How Will Covid Affect Our Children?
“We believe the steps we have already taken, together with those I am announcing today, are already slowing the spread of the disease… We will do whatever it takes to so that we beat it together.”
This was how Boris Johnson closed his statement on coronavirus on the 18th March 2020. These words, as familiarly repetitive as they may seem now, followed the shocking announcement that schools across the UK would be forced to close their doors to all but the children of key workers in an effort to stop the spread of the virus.
Back then, ‘beating’ coronavirus probably felt like a reasonably achievable goal, one that we wouldn’t still be striving for today. In fact, it’s hard to believe that we’re still miles away from that goal. It’s even harder to believe that almost eighteen months on, we still haven’t found a way to protect the nation’s children from this virus without continuously depriving them of education. Undoubtedly, an entire generation of children have had their childhood irreversibly altered by the events of the past year and a half. But how exactly, beyond the frequently discussed exam losses and bubble-induced isolation periods, will Britain’s school kids have been affected by the rona? And why exactly, will this issue have disproportionately affected children from disadvantaged backgrounds?
Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, one of the main ways in which all children will have been affected by school closures and frequent isolation periods is in their intellectual development. On the one hand, I’d be the first to agree that test scores and attainment grades are not a measure of a child’s intelligence. However, experts’ opinions on this topic are pretty black and white: time out of school will cause a learning loss.
A lot of the research on short periods out of school has been conducted in North America as opposed to the UK, yet it unanimously shows that even the loss of several days can cause a drop students’ overall pass rate. Over here, most of the research has focused on the annual 6 weeks break in summer. A survey conducted by The Key Support in 2014 showed that 77% of primary school educators and 60% of secondary school educators expressed concern about their students’ loss of attainment over the summer break. Furthermore, evidence submitted to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hunger (APPG) in the UK suggested that teachers can spend up to the same amount of time reteaching material forgotten over the break as their students spend taking it.
Before even considering time lost due to self-isolation, the two official school closures (between March and September 2020 and at the beginning of 2021) will have caused some children to lose up to 24 weeks in the classroom. Yep, that’s right – that’s four times the length of the summer holiday. Of course, online provision has been provided to children throughout these periods. However, you’d only have to ask a single person working within the education sector to understand how little many of their students will have engaged with online learning. Personally, having spent the lockdown of January-March 2020 covering online classes to assist with my department’s workload, I’d say the engagement resembled a 9am seminar in the first year of a humanities degree. Hint: about eight children in a class of thirty would produce something remotely close to what they may have done if they’d been in school.
Not all children will have been affected in the same way, however. Whilst we are yet to see just how severely, education experts assume that repeated lockdowns and isolation periods will have widened the (already rather considerable) gaps between higher and lower income families. When returning to school in March, I spoke with one of my students about the work she’d managed to complete over the lockdown. She explained to me that she’d found engaging with home learning quite difficult at times because her room didn’t have space for a desk, and if she tried to complete work anywhere else, her three younger siblings would bother her. This is a problem that many children from lower income backgrounds will have faced.
The success of home learning relies on several things: a solid internet connection, ease of access to learning resources a quiet, adequate space in which to study, etc. For younger students, it might even rely on a parent/guardian who is sufficiently educated enough to assist with the curriculum. It’s not hard to see, therefore, why students from families with a lower income might have struggled to make the best of online learning. Schools did everything they could to combat this (providing laptops and delivering resources to students’ homes, for example). However, there’s only so much that can be done when the schools themselves are already working with limited resources.
Putting the content that children learn at school aside, there is another key way in which time spent away from their educational establishments may have impacted upon our youngest brits: their mental health. On the most basic level, most children have spent upwards of three months this year totally isolated from their peers. For younger children, this could have seriously impacted upon their social development. For older children, this could have deprived them of one of their most reliable support systems. For many children of all ages, this could have taken away the security that school – and the safeguarding that takes place within it – provides.
In 2016, the children’s mental health charity, Young Minds, found that 90% of school leaders have reported an increase in the number of students experiencing anxiety or stress over the five years previous. Thus, even prior to coronavirus, we were already experiencing a mental health crisis among Britain’s children. It is worrying to think, therefore, how the pandemic may have exacerbated this issue. Once again, it will be poorer families that may suffer the worse, as school could be the only place that their children are able to access mental health services and counselling.
Now, I really didn’t want this article to be all doom and gloom, so I’m going to end it on a positive note – kind of. If there’s one thing that working in education has taught me this year, it’s that children are truly, truly resilient. In fact, I have every faith that all the amazing children I’ve come into contact with over the last year won’t allow this pandemic to define them; they won’t allow themselves to become the ‘lost generation’ that so many have branded them as. However, what I have also realised is that they are going to need a hell of a lot of support, sympathy, and kindness. The pandemic has been brutal for us all, but I’m not sure that any of us adults could ever begin to understand how it might have felt for children.
Unfortunately, there are no easy answers for the issues that the pandemic has created for our nation’s children. With very little practice-based evidence or research in this area, alongside so many other issues caused by the virus taking precedence, it’s hard for anyone to grasp the reality of how children might have been changed by the pandemic. Helping the next generation to overcome the events of the past eighteen months will require a collaborative, cohesive effort from all of us: parents, teachers, social workers, politicians and medical professionals. And that effort? It has to start now.
Written by Erin Lister
Erin is a recent English graduate, currently living in Manchester and working as a teaching assistant. She's obsessed with all things music, theatre and television and hopes to one day write about them for a living.
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