Keeping primary schools closed is asking children to pay too high a price
Time speeds up as we get older. No one knows exactly why. Some neuroscientists think it has to do with the rate at which we process visual images. Others think it is related to the way we store memories. Still others link it to our slowing metabolisms. Whatever the cause, we are all glumly aware of the effect.
The subjectivity of time means that young people, though they suffer least from the coronavirus, suffer most from the lockdown. The past 10 months have been miserable for most of us. But for children, to whom a month seems an eternity, they have stretched emptily, day after dreary day without play groups, sports or friends.
We see the impact on every agegroup. Toddlers, who can barely remember pre-Covid times, put face masks on to play “shop” and cup their hands under any box-shaped object, waiting for sanitiser to purr out. School-age children, isolated and forced to spend even more time on screens, are suffering so much psychological trauma that, according to the Children’s Commissioner, mental health services have been overwhelmed. University students, at what should be the most active stage in their lives, are forced to mope about at home.
We seem to have lost our capacity to make trade-offs. Yes, halting human interactions slows the transmission of a disease. But are we really saying that any amount of social and education deprivation is justified provided it saves a single life?
A lot of us are evidently saying precisely that: hence the unwavering opinion poll support, not only for keeping schools closed, but for going further and shutting nurseries. Yet trade-offs sometimes have to be made. We made one when we chose to keep schools open for vulnerable pupils and the children of key workers. We made a different one when we chose to turn away everyone else.
The case for closing schools is, like so many things at the moment, based on necessarily patchy data. Almost everyone seems to agree that children themselves do not normally get seriously ill with Covid-19 – though they can, of course, catch the virus. The question is whether having them in school leads to an increase in the spread of the virus. Here, the evidence is mixed. Some reports suggest that closing schools significantly slows community transmission, others that it makes little or no difference.
Those with the more robust data sets tend to be in the latter categories.
Major studies by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and McMasters University point to very low levels of spread among schoolchildren. Data from the ONS show that teachers are at no more risk than other working-age adults. Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, says that kids are “not a significant driver as yet, as far as we can see, of large-scale community infections”.
Pre-teenaged children seem especially unlikely to be vectors. For some reason, their immune systems are far better at suppressing the disease. Perhaps that reduces their viral load. Perhaps, being themselves asymptomatic, they are less likely to be infectious. Whatever the explanation, it seems especially harsh to have closed primary schools. Younger children are less able to study unsupervised, which not only means that their learning suffers more, but also that their parents are less able to work.
Yes, reopening primary schools fully might incidentally have pushed up the R-rate by allowing more parents to go back to work. But are we truly prepared to inflict serious, quantifiable and lasting damage on children for what might be very marginal gains to adults?
Plainly we are. One of the saddest aspects of the outbreak is that it has revealed how uninterested most of us are in the freedoms exercised by others. People who don’t belong to gyms are happy enough to see gyms closed. People who don’t go to the pub want pubs mothballed. People who don’t have children are quite relaxed about losing another term.
Even before the epidemic, I used to fret about how easily folk would glide from “I don’t like X” – shooting pistols, smoking pot, hunting foxes, expressing hateful views – to “X should be banned”. The collective fear induced by coronavirus has brought our authoritarianism to the boil. Even laws preventing us from leaving the country – as opposed to restrictions on arrivals, which are fair enough during a pandemic – are popular.
Liberty was the single most precious commodity that, as British people, we inherited from our parents. We seem not to care about passing it on in our turn.