Harriet Sergeant

Ghost children: the pupils who never came back after lockdown

‘There was this guy in my year who never came back to school after lockdown,’ a 14-year-old girl at a comprehensive in the Midlands says. ‘Then one day my friends and I saw him by the shopping centre. He was, like, sitting on a piece of cardboard by the side of the road, looking a bit homeless. Other kids recognised him and bought him food and clothes. He’d always been popular. Then someone told a teacher and a couple of days later he came back to class. But he was so far behind, he grew frustrated and angry, and then one day he just upped and left for good.’

That boy is a ghost child – a victim of the disastrous policy of school closures during the Covid pandemic. On 8 March 2021, when schools reopened, everyone expected that it would be business as usual. They assumed children would skip back into class and resume their education.

A new report from the Centre for Social Justice, Lost and Not Found, shows just how wrong those assumptions were. In fact, many tens of thousands of children have gone missing. Two years on and growing numbers are still abandoning education altogether. It’s an effect no one anticipated and few understand. Worse, no one seems very interested. It’s why, over the past year or so, I have been trying to document the story that political parties refuse to address.

Lockdowns proved a disaster for young people at every stage of their development. With all the attention on the elderly, the young were left to cope on their own. It was assumed they’d be resilient. Far from it.

‘Lockdown has derailed their plans. The pandemic has diminished their life chances’

A school counsellor told me that the countless kids sent to him for help fall into two groups. Either they are so crippled by anxiety or depression that they cannot leave the house, or they are angry and bitter, out on the streets and into crime and gangs.

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