Up to 100,000 children missing from school rolls

[TheDailyCarbunkle]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-60054253

If anyone has any doubt about the risk created by lockdowns, doubt no more. Many of those children will be absolutely fine, well cared for, educated at home. But many many of them will not - without regular attendance at school and someone outside their family monitoring them daily, they will have just fallen through the cracks. Who knows what the final fallout of this will be?

@VikingOnTheFridge

It was a pandemic. Nearly the whole global population was mandated to 'stay at home' for months(with various explanation of what that meant in practice)

This is just not true at all, even with your caveat. There would've been a great many more deaths if it were. Being able to implement any kind of lockdown for that length of time is the preserve of societies with the resources to do it. What you mean is much of the richer world did it. It's an extremely important distinction.

Also, Sweden never mandated people to stay at home, never closed schools for under 16s and never used 'it's a pandemic' as an excuse to ignore the needs of children.

@cantkeepawayforever

If you would prefer a non-school analogy - think of two train joirneys.

The first is a trip in a country train between 2 stations. Nobody gets on, nobody gets off, a Each person sits in their own space, and it is the same group of people on this journey every day. there is no more than 1 person per group of seats. The windows are open.

The second is a London tube train at a busy time, travelling the same distance but with multiple stops. There is constant movement of people in and out and every seat is taken by people squeezed up against one another. There is little fresh air.

If the Covid rate is the same in each community (ie there is the sane chance of any individual carrying the infection), in which scenario is a traveller taking that journey every day more likely to be infected?

You seem to think I don't understand basic probability. I do thank you.

My point is that if the risk is not zero then it's some undefined number above zero. For a truly deadly illness the only acceptable risk to expose a child to would be zero. But it was decided that some children could be exposed to the non-zero risk while others sat at home with no interaction, no friends, no education. If you talk about it in probabilistic terms it seems to make sense. When you talk about it in the real situation that transpired - ie that some children saw 5+ children and a teacher every day and some children had no contact with anyone outside their own house for months - it makes no sense at all.

[quote Namechangeforthis88]@cantkeepawayforever

I am not quite sure why the emphasis is on 'school closure', if what you really mean is 'the pandemic'.

Sadly referrals to children's social work drop away during the school holidays because many children have no one to tell, and no one to see bruises or signs of neglect. For many children school is their safe place, with heating, warm food and someone who cares. DH used to interview children for child protection, process very often triggered when a child arrives at school and says "Daddy hit me yesterday" or similar.[/quote]
Exactly. You can have mealy-mouthed rhetoric around the requirements of a pandemic, and problems being highlighted for the greater good and other such bollocks, but that fact is that for many children, school is the place they go to get away from home, school is where they have contact with people other than their family, school is where someone might notice they are withdrawn and subdued, bruised and upset.

The blase way people say it was max 1.5 terms out of six really really makes me angry, especially in a world where pointing out the mean age of the people who died from covid makes you a selfish granny killer. 1.5 out of six is a very interesting way to put it - how many actual days was that? How many days were children at home with no contact outside their families? How many days did children have no outlet, no escape?

I think, rather than only looking at Sweden, it would be worth considering the impact of the pandemic on children world-wide, and what different factors have been most important in determining that. Did other countries have a similar proportion of children not on school rolls at the start of the pandemic? Has there been a similar increase in home education / children not returning to school? Are they also seeing services overwhelmed? If not - for countries which did have school closures, so most of Europe and North America - what did they do differently? Were services better funded pre-pandemic, for example? Has recovery money been poured into therapeutic and social services during and post lockdown to aid recovery?

I do think we can learn from what other countries are doing, and have done, for children - but from a range of countries to identify genuine best practice.

The blase way people say it was max 1.5 terms out of six really really makes me angry

Is this referring to a specific group?

We had two terms out of three out. Three terms in a year basis

Quite apart from everything else that's wrong with the 1.5 terms claim, it's also incorrect. Some children lost easily two terms in total. One of mine had their final day on Friday 20th March 2020, with a couple of weeks left of the Easter term, and wasn't allowed back in until September due to year group. Then, as my DC were amongst those considered unworthy of school in the 2021 lockdown, they missed the whole of the first half term save one day and the first two weeks of the next half term. That's more than 1.5 terms.

There is some variation on term dates between schools and areas and terms are not all equal length, but then that's all the more reason not to have claimed it in the first place.

Op, I completely understand that you believe that the only reason children have come to harm in the pandemic is because schools were closed to most, and that you believe by not closing, everything would have been ok. I get that. You saying it repeatedly doesn’t make it true.

Yes, looking back, things could have been done differently by the Government. What I am not sure about from your posts is what you want done NOW, moving forwards, to sort this out? I say more funding and resources for all children’s services so that when schools - which have now been continuously open for 10 months - identify an issue, the services are immediately available to help. Do you agree?

We had all summer term out and the spring term bar three weeks before Easter - tg despite many cries on here not to do it as per.

@cantkeepawayforever

Op, I completely understand that you believe that the only reason children have come to harm in the pandemic is because schools were closed to most, and that you believe by not closing, everything would have been ok. I get that. You saying it repeatedly doesn’t make it true.

Yes, looking back, things could have been done differently by the Government. What I am not sure about from your posts is what you want done NOW, moving forwards, to sort this out? I say more funding and resources for all children’s services so that when schools - which have now been continuously open for 10 months - identify an issue, the services are immediately available to help. Do you agree?

