It’s time to repair the damage done to the Covid generation’s education

Aswitch of personnel at the Department of Health this week has brought a welcome change in the government’s tone. No longer, it seems, are ministers looking for reasons to delay the final stage of lifting lockdown restrictions. After 16 months of curtailments on liberty, 19 July is inked in as the day when society and the economy will finally throw off the shackles of Covid restrictions. The vaccines mean that the virus has been downgraded to the status of flu and pneumonia: nasty bugs, sometimes fatal, but not enough to warrant locking down society with all the immense collateral damage that entails.

Yet as pubs, theatres and concert halls are allowed to fill again, it is important to remember that recovering from the pandemic is about more than just reopening society. There is the serious job of rebuilding to be done, and nowhere more so than in children’s education. In our obsession with daily Covid infection figures, we have lost sight of another frightening statistic, revealed by the Centre for Social Justice: that 33,000 children disappeared from full-time education as a result of the first lockdown. That is to say, they were absent from school on more days than they were in attendance.

We hear endlessly from public figures about how we should ‘build back better’ by creating cycle lanes, reducing carbon emissions and other fashionable causes. But we hear rather less about schools. Good though it would be to ‘build back better’, it will be a big enough challenge just to get back to where we were before the pandemic. And while a road can be re-laid at any time, children get just one chance at education.

The announcement by the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson this week that he wants to impose a national ban on mobile phones being used in the classroom shows yet again a worrying attachment to irrelevant detail.