Scale of damage to children from lockdown is ‘immense’, MPS told

THE number of children failing to reach their potential will be “immense”, the Children’s Commissioner has said, as she warns that some may never come back to school after lockdown.

Anne Longfield said that unless more pupils are allowed to return to school, there will be eight million children who have been out of school for six months by September.

Speaking to MPS at the education select committee, she said: “The scale of other children that will not be reaching their potential because of this time out of education is also immense.”

Ms Longfield said that the impact of school closures on children from deprived backgrounds was particularly stark and could lead to them dropping out of education forever.

“Those who are disadvantaged, who maybe have negative experiences of school, will have more time away from it,” she said, adding that she has received reports from head teachers who “stay up worrying whether those children will ever come back because the leap that will need to get them back into school will be so vast”.

This week, pupils in Reception, Year One and Year Six are allowed to return to the classroom but many schools across the country have decided to stay closed as more than 50 local councils around the country defied the Government’s plans.

Downing Street stated last month that it was its “ambition” that primary schools would be fully open by the end of June to allow children four weeks of lessons before they break up again for

the summer. But this week the Government said that the plan to have every primary school pupil back in the classroom for at least a month before the summer holidays was under review,

following warnings from head teachers and governors that this would be “logistically impossible”.

She said that since shops will soon be open, children who are not back at school until September “could have spent two and a half months browsing Primark, but not been in school”.

Ms Longfield told MPS that while some schools had been “fantastic” with providing children access to learning materials during lockdown, this was not the case across the board.

While some children had been given a full day of classes on Microsoft Teams, there were others who had not had so much as a phone call from their school.

“And then of course the fact of the matter is there are an awful lot of children who won’t have had very much or anything at all,” she added.

Ms Longfield cited a Teacher Tapp survey from April to March which found that teachers believed that two thirds of children were logging online for lessons less than two hours a day during lockdown, which increased to 90 per cent of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. “We looked at figures of kids not going online – that was before their parents went back to work and before the sun came out for any length of time and frankly before other things became more interesting, she said. “The scale of the number of children who have been falling through the gaps between the online access and what is available to them at home or at school is significant.”

Yesterday, the Welsh education minister announced that all schools in Wales will reopen on June 29

Kirsty Williams said that said a phased approach would see staggered starts, lessons, and breaks for different year groups, with a third of pupils at most in school at any time.

She said that allowing pupils to return to the classroom was the best way to meet the needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged children.