I think the children of this generation...

[TheDailyCarbuncle]

Will, in future years, legitimately ask us why we let them down so badly. Why we allowed them/their peers to be left at home for months with abusive/neglectful/drug addicted/alcoholic parents, with no outside contact, no adult help, relief or respite whatsoever. Why some of those children disappeared, never to be seen again, or were so badly hurt as to have years and years of horrendous struggle ahead of them.

It's only now beginning to be talked about, months too late: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52876226

When everyone is talking about 'protecting' children, where is their concern for those children for whom home is a dangerous place? For whom school is their only sanctuary?

There are much better options to help those children that are struggling at home than sending everyone back to school in the middle of a pandemic.

@Trevsadick

Op what are you going to tell these children, who are asking what we should have done.

How should we have handled it.

Schools have an important role in spotting and helping support kids who are being abused.

Schools absolutely should not be a place of respite for these kids. Thats the problem. We have been letting several generations down with this. A child shouldn't need respite from their home life. And if they do, they shouldn't be in that home.

I am all for ss supporting families in the first instance. But where that doesnt work, children need to be removed. successive governments have put more pressure and more responsibility onto the schools, rather than look at the actual issue at home and deal with that. Because its cheaper to tell schools they should do more.

Thats how we have let children down.

I agree to an extent but no matter how good the system is, there will always be children who live in homes where, while school is a respite for them, the situation in their home doesn't warrant removal, especially as removal may mean going to an even worse situation in foster care.

As for how we handled it, I think we should never ever have sent children home with no outside contact. The whole point of school being compulsory is that it's understood that if it isn't compulsory, too many children will be neglected. Now, suddenly it's totally optional, with little or nothing on offer for most children. It's not good enough. Children should have had at least some contact with their teacher, every week. Something to keep access to the outside world, to monitor them. Taking them out of the safety of school and leaving them to whatever fate awaits them at home, for months, is not acceptable IMO.

Of course they matter. But what would you suggest happened?

I’m a teacher in a massive school. Plenty of staff who are shielding and indeed ‘vulnerable’ in another way. Plenty of older staff too. The government closed the schools on public health grounds.

What else could they do? We all know the kids with problems and difficult home lives. And the schools have gone the extra mile to help and protect them. What else can they do?

But l do not think a generation of children will be scarred by it.

And in fact, what this whole thing has highlighted is schools seem to carry responsibility for every single thing. If children are that vulnerable, where are social services? Where are CAHMS? Not heard anything at all about these organisations at all during lockdown.

I think more questions would be asked if we hadn't closed our schools. We had to slow the rate of infection. Even my primary aged child understands that.

And surely people realise that ' more funding' for any service is simply not going to happen now. We need to pay this lockdown bill! Yet another example of putting our children last

And all our students get at least one welfare phone call a week.

The vulnerable get more

It's not a "lockdown" bill. It's a "pandemic" bill.

This has been discussed all along, it was one of the main reasons they kept school open so long, why they stayed open to vunerable children the whole time, and why they have started to reopen schools now...

Exactly!

@nellodee

Half a million deaths is absolutely possible if we choose to simply pretend this virus doesn't exist.

6% infected - 50,000
60% infected - 500,000

The fact that we have not continued along this path is because we have had a lockdown.

There may be other effects that might potentially limit this number, but those are the total unknowns, not the death rate, nor the amount currently exposed, for which we now have approximations.

I don't want to divert into a discussion about this, but there is absolutely no evidence for that claim.

We have absolutely no idea how many people have been infected - testing was only occurring in hospitals until recently, so there were potentially hundreds of thousands infected without a diagnosis.

The infections were spread widely within hospitals and care homes, meaning that many of those infected were already vulnerable and more likely to die.

In no country anywhere in the world has there been one ounce of evidence for the Imperial model (one of many models, it just happened to be the one chosen by the government) being in any way correct. The 500,000 number was a guess and a bad one at that.

@NinetyNineRedBalloonsGoBy

The effect this had had on all children is disproportionate to the risk to them of covid.

This 100%

It isn't really the risk to the children themselves, is it? it's the risk of them catching it and passing it on to others in the family (particularly elderly relatives), who would be far more likely to be killed by it.

@nellodee call it what you want. But closing business. Paying furlough. Increasing unemployment. It still needs to be paid for.

@TheEmojiFormerlyKnownAsPrince

And all our students get at least one welfare phone call a week.

The vulnerable get more

We've had one phone call from my son's school since lockdown began. In any case, I don't see how a phone call is a substitute for actually seeing a child and interacting with them.

the answer does not lie in education, these children are rarely saved by school. The truth is that a lot of children are born without a chance, their parents are given chance after vance by social services to the point the child isn't given any.

it's a cycle, a social problem. still you take a child away from a parent and there are lifelong issues created

there is no quick fix, no popular answer.

