Meet the parents fighting for our schools
Horrified at children being overlooked during the pandemic, four women joined forces to start a movement. Victoria Lambert reports
There have been many low moments for our education system over the past few months – culminating, so far, in Thursday’s A-level results debacle.
But for many of us, the first realisation that schools were being hit hard by social changes resulting from the pandemic came in April, when a stark image of French pupils emerged online. Les enfants were back in the playground, but sitting miserably metres away from each other in demarcated individual zones. Was this the future that awaited British youngsters when schools finally reopened here?
Molly Kingsley shudders at the memory. “I had a visceral reaction,” says the 41-year-old tech entrepreneur and ex-lawyer, who lives in Cambridge with husband Ben, 43, plus daughters Mila, six and Farah, four. “Like most people, I’d accepted lockdown and schools closing, but that picture changed everything.”
Kingsley was not alone: the same day, other parents were experiencing a similar awakening.
Marketing consultant Liz Cole expressed her horror on Twitter, where she bumped into Kingsley in comments below a tweet shared by Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson. Their alarm soon began to crystallise into something more profound: a belief that in the Government’s efforts to manage the pandemic, children had been completely and utterly overlooked.
“It was so obvious,” says Cole, who also lives near Cambridge with her 52-year-old husband Martin and their two girls Bea, 12, and Aggie, 11. “Every element of policy seemed to ignore its effect on children – despite there being little evidence that youngsters are affected by Covid-19. And where that was going to hit hardest appeared to be the attitudes around education, which seemed to start and end with shutting schools.”
Thus the idea that they would have to campaign to get all schools reopened, as soon and as normally as possible, was born.
Within 24 hours, Cole had recruited two other women – both old friends – to the team. Jo Bisset, 49, runs an infrastructure support company with her 56-year-old husband Gordon in Edinburgh, where they live with sons
Harris, 15, and Hector, 12. While health economist Christine Brett, 48, also lives outside Cambridge, with her husband Mark, 52, and their children Lucy, 11, and Ollie, nine.
The four began talking via Zoom and decided to act fast. “We had a platform ready to go,” explains Kingsley, “as I had already been working on an idea around social action, called Us For Them.”
Adds Brett: “We were all just frustrated that no one was talking about children. So we wrote to the Secretary of State, set up a petition, and it took off from there.”
Three months on, their movement has more than 25,000 members and is styling itself as Us For Them: The Parent Voice, because, put simply, that is what it is.
Members write to their MPs and the Department of Education. They are active on social media. Open letters are coordinated, most recently to the Prime Minister, signed by a 2,000-strong coalition of CEOs, academics, doctors and psychologists, arguing that schools should be deemed “critical national infrastructure”, so that they cannot ever be closed wholesale again.
Physical meet-ups are not yet possible, but marches and meetings are not being ruled out in the future.
The group is determinedly nonpartisan. In fact, Bisset points out that Scotland is the only area where “education transcends party politics”.
That’s not true in England, where I meet Kingsley in an appropriately distanced fashion. She explains how all four women began research into why so many schools had closed and what the impact was, not just in terms of education but also child welfare.
With the benefit of Brett’s background as a health economist and her understanding of risk vs benefit, they felt early on that their instincts were right: not only should all schools be opened, but perhaps they never needed to be closed at all.
However, their ideas were not immediately popular. “Looking at the comments online when we posted a blog or tweeted,” says Kingsley, “it was clear people were genuinely scared. It wasn’t until eminent voices started speaking up and saying that social distancing was bad for kids that the mood changed.”
She adds: “People thought we were anti-teacher, but that wasn’t true. We could see that the rights and needs of children were being overlooked when decisions were being made in Government. What was lacking in the Cabinet and all the committees in Whitehall was a voice for parents.”
The campaign, known as #UsForThem online, started to gain traction quite quickly. Teachers began to email, worried about rules they’d been sent for returning to school. Psychologists got in touch, concerned about children’s mental health. Membership of the website began to grow and the quad set up Facebook groups on a regional basis, with organisers in Northern Ireland and Wales, as well as Bisset co-ordinating things in Scotland.
What was quickly becoming apparent was that how children went back to school was as important as when. “They need to be in a normal environment,” says Kingsley. “Anything is not better than nothing.”
Many of us are finding it hard enough to cope with the day-to-day rules of Covid life, but try wading through the intricate measures schools that have been told to follow.
“Overzealous,” says Cole. “It is really troubling that some of these things are getting signed off.” She cites Reset
Zones, where children who have been caught not social distancing will be sent home, before being allowed to return the next day only to sit – silently – in a designated space at least two metres from their fellow pupils. It sounds horribly like the sort of thing found in a Victorian institution.
What is most worrying, adds Cole, is that the perception of the whole sector has changed. “Children shouldn’t be ‘invited back’ to school as though it is discretionary,” she says. “Children have a right to education.”
Kingsley is also concerned about how this will play out globally: “A UCL study says 71 per cent of stateeducated pupils have had one or fewer lessons a day. Some countries have been running their schools as normal throughout. So our children won’t just be disadvantaged in this country but also around the world,” she explains.
Moreover, she points out that as more independent schools have managed to keep lessons going online, the already entrenched inequalities in our system will be exacerbated, something that seems to have been foreshadowed in last week’s A-level results.
Some sixth-form colleges are still not planning on returning full time next month – how will that affect next year’s A-level cohort?
Add in the Government’s own report, which found 67 per cent of school-age children are thought to have suffered with mental health problems, and Kingsley says: “This has been an untested intervention on a generation and for some it will have been catastrophic.
“Safeguarding has all but disappeared: 94 per cent of vulnerable children have not been in school at all. There has been systemic failure.”
She adds: “We are dropping things without discussion that until recently were considered essential for working parents in every direction: extra curricular activities, breakfast clubs, after-school clubs. What is going on?”
Last week, in Scotland, Bisset reports that it was delightful to see mums posting pictures of their kids’ first days back at school on Facebook.
“Most schools are returning in a fairly normal way,” she says. “But we are watching across the country for uncalled-for measures like children being asked to wear masks.”
If schools do reopen, but in one of the limited ways being mooted – one week on, one week off, for example – demonstrations may be on the cards.
“But we are exploring other sanctions,” says Kingsley. “Can you withhold taxes in some way? Do we demand a rebate? Do we set up community schools and opt out?”
Given the firm stance taken by some of the teaching unions, has the group found a way forward that has eluded the Government thus far?
“Teachers are in an impossible position,” says Kingsley. “This is not about bashing them; I hate to see them trolled online.
“In fact, I would ask, who has been clapping for them? Some schools have been open throughout to some pupils. That’s not our complaint.
“Ironically,” says Kingsley, “the chaos of Covid-19 has given us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reimagine and re-engineer our education system. Let’s take it.”
‘This is not about bashing teachers. In fact, who has been clapping for them?’