The kids? They aren’t alright
From broadband issues to disrupted teaching to a vacuum of support, Katie Strick reports on the class divide that has opened between state and private school children
IT’S only three weeks into the new school term but Nadja Mueller says her children are already close to breaking point. Before the pandemic, Lily*, 11, and Sam*, nine, were grade-A students at their local state school in Hackney: motivated, ambitious, eager to learn. But over the 10 months since schools first closed their doors, the marketing director says her children have experienced a “total regression”. Lily struggles to keep up in class, Sam has tearful meltdowns and both have started sleeping in her bed citing a cocktail of fears around the virus, grandparents dying and never seeing their friends again.
“They’ve totally lost their spark,” says Mueller, describing how the pressures of the curriculum are leaving teachers no room for talk about the pandemic or feelings. As a single mother, she’s lucky she can work from home and assist with schoolwork, but there are other disrupting factors: siblings; children not liking to be taught by parents; Zoom fatigue. “Most adults struggle staring at a screen for hours a day,” she says. “To expect nine-year-olds just to sit down and get on with it is unrealistic.”
Like many parents, Mueller is concerned that the damage from a year of disrupted schooling will be irreparable. But she knows her children are some of the lucky ones: they have a parent who can work remotely, just one sibling competing for that parent’s attention and a school delivering three lessons a day on Microsoft Teams. Naturally, she thinks of children without that support: those whose parents are working night shifts; those crammed into flats with one laptop between four.
“The worry is what happens when they meet one day at university or in the workplace,” says Christella Kupa, as her daughter Judith Zooms into a science experiment hosted by her independent school in Marylebone. “I feel very sad when I think about how huge that gap is going to be.”
Kupa’s concern over plummeting education standards points to a more concerning gap than the one within classrooms: that between state and privately educated students. According to the Social Mobility Commission (SMF), the educational divide between the two is “widening by the day”, with students at some state schools believed to have regressed by as much as six months over the first lockdown alone. “They will know less. They will enter work knowing less. So they will earn less. And we will all be worse off,” explains director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies Paul Johnson.
England rugby star Maro Itoje, who recognises the fortune of his private education at Harrow, is the latest figure to highlight this disparity, calling for better state-funded laptop provision after Ofcom found that as many as 1.78 million children still don’t have access to devices for online learning, despite the Education Secretary’s £4 million laptop pledge. Recent studies also found that some 200,000 children have almost no internet connection at home — four times the number of routers up for grabs in the Government’s latest tech package.
In many cases, the disparity in teaching hours is also stark. While 71 per cent of state school students say they’ve had between zero and one online lesson per day since the school shutdown on January 5, almost a third of private school pupils have received at least four daily online lessons, with uniform checks, PE lessons, assemblies and even live classes from partner schools in Rwanda. Meanwhile parents at some council-funded schools say their children haven’t set their eyes on a teacher since the shutdown began.
Charity Villiers Park Education Trust has warned that the result of this disparity is “a whole generation of young people” being lost to education, with children owning laptops more than twice as likely to achieve five A* to C-grade GCSEs. Although this year’s exams have been cancelled, many will still have to sit “mini exams” from home, prompting concerns for those who’ve missed swathes of the curriculum. The repercussions could long outlast the virus. According to the children’s commissioner, closing Covid’s education gap could take a decade.
For some, the impact will be lifelong, says Nadine Ahmed, 18, studying for
The result of the privatestate school disparity is a whole generation of young being lost to education
her A-levels at a state school in northwest London. Though she hoped to study law at Oxbridge, factors outside her control mean she’ll be lucky to get into any Russell Group university.
Among the setbacks: four weeks of missed schooling due to Covid outbreaks, poor broadband signal, half a year without a laptop.
“I spent six months viewing PowerPoints on a tiny phone screen,” she says, describing how she would submit homework by taking photos as she didn’t have a PC or printer at home. “It feels like the odds are against me just because of who I am and where I’m from,” she adds. Is it fair to compare her grades to a private school Oxbridge candidate with round-the-clock teaching, a Macbook and 24/7 internet?
Ahmed is among thousands of children in the capital whose postcode and income have put them on the wrong side of lockdown’s digital divide. “It was a chasm for us,” says Rebecca Hickey, principal of eight state schools across the Harris Academies. Her students are lucky to be part of a federation that has provided laptops to all students, they’d have “struggled” with just state support, but others have not been so fortunate.
“The Government needs to be more realistic about what is deliverable,” says Andrew O’Neill, headteacher at All Saints Catholic College in Kensington, yet to receive any devices for the spring term. Linda Heiden, founder of Lambeth TechAid, says many families have one device for two or three children.
For multiple-child families, there are competing factors aside from laptops, such as space to work and parents to supervise. “Try teaching onomatopoeia to a seven-year-old when her brother is hurling toy buses at her,” says James*, a father of three in east London. Louise Curtis, a single mother of five studying for a healthcare degree in Elephant and Castle, says she’s lucky if she can sit down with each child once a week.
What about children in chaotic households? Rachel*, a GP in Tooting, says she only realised the impact of her husband juggling two jobs from home when teachers called last Friday: their daughter, 11, hadn’t logged into a lesson all week. Meanwhile a state school teacher on Twitter says she’s seen children attending classes from cupboards to escape noisy family homes, and Hickey is aware of the difficult home situations many of her students will be grappling with. Domestic violence, knife crime and drug abuse are some of the issues her welfare team have been tackling.
For Hickey, recognising the mental effects of the lockdown on this generation is paramount. “There’s definitely a divide growing,” says Helen Spiers, head of counselling at Mable Therapy. The platform has seen a 50 per cent spike in referrals since September, with school referrals “much more likely” to come from socio-economically deprived backgrounds. “They may have problems such as parents losing their job and not knowing who is going to pay the rent or where the next meal is coming from. For those children, even if they have access to learning, they’re unable to engage with it as they’re overwhelmed by bigger problems.”
So what can be done to avoid that “lost generation”? Getting children back to school is a priority but, in the meantime, there’s a long way to go in closing the digital divide, says SMF leader Sarah Atkinson, whose charity is among organisations bringing devices to those who need it most through its End Laptop Poverty campaign. “This isn’t about tech,” says Atkinson. “It’s about giving kids an education and a fair chance in life.”
• For help accessing laptops or other resources, visit techforuk.com or socialmobility.org.uk