DT article by Molly Kingsley of U4T - hope the long C&P works, you know MN:
(First para about a girl who's developed anxiety-related Tourette's in lockdown)
Cara’s case is extreme but it is not isolated. Up and down the country children are being harmed by social isolation and school closures in ways that in some cases will leave deep and lasting scars. During the last lockdown some of us were speaking of the disproportionate impact of school closures on young people. Now that data from the first lockdown is emerging, far from “catastrophising”, that language looks if anything too weak; “devastating” is - sadly - becoming a commonly used wordrd; Rob Halfon , chair of the Education Select Committee, has described school closures as “the four horsemen of the education apocalypse.” It’s against this sorry background that the various Government-sponsored recovery proposals must be judged.^
^
S^o far those suggestions have included summer bootcamps, extensions of the school day, shortening the summer term and extending the existing tutoring programme; a new Catch-Up Tsar has been appointed and Boris Johnson has saidid we must go “flat out” to help children get back on track.^
^Whilst on one hand the stark acknowledgment of this huge issue is welcome, in truth I'm wary.
What we’ve taken from many of these kids is time - and it’s not easy to give that back. Heated and diametrically opposed opinions are starting to emerge on the proposals - plans to extend days and terms have, predictably, been shot down by the Unionsns. For some children - especially younger primary kids - there may be a lack of wiggle room in the day to add on hours, although suggestionsns to use this time for physical activity and support with mental health are attractive. Figuring out what these projects should look like in practice will be far from easy. Kids are starting on unequal terrain and will need to move at different paces; studieses looking at the impact of natural disasters on education show how important it will be for each child to catch up from the right base and at the right speed. Anything else risks further derailing these children to the point that many will never claw back.
^
Evidence suggeststs that targeted tutoring whether over summer or after school may be the best way out of the educational abyss for those children who have been hit hardest. But of course there is a hefty price to pay for that level of support. Ministers have chucked an extra £300M into the pot, but so far the total allocated to catch-up stands at a little over £1bn; even allowing for population size this is an order of magnitude less than the US’s 170 billion dollar rescue package for education and is a far cry from the “rocket boosting” that Anne Longfield prescribed a fortnight ago.
Children are traumatised^
We must also question “how much is too much”? Edinburgh-based headmaster Rod Grant uses the phrase “PTSD” to describe what he saw of the impact of the last lockdown on the children he teaches. Whether by negligence or design, with our pandemic response we declared war on children. And like soldiers coming back from a war, many of these children are traumatised. More time at a desk might go some way to assuaging adult guilt but is it really what these children need?^
Speaking to parents this last week one consistent theme emerges. Sure, catch-up is needed, but what parents really want for their kids now is simply for them to be happy. Playing, singing, dancing, drama and above all else friendship - all the things which make a childhood and which have been so abruptly taken. Encouragingly this has been recognised by the new Catch-Up Tsar when he talksks_ of children needing to re-learn to play.
There are also some deeper philosophical questions.^
The language of “recovery” seems off the mark. As well as being un-aspirational and potentially even stigmatising, it masks that for children like Cara there will be no recovery: not all cuts can be uncut. A report on the impact of the Pakistani earthquake of 2005 states “…the disaster can leave long-lasting scars on children, even when government interventions compensate households for the shock and facilitate a speedy economic recovery”, and the social isolation we’ve inflicted on this generation is extraordinary and unprecedented. People talk of children being resilient but for the babies who have not yet met anyone but their parents and the toddlers who have never played with another child we may not know for many years what effect our lockdown experiment will have had.
Deflecting attention
Whatever the name given, these programmes will not be worth the promissory notes on which they will be printed unless Government is able to reset its pandemic response in a way which takes school closures out of the equation. Why bother having summer schools or longer days if, when the Cornwall variant strikes in October 2021, we’ll be slamming the school doors shut again? New job titles are easy to dish out; intractable political problems are harder to fix. Appointing a Catch-Up Tsar seems a good way to deflect attention from the fact that the harm of school closures is ongoing.
^The educational and welfare crisis that our children have sustained is grave; they have behind them many months of struggle and suffering. Much, indeed, has been made of the war analogy, but really, it’s an irony. There is no war, yet children are being sacrificed to save the NHS - the institution that was the last war’s legacy. We must now come full circle. We must recognise that children are giving up their lives so that others can live. This is a grim but necessary truth, as it frames the nature of the effort now required. As happened in the wake of 1945 we need a long term approach which harnesses appropriate investment, creativity and hope to take our early years children into their adult lives.
Whatever The Plan is, it must be a tribute to childhood, rather than a further betrayal of it^.