Lockdowns to dent economy for 40 years

ECONOMIC growth could be held back for up to four decades because of the impact of lockdowns on children’s education, according to major report.

The Organisation for economic Cooperation and Development ( OECD) said test scores showed an ‘unprecedented’ drop in reading and maths standards between 2018 and 2022.

‘This decline could have a persisting negative impact on the level of productivity over the next 30-40 years,’ the Parisbased global watchdog warned in its interim economic Outlook report.

Pupils from poorer households without access to online learning were most likely to have been affected, it said.

Improvements in productivity – or doing more with less – are the key driving force of growth, making societies richer and giving individuals a better standard of living. The

findings are likely to be seized on by lockdown critics who believed that children were forced to stay at home for far too long during the pandemic, despite evidence that they played a limited role in spreading the illness and were less likely to fall sick from it.

They highlight that, even after economies have recovered from the recessions that many suffered as they ground to a halt during the Covid outbreak, long-term effects will continue to take their toll.

Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith said: ‘A lot of us knew what was going to happen. For children to be shut out of school was a disaster.’

The OECD said the deterioration continued a downward trend prior to 2018 ‘pointing to longer-term issues in educational systems in some countries’. It called for reforms to improve teaching quality and teachers’ qualifications.

The OECD’s latest findings come as part of a report showing that growth in the UK is expected to pick up from 0.3pc last year to 0.7pc in 2024. That will be stronger than Germany and France.