Zahawi’s the man to free up our children’s schooling again
AS PARENTS, most of us put our children first without a moment’s hesitation.
Our hearts break when we first leave them at school.we share the thrill of every achievement and try to help them up when they fall down.
If we will go to the ends of the Earth for our children, why is it, as a society, we have shown so much less care for them as a whole?
Knowing that healthy children are unlikely to be seriously at risk from Covid and that they [especially younger children] are also less likely to spread the virus, we have nonetheless inflicted a year and a half of disruption, fear and lost opportunities on them.
Months when schools were closed, when they were banned from playing with their friends or celebrating their birthdays.
Sporty children were barred from the games field and those who yearn for the stage were left in the wings.
Those who lived in small flats, sharing a laptop with siblings, had it even worse. The toll on educational attainment and on the mental health of young people has been immense.
A massive increase in reports of eating disorders is just one of the more visible consequences.
Now the adult world is enjoying its return to normal, surely our future generation should be allowed to do the same? In many schools, the truth is very different.
If the “pingdemic” caused chaos in workplaces, the repeated isolation of bubbles, classes or year
groups, when a positive test occurred, caused yet more disruption.
When the Government issued new guidance that face masks needn’t be worn in schools some heads and teachers, often guided by a local director of public health, continued to encourage mask-wearing (in spite of the evidence that they make little, if any, difference).
It’s not just that children – whether tots or teenagers – need to see people’s faces so they learn the subtle signals that are key to human society.
Worse still, there are stories of discrimination and division between those who mask and those who don’t; those who test and those who won’t.
Children made to sit alone or learn remotely from another classroom, children made to sit facing the wall.
As Nadhim Zahawi takes the helm at the Department for Education, he faces all the usual challenges of maintaining and improving standards.
I am optimistic. As a nine-yearold boy, he stepped off the plane from Iraq to start a new life in Britain. He knows that education was the key to his successful career in business and now in politics. I have a hunch that he will be driven by a passion to see those same opportunities opened up once again to all the nation’s youngsters.
Nadhim, we are all depending on you to get our children’s lives back to normal.