly more important than children.

I always forget that we closed the bloody play areas. I remember taking my kids to the park on the day they reopened and there were multiple other families there waiting for the council to unlock the gates.
Children not in school/nursery were absolutely desperate for human contact by that point.

I remembered another thread on here - poster was worried that her garden was less than 2m from the pavement where people were walking, so she wasn't sure if she should let her kids into her garden to play. There were lots of posters that said of course she shouldn't.