Tory revolt over closed schools
PM told children are ‘forgotten victims’ of pandemic amid concerns classes will not resume until after Easter
‘Each day they are out of the classroom... children are falling behind in their education, and their life chances are poorer as a result ’
SCHOOLCHILDREN have become the pandemic’s “forgotten victims”, Tory MPS have told Boris Johnson, amid a growing backlash against plans that may keep classrooms closed until Easter.
A dozen Conservative MPS, including Esther Mcvey, the former Cabinet minister, and Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, today back a campaign by the parents’ pressure group Usforthem to reopen schools fully. They argue that the schools shutdown means education has become an “optional extra”, with the gulf between the most disadvantaged children and their wealthier peers growing “by the day”. At the same time, the pressure on parents who are trying to hold down full-time jobs while also acting as teachers “is simply becoming too much”, they say.
Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, is expected to announce as soon as this week that schools will remain shut to all but the most vulnerable and children of key workers beyond the February half-term break. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said the full reopening of schools before the Easter holiday was merely a “hope” rather than an expectation.
Ms Mcvey said yesterday: “We genuinely seem to have forgotten about schoolchildren. Millions of them are missing out on an education, not developing socially with their friends and aren’t allowed to enrich their lives by playing sports and music anymore. They are the pandemic’s forgotten victims and we’ve got to start thinking about their prospects and futures as well.”
Mr Johnson has said school closures will be the first restriction to be lifted once conditions are right. The clamour for schools to reopen is likely to grow this week after the number of daily infections fell by 22 per cent over the past seven days, with 30,004 new cases reported yesterday.
The number of patients admitted to hospital also fell slightly, with the seven-day average down by 6.3 per cent, though deaths continue to rise, with another 610 reported yesterday.
The figures will also intensify calls for the Government to lay out plans for lifting lockdown. It has emerged that last week Mr Hancock extended lock- down laws to enable councils to keep retail and hospitality businesses shut until July 17, but The Daily Telegraph understands that the Government is discussing a plan to reopen pubs and hotels by June, partly to ensure the G7 summit in Cornwall can go ahead.
One option is to reopen hospitality with social distancing and the rule of six for a period of 12 weeks, to allow for all over-50s to have their second vaccination, before allowing a return to near normality at the end of the summer.
Usforthem, a volunteer organisation set up by parents and grandparents last spring, argues that if the Government does not reopen schools it must publish an assessment of the “huge amount of harm” being done to children. Ms Mcvey said keeping classrooms shut was having a disproportionate impact on the most disadvantaged children, increasing “by the day” the attainment gap between them and their peers from wealthier families.
She added: “Education should not be treated as some sort of optional extra. It is an essential and critical service just like healthcare and the food provision.” The alternative was to “let down an entire generation”, she said.
Other Tory MPS who have joined the campaign include Ben Bradley, the former Tory Party vice chairman, who said narrowing the education gap was fundamental to Mr Johnson’s promise of “levelling up” the country.
He said: “Each day they are out of the classroom, the most disadvantaged children are falling behind in their education and their life chances are poorer as a result. In my view it’s storing up huge issues for the future that are being grossly underestimated.”
TWO British directors of Oscar-winning films have found it much easier to remake their much-acclaimed film in which people document their own lives because so many people have had time to record themselves during lockdown.
Sir Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald say that videos filmed for the ambitious Youtube project “Life In A Day” reveal just how much the world has changed in a decade. This time, they found a wealth of darker and deeper videos created
by people across the globe. Macdonald told The Daily Telegraph: “Looking back now at the film we made in 2010, it seems like a time capsule from a different age – a time when Youtube was mainly about uploading cute videos of your children and your cats and the idea of the professional “vlogger” didn’t really exist. I remember that we had to really search through the material to find anything dark.
“Critics complained that there was no death or sex – that therefore the film didn’t encapsulate life. Well now we
have a totally different feeling from the material we received. Loss and grief are heavily in evidence – as you would expect from the ‘worst year ever’. But the joy that is there is all the more precious for it. I feel that [this] is a more mature film, a more accurate reflection of humanity.”
Their first film asked the public to film themselves on a single day in July. From 80,000 video clips submitted from 192 countries, Sir Ridley and Macdonald created a 90-minute feature documentary that has been viewed
more than 17 million times on Youtube. Now they are premiering a new film based on 324,000 entries, all shot on July 25 2020. Such is the international interest that their two short videos inviting further submissions have been viewed 65 million times.
The “Life In A Day” productions try to capture the mood of humanity through snapshots of everyday lives across the planet. The film will be premiered on Feb 1 at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, in the US, and launched free on Youtube on Feb 6.