Letters: Speak up for our children

Care of children

Sir: At last people, namely Harriet Sergeant (‘The ghost children’, 25 March) and Rod Liddle (‘Childcare: an inconvenient truth’), are speaking up for the children. In so many areas of life today we sacrifice our children for the sake of our adult fetishes and fancies. The only people who have no political voice are our children. I am not suggesting that we lower the voting age to five; only that we try to do our best on their behalf. Why not spend the money that is going to provide 30 hours of childcare per week for babies over nine months old simply to pay the mothers to stay at home and look after them themselves? I can tell you which the babies would prefer.

Martin Down
Witney, Oxfordshire

Lesson plan

Sir: Harriet Sergeant’s article on children missing from education since the pandemic was sobering. However, to state that it was the Department for Education’s job to ‘ensure all schools provided a basic standard of education for all children’ is a gross misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the unprecedented situation at the time. With just a few days’ notice, schools large and small, urban and rural, state and independent, had to rip up the manual and start again. Even in the most favourable circumstances, the complexities of delivering any sort of education were quickly evident. I should know: that was my job in my school.

I would love her to outline how she would have gone about things. Equally, I would love to be able to explain to her the details of the appalling situation in which we all found ourselves, and the quite extraordinary efforts and successes of teachers and school leaders, when they themselves were often risking their own lives to help the children in their care.