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.

Yy re the inconsistency. In the second lockdown, some DC got to go into school and have the curriculum delivered with much better ratios than average. Mine didn't. They got the bare legal minimum, which was fuck all.

Schools aren't childcare yaknow 🙄

No. The kids suffered and continue to do so in many ways. I've worked in several schools and seen the ripples of damage throughout.

Later lockdowns were problematic and I hope the review addresses them separately. It was ludicrous; I wasn’t allowed out except to work yet many of my pupils and colleagues in different regions were living more or less as normal

March 2020 lockdown.

We are still seeing the trickle down in youth groups.
The chain of experience of things like independence skills on pack holidays was broken. By the time it was viable to start doing them again, we'd lost over 2 years of experience so the older children didn't have the skills and routines for the younger children to follow and we're still at the leaders having to coach stage. Added to that the oldest children now were our first post-Covid intake and were very much less socially confident as a cohort than usual so have had more growing to do than usual.

On talking to leaders of other groups of same/ similar organisations, they've observed the same pattern.

Thanks for the info. I did think it would probably be that one not 2021.

I've taught for twenty years. Left last year.

The impact on children has been massive.
Not just the lockdowns themselves but all the impact afterwards - no moving classrooms no talking to other kids, ten days isolation for Covid, etc. it hit my mental health badly and I'm an adult.

I don't know whether it was worth it.

There is no real way to tell.

It's not even about people dying alone in hospitals - if the nhs had been overwhelmed it would have been the situation that basically no medical care would have been available. That's terrifying.

It was a joke! Shut down the schools because of a virus that kids will survive just like a cold or flu then even when they reopened the schools they sent whole classes of healthy children home because "they have been in contact with someone who tested positive" now a few years later they suddenly care about children's education and want to fine you if you keep your child off when they are ill. Where a few years ago they would have been telling you to isolate them for a week or more if they had a cold! Oh and fine you if you want to take your own children on holiday saying they care about their education yet didn't care when they wanted to close the schools for nearly a year

My DD was in S1 and S2 during lockdowns. She completed the work they gave her and done online classes. Shes just gotten 7 As at nat 5 so her academic side has not suffered. We actually spent quality time together as a family, although both DH and i worked the whole time. I don't feel she has any lasting effects at all. Obviously kids who already had MH/anxiety issues may be different.
The person most affected in our family is me, Im a nurse my ward was turned into a covid ward for 2 years, literally where people who were not for invasive treatment were sent.. I could never ever go through what i seen i those two years again

And the vulnerable kids for whom even a cold causes problems?

Thank you for your service

What do those kids do for any other virus or bacteria?

Don't forget the farce of the Leicester lockdown. Have friends who live in Leicester City council and Oadby and Wigston (the district south of Leicester) areas. The non essential retailers were open on Monday and by the Friday, it was back to lockdown. It was supposed to be 3 weeks but ended up double that. Their friends and families living in neighbouring districts (Harborough and Blaby) were able to get haircuts - showed off their newly cut hair on FB and my friends and others living in LCC and O&W were getting fed up of these posts.

Other places in the NW had higher cases than the Leicester lockdown areas later on. Did they get in local lockdowns? No. Leicester lockdown residents were treated badly by the govt and no apology.

Places such as hairdressers and barbers should not have been closed in lockdowns. They provide MH boosts (do you feel much better once you been to hairdressers?) and could carry on with operating with both worker and client wearing masks. Then a friend's sister working as a nurse found her very thick hair an annoyance for wearing PPE as it was tight on her head, giving her migraines.

strictly speaking society advanced many civilisations without our version of the modern school system, so you can argue we all need an education we just dont need the modern schooling system and thats based on the history of many previous eras of history

MH and lockdowns affected everyone, not just the kids.

Ask anyone who works in retail - especially essential retail before and since - they will tell you that rudeness from customers is getting worse. If it wasn't for lockdowns, restrictions in the number of customers able to visit shops at the same time, etc, I believe that rudeness would not be such as issue and people leaving retail.

Still hear of elderly people who don't have health issues refuse to leave home.

Well there needed to be rules to protect those not lucky enough to be in your husband's position. There would have been lots of complaints if thousands of vulnerable were forced into work and overloaded the healthcare system.

People may think it was overload but I wander if more lives would have been lost if it wasn't for all the lockdowns.

Easy to make assumptions after the event.

Because subsequently we had vaccines

You know healthy people were dying too, it wasnt just a cold or flu.

I think that lockdown good/lockdown bad is far too simplistic, since there were multiple lockdowns. Would it have been better had we locked down earlier, moved the November lockdown earlier, acted differently in Jan 21? The response was a shitshow, but there are far too many variables to answer this one.

The answer is it depends - on the age of your children, your living arrangements, whether you could teach at home, how the school handled it. Mine were both primary, I was furloughed, we live in countryside - so fine for my family, but really not for others I’m sure.

I think its really hard to quantify, and the answer will vary from person to person.

For us, in a strange way, covid wasn't a negative. We were living in a small house in London, commuting and rushing around and not seeing much of each other. Covid gave us space and time to reconnect, and ultimately made is re evaluate our lives and move out to a small village where we have an amazing quality of life. But our girls were 1 and 4 when covid hit, the impact on their education was minimal, oldest missed part of reception but her school did brilliant home schooling.

For older children I'm sure it's a very story

I suspect this is the first time in human history that we collectively “agreed” to put the needs of the few before the many, and those of the old before the young. Looked at one way it was a triumph of altruism over self interest. Viewed another way it was a triumph of sentiment over common sense.

I think it’s interesting to contrast the “protect the vulnerable” (who were predominantly elderly) approach with the Japanese approach to Fukushima where older volunteers did clean up because they’d lived more of their lives and had less to lose, the nobility of which reduced me to a blubbering mess.

I’m not saying it was wrong, but viewed one way it was an odd choice. The impact on children was predicted. Damage to mental health more generally was certainly predictable. Given the change in death certificate process (from memory it went on if there had been a death within 28 days of a positive test and such deaths were recorded as “covid deaths”) it’s not clear what was the death toll where covid was the primary cause, as opposed to a cause, or even a co-morbidity.

Again I’m not saying it was wrong. But a different approach might have resulted in us thinking very differently about it.

my opinion is that lockdowns in the manner undertaken were not justified and the damage caused outweighs the good done (taking into account not just damage to school children but damage more generally) but I’m a lay person, so my opinion is just that. I think really there was no good answer, just a choice between which crappy outcome we got. So probably there’s not a “right” answer.

In schools the teachers are in a small room with 30 children with no social distancing for 5 continous hours.

Pubs are a completely different situation. It was safe to open pubs before it was safe to open schools.