'Vulnerable' does not necessarily equal 'abused' OP, you're letting your own experience colour your perspective.
Vulnerable children, those that present this way in school, have been invited into the limited provision, in many cases are being phoned and visited (and food parcels being dropped off). When they are visited the teacher will insist on seeing them.
With the best will in the world, hidden abuse will often remain just that, hidden. It's shit, but I don't see how having more contact with a teacher would change that.

As a society we have voted to underfund essential services for years. This is going to get much worse not much better. So yep. More responsibility than ever on frontline services such as schools.

There are also children who show absolutely no outward signs of abuse. These are the children who are emotionally abused. They often do very well academically, mainly because they are so frightened not to, and because they have no trust in any adults, won't tell you if there's anything wrong. They'll sit at the back of the classroom quietly, and will just pass under your radar. These are the ones we won't know about and for whom lockdown has been pretty awful.

I also worry about little children, the ones up to about 3 years old. These are the years which are the hardest for parents, in my view, because the children are so mobile and need so much watching and entertaining. This is also when those same children are really vulnerable because they're so small. I worry that parents will lose their tempers because they've nowhere to take the children to keep them amused, and they can't take them to grandparents when they've had enough, and so maybe tempers fray and the child gets hit, but hey, no-one will know because no-one will see the marks. Or maybe the child just gets shut in its room for days on end..... Again, possibly no-one's ever going to know.

Yes, I am very worried about these children.

@1moreRep

the answer does not lie in education, these children are rarely saved by school. The truth is that a lot of children are born without a chance, their parents are given chance after vance by social services to the point the child isn't given any.

it's a cycle, a social problem. still you take a child away from a parent and there are lifelong issues created

there is no quick fix, no popular answer.

I agree with that in terms of the bigger picture. But regardless of the bigger social problem, it's still the case that those children have to live their lives day to day and that the one source of support for many of them has been entirely removed. The situation is shit, but this is just making it more shit.

We’ve had no phone calls from school about our foster children and had to send over 20 emails before we even got a response acknowledging that they’d been taken into care and placed with us!

The SLT and classroom teachers simply washed their hands of these children.

As for how we handled it, I think we should never ever have sent children home with no outside contact

But lots of schools are making contact. More contact for vulnerable children. If you school isn't, thats your schools issue.

Kids were never sent home because of the risk to them. It was the risk of them taking it home or bringing it back in giving it to teachers who then took it home.

So given they couldn't keep all kids in schools and vulnerable children have always been able to go to school, what would you have done different?

And remember the decision was made when we knew next to nothing about covid.

@Myothercarisalsoshit

'Vulnerable' does not necessarily equal 'abused' OP, you're letting your own experience colour your perspective. Vulnerable children, those that present this way in school, have been invited into the limited provision, in many cases are being phoned and visited (and food parcels being dropped off). When they are visited the teacher will insist on seeing them. With the best will in the world, hidden abuse will often remain just that, hidden. It's shit, but I don't see how having more contact with a teacher would change that.

You don't see how a child having the opportunity to talk to and interact with a caring adult outside their abusive family would help them?

History grad here

It’s interesting how generations view previous generations. Usually very sympathetically. Why? Because there is a strong “they did what they did because that was the knowledge they had at the time”.

So future generations will learn a heck of a lot more about this situation than anyone today knows.

Consequently - they will likely judge with empathy.

@HelloMissus

We’ve had no phone calls from school about our foster children and had to send over 20 emails before we even got a response acknowledging that they’d been taken into care and placed with us!

The SLT and classroom teachers simply washed their hands of these children.

Really? That's quite a leap you made there.

@1moreRep completely agree with you. There is sadly no fix. But school helps bring a bit of normality. And a bit of a chance?

Also @Duckfinger, are you doing that for every child? Or only the ones you know are vulnerable? Because you must be aware that plenty goes on behind closed doors that no one knows about.

If no one knows about it how are people supposed to do something about it? Your bitching because teachers are not there for a problem they know nothing about?

Ok then just to be clear this isnt Hogwarts and divination is a very imprecise branch of magic

And surely people realise that ' more funding' for any service is simply not going to happen now. We need to pay this lockdown bill! Yet another example of putting our children last

I don't expect it. But this is where we have let generations of kids down. Not funding support properly and expecting the schools to just pick up the slack.

Lockdown, hasn't let our kids down. It hasn't let the vulnerable kids down
We have been letting them down for years