Kids are delighted – but closing our schools may not be the right choice
The economic and social cost of denying pupils an education is certain, but the benefits are not
My six-year-old daughter looked thrilled when I arrived home on Wednesday evening. “Boris Johnson has said there’s no school for months,” she informed me. “I like him.” Her two brothers had worked out that these closures were not good news. One has important exams coming up – and, now, no decent teacher. But we’re all healthy, in a comfortable house and under no threat of eviction: we’re the lucky ones. For a great many others, life in this country has just got a lot harder.
Whitehall officials have been war-gaming the response to a pandemic for years. Teams of civil servants are sent into exercises with scenarios ranging from the mild to the terrifying. One of the first questions is whether to close the schools. The arguments are easy to understand: kids are germ sponges, so keeping them apart could stop them infecting others. But then again, school closures are only useful if they last for several weeks: and this has huge social and economic consequences. They should be a last resort.
The knock-on effects are vast. One in five British pupils is looked after by a single parent, most of whom work. What do they do when schools close? How many of them will be likely to lose the jobs they will have balanced with parenthood? Half of NHS hospital doctors and nurses have a school-age child at home. The Prime Minister says he’ll make special arrangements for “key” workers, but we’ll have to see how that works out. A primary school in my neighbourhood has told parents not to expect to send pupils back in September, let alone after Easter.
History is full of examples of schools closing to thwart the onset of flu, so academics have plenty of evidence to pore over to see whether the harm outweighs the good. One French study suggested school closures could cut the number of flu cases by 17 per cent and reduce the peak infection by 45 per cent. But studies differ. When Hong Kong closed schools in response to flu deaths in 2008 there was no difference from the flu outbreak there a year before, when classes stayed open. When the NHS pandemic planners surveyed the dozens of studies, they found very mixed messages.
No one, however, doubts the harm inflicted by denying children an education – or the unfairness of what will happen now. The wealthier schools are bound to turn their hand to remote learning better than schools from tougher neighbourhoods. Judging by the number of adverts from online tutors flying around yesterday, there is likely to be a boom in digital private education (for those who can afford it). Universities might now offer places to students based on predicted grades, given the absence of actual exams. This will hurt pupils from more disadvantaged schools, who tend to be given more pessimistic grade predictions.
Even if the children of “key workers” are kept in school, there’s the rest of the economy to think about. One in six British workers is also the main caregiver at home. If they now give up work, as well you might if your child’s education collapses, it could double the economic damage inflicted by the pandemic. School closures, after all, hurt millions of families, not just those with the virus. Some studies put the cost of school closure at 4 per cent of GDP, or £88 billion. But it isn’t just about money: economic wealth translates into health, fairness and opportunity.
That’s why Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, was resisting school closures until a few days ago: the harm they cause is certain, the benefits are not. And given that Covid-19 seems uninterested in children, they’re at no risk to each other. But with countries the world over going into the sort of lockdown never imagined in any government pandemic plan – and world markets crashing – the Prime Minister has had to take each hour as it comes. He perhaps didn’t have much choice.
No pandemic sticks to a script – which explains the terrifying scenes in Lombardy, with patients left to die because hospitals are overwhelmed. This is precisely what British ministers fear now. The NHS has just 4,100 critical care beds, of which about 3,300 are used at any one time. With so little spare capacity, it wouldn’t take much for an Italian-style overflow. Then NHS hospital managers need to decide their ethical criteria: should the 45-year-old be saved and the 75-yearold left in the corridor to perish? Such horrific choices might not be far away, especially in London.
This is what led to the Prime
Minister’s change of tactics earlier this week. The old approach – a careful weighing of the risks and balances – has been replaced by an all-out attempt to slow the flow of cases into hospitals. Hence the city lockdowns, the pensioner quarantines and the school closures: anything likely to make a bit of difference is, now, being done. Anything that might save Britain from a Lombardy scenario.
Fewer than 200 British lives have (so far) been taken by Covid-19. This compares with the 26,000 Brits who died of flu the year before last and 1,500 who die of respiratory diseases each week. But it’s the trajectory that terrifies ministers: a final British death toll in low six figures would be at the milder end of their expectations. “It’s our job to assume the worst,” says one architect of the UK pandemic response plan. “But we need to be humble about what we still don’t know.”
Every day, they look at data from the UK and around the world to see how our future might look: are we on a more modest epidemic curve, or two weeks behind Italy? A Warwick University study last month showed Italy most at risk, given its elderly population. Almost a third of Italian adults live with their parents, with grandparents often looking after children. This solidarity between the generations, a beautiful part of Italian life, might have become a vulnerability – especially when schools were closed.
I once tried to take my son out of his primary school a day early. The headmistress refused, telling me in a letter that no airfare saving was worth “a single, irreplaceable day” of his education. She was right. The value of education is incalculable, as is the value of what millions of children will have just lost. In this way, the virus keeps taking its toll.