I don't see how you understand that @cantkeepawayforever because that is absolutely not what I said. In fact I have acknowledged multiple times that other services need to be involved. I don't know if you haven't read what I've written or you're just trying to imply I've said something I've not for another reason. Can you tell me which one it is?

I'll state what I've said one last time. Closing schools badly affected children. That's it. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise is talking pure shit IMO. Regardless of what was happening before the pandemic, the issues with other services, etc etc, closing schools had a massive detrimental effect on a whole generation of children. There is no getting away from it, wriggling into other arguments to avoid looking at it. It is what it is.

How would I not agree that children's services need more funding? Any idiot can see it's true. Your way of asking that is extraordinarily patronising and unnecessary and not actually relevant to what I'm talking about at all.

I don’t really understand

The pandemic happened, and countries across the world were introducing stay at home measures to control the infection rate.

Once that happened, schools returned - and I think everyone, especially teachers have done their very best to keep schools open.

I agree we need to learn and do things better in the future but if we are faced with a virus we cannot control again we’ll need time to work out the cure. Otherwise all services are overwhelmed and we cannot healthily serve our children.

Is this thread more about anti lockdown or is it about the 100 000 lost children because I think we can’t pretend there hasn’t been a global pandemic. It did happen and therefore what should happen now. Better funding is paramount. Better training, better communication across services, how teachers should be supported. Surely this should be the focus of the thread?

People always want win/win situations. There isn’t one in a pandemic.

Closing schools costs some children their education. Keeping them open costs many adults their lives.

We did need to close them (though possibly not as long as we did). We now need to find these missing children and help them settle back into school.

@TheReluctantPhoenix

People always want win/win situations. There isn’t one in a pandemic.

Closing schools costs some children their education. Keeping them open costs many adults their lives.

We did need to close them (though possibly not as long as we did). We now need to find these missing children and help them settle back into school.

Exactly. Ultimately, we can’t go back and not close schools. We have to move forwards, identify and supply what support is needed for children in and out of school, to enable all children (pre school, in school, home educated, leaving school) to make the best possible progress from now.

Not win win but I’ll except very bad and agree with this

Closing schools badly affected children. That's it. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise is talking pure shit IMO. Regardless of what was happening before the pandemic, the issues with other services, etc etc, closing schools had a massive detrimental effect on a whole generation of children. There is no getting away from it, wriggling into other arguments to avoid looking at it.

There was a lot of minimising on the harms throughout. So no it can’t be turned back but it can be acknowledged

@VikingOnTheFridge

It was a pandemic. Nearly the whole global population was mandated to 'stay at home' for months(with various explanation of what that meant in practice)

This is just not true at all, even with your caveat. There would've been a great many more deaths if it were. Being able to implement any kind of lockdown for that length of time is the preserve of societies with the resources to do it. What you mean is much of the richer world did it. It's an extremely important distinction.

That's not what the data says.

First link to patterns of lockdown across the world, second to school closures across the world.

ig.ft.com/coronavirus-lockdowns/

ourworldindata.org/grapher/school-closures-covid?time=2020-02-27

Closing schools did badly affect children and its effects are ongoing in so many ways.

I'm not sure that anyone is disagreeing with that, are they? Others are pointing out that closing schools/locking down was a global response to a pandemic (with caveat as above) about how to reduce harm that the pandemic was inevitably going to cause.

I don't think anyone is 'trying to get away from it' either. As Emergency73 and others have said, there are discussions that should be going on now about how to repair as much of the harm done to children especially the most vulnerable and how to avoid the on-going and pre-existing problem of children 'missing' to the school system.

None of that suggests nearly the whole global population was mandated to stay at home for months.

accept…

@Twitterwhooooo

Now I’m really confused. That link says the UK had no measures. What time period are we talking about?

Sorry - got you now!

Yes @VikingOnTheFridge - I mean colour wise, it would suggest that we were not as strict as some, but less strict that others.

And then second link - one of the least strict countries.

But!! I really think this is getting away from the most crucial point of this thread. And I think it’s about how best to move forwards. And there is a teacher on this thread who sounds amazing, yet others are lambasting her - god knows why.

I always thought the key factor was communication between services. And this simply isn’t happening. The police/schools/social services/doctors all working together.

And I think this has been an issue pre, during and as we hopefully emerge from Covid. Tackling this is crucial.

I think it's extremely important to be clear that lockdown was a rich world response.

Op do you work in a school?

@VikingOnTheFridge

I think it's extremely important to be clear that lockdown was a rich world response.

Except it's not as simple as that.

Much of the 'poor world' if you want to frame it in that way consists of very isolated rural communities where the risk of contracting the virus in the first place is somewhere between negligible and zero.

And there are plenty of poor people living in the 'rich world' who bore the brunt of the pandemic.

Yeah, it is.

You're certainly right that the poor in the rich world were most likely to bear the brunt of restrictions. That's an undeniably correct point, and one that hasn't had nearly the airtime it should've over the course of the pandemic. The suffering caused by lockdown was not distributed evenly and we were never all in the same boat.

It does not, however, affect the fact that it's plain wrong to claim nearly all the world was asked to stay at home for months. That just assumes everywhere is like the West. Additionally, there are many large cities with millions of people in poorer countries.