Lockdown made staying home the devastating default

Disruptive unions are persevering with a ‘shutdown’ mentality as we go about normal life

Were teachers really looking for an “excuse to avoid having to teach” during the pandemic? That was apparently the view of Gavin Williamson, education secretary at the time, back in May 2020 when he was trying to reopen schools – one of the many revelations in the Lockdown Files released by this paper so far.

For plenty of individual teachers, the accusation doesn’t wash. Many of them understood right away the disastrous consequences that would come from closing classrooms: lost learning, failures in safe-guarding and, in the worst cases, children falling off the school register completely.

But in fairness to Williamson, most of his criticisms didn’t seem to concern teachers, but the unions that claim to represent them. And from the start it was clear that, to them, pupils were a secondary concern. There’s little denying that Williamson was negotiating with union representatives who were intent on doing all they could to keep their members out of the workplace. Despite schools effectively being closed for months at the start of the pandemic, they labelled proposals to reopen them in June 2020 as “reckless” (Covid cases were plummeting at the time). The National Education Union created an “escalation app” in November 2020 in an attempt to organise strikes, as it aimed to shut down schools in the second lockdown.

Then in the lead-up to the third lockdown – the longest Britain would experience – the unions were adamant once again that in the name of “public health” teachers could not return to the classroom. This battle was eventually lost by Williamson and won by the unions. Experiencing this pushback first-hand, Williamson will have clocked early on the importance of keeping schools open: not just because of the horrible implications for children, but because once teachers went home, he knew how difficult it would be to bring them back to the classroom.

And, sadly, the consequences of allowing core services like teaching to be watered down or cancelled all together have not been contained to lockdowns. Suspending education at any time should be considered a huge upset, only done as a last resort.

Yet the idea that children’s learning can simply be put on hold appears to have become normalised. This week’s strike action from the NEU is not a standalone walkout, but one of seven voted on by members across England and Wales, affecting schools up to four times each this winter. The complacent assumption is that working parents can learn to live with this. This is not just naive, but throws up, once again, the blind spots that were on show during the pandemic: middle-class perspectives that fail to acknowledge the parents who cannot work from home to look after their off-school children. Many do actually need to show up to their workplace to bring in their day’s wages.

Unfortunately, these people are still being overlooked. The received wisdom goes: if the lockdown button could be so easily pushed to send people home for months on end, why can’t parents play teacher again for just a few days?

Of course, for many parents, it wasn’t doable. Income was lost, their children’s educational experience fell short. Some 93,000 pupils have gone missing altogether.

The then education secretary was mocked by his fellow ministers for wanting to see schools reopened. But Williamson, it turns out, was correct in his assessment and now we are going to spend years discovering the harrowing effects that lockdowns had on kids.

Yet at a time when we should be desperately playing catch-up on what was lost, the unions risk causing further pain. The biggest impact of these strikes could be a further widening of educational attainment gaps.

This is not uniquely an issue for the education sector. Lockdowns have convinced plenty of professional groups that it’s OK to put core services on hold. Those assumptions about spare rooms and home offices apply to the transport sector, as well, where unions keep turning down comparatively generous pay offers, and simply cancel train services instead.

It was a separate, yet equally painful, battle to get GPS to return to face-toface appointments as restrictions eased. The effective suspension of so much non-covid medical care at the height of the pandemic has led to NHS waiting lists soaring to 7.2m in England alone. Yet medical staff and ambulance drivers are repeatedly walking out of work to demand more pay, as local trusts encourage patients to keep their distance from the health service once again.

Indeed it’s difficult to see how this “winter of discontent” could have been conducted so confidently by the unions without the lockdowns that preceded it. The terrible disruption that has been caused to children’s learning (and their parent’s lives), to commuters and to patients waiting for treatment should be a national scandal. Instead, too many people just shrug their shoulders and attempt to put up with it.

It’s one of the most important revelations of the Lockdown Files to date: we can now see, in their own words, how ministers appeared to be crafting lockdown policy with politics, rather than people, in mind. How can anyone be surprised that 18 months on, other groups are using that playbook, requiring people to stay home, and away, in the name of today’s political battles? The sacrifices continue – children’s education included.