This week, school starts again, but not in anything like the normal way. Were it not for Covid-19, millions of children would wake tomorrow to the familiar routine: a hurried breakfast, perhaps a panicked search for missing shoes or a stray jumper, then a dash to avoid being late.
Instead, what awaits young minds that would otherwise be trying to learn? In this strange new world, where each family and household gamely tries to find its own way from the start of the day to the end, there are probably only two certainties around education. First, the BBC, which tomorrow unveils the biggest slate of educational programmes in its history. Second, the jokes, the social media jokes from parents juggling work and the improvement of the next generation.
I don’t need repeat those jokes here because everyone, whether they have children or not, will be familiar with them: the internet has been awash with self-deprecating gags about how hard it is to work and teach, to keep the little darlings engaged with geography or spellings while dialling in to video-conferenced meetings and stay sane. Lots of them reference drinking, generally wine or gin. Some of them are even funny.
Those jokes are harmless enough, and let parents deal with some of the very genuine stress and tensions that come from trying to juggle work and children in a home that wasn’t designed to do both. But they’re also a sign of the myopic, self-absorbed and sometimes just a little bit self-satisfied middle-class narrative that has been a feature of our national story during this crisis.
Because not all kids are having a lockdown experience like that. For too many youngsters, lockdown is putting another dent in their educational record, their confidence and their prospects. This problem has not been properly recognised in that national story. One of the many malign consequences of the measures that have been necessary to combat the virus is that without significant and lasting interventions, inequality in the education system will grow, with poor children falling further behind their better-off classmates.
Even before the crisis, it was a simple, awkward fact that children from wealthier homes in richer areas did better at school than those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some of that is down to the quality of the teaching they get at school. Schools in better-off areas find it easier to recruit the best-qualified teachers, who tend to stay in their posts longer and enhance their teaching skills.
Even before the crisis, it was a simple, awkward fact that children from wealthier homes in richer areas did better at school than those from disadvantaged backgrounds
But a lot of that wealth gap in education comes down to differences at home. Children from poorer homes are less likely to have parents who engage with their learning: maybe those parents lack the educational skills or confidence to support children learning. When your own experience of school was miserable, you might not see the point in encouraging your kids to stick at it, feel able to read to them every night or want to go to parents’ evening.
Those same parents are also more likely to have insecure jobs that require anti-social shifts and leave little money or time for supporting kids to learn at home. Some parents struggle to feed their kids three full meals a day when they’re not at school: “holiday hunger” will be part of the home schooling experience for some. Yet now those parents, like all others, are now responsible for their children’s education at home.
There are more than 1.2 million children who qualify for free school meals because of their parents’ low income, but the independent Social Metrics Commission estimates that 4.6 million children are living in poverty. Test scores suggest that the typical child on free school meals will be 18 months behind the rest of their age group by the time they reach GCSEs. Magic Breakfast, an inspirational charity that feeds poor, hungry kids in schools, estimates as many as as 1.8 million children are at risk of going hungry, a risk that increases with time away from school.
Studies in the US and here in Britain have shown the impact that long periods away from school have on children from different backgrounds. Most of those studies are based on the long summer holiday and show middle-class children maintain their skills but low-income children experience a downward “slide” in attainment as they get out of the habits of learning.
Some US estimates show that during a 12-week absence from school, the test scores of the poorest children fall three months behind the best-off. Research at Northumbria University on poor families in the north-east and Scotland has shown that children here suffer “summer learning loss” too.
Although many UK schools remain open during the lockdown, the overwhelming majority of children are staying at home and longer that remains so, the greater the risk that the gaps between rich and poor will grow.
This was one of the central reasons cited by France’s President Emmanuel Macron last week for starting to relax his country’s hardline lockdown policies. “The current situation widens inequalities,” he declared, naming schools and nurseries as the first French institutions to start reopening after May 11th. Denmark is reopening primary schools.
Should Britain be following suit, prioritising the early return of schools when the peak of the crisis has passed? It’s a terrifyingly grave and complex decision and I don’t envy those making it. But I’d argue that ministers should give more weight to the long-term costs to children of keeping schools closed. They should also see re-opening schools to support children in need as a goal in its own right, not merely as an economic measure deployed so that parents can get back to work.
In the meantime, there is much that can and should be done.
We may think smartphones and broadband are universal, but hundreds of thousands of children don’t have the kit needed to learn online. The charity Teach First found that many teachers in the poorest schools believe as many as a fifth of their pupils are unable to access online teaching resources.
At a time when the Government is, rightly, willing to tear up the old economic rules to spend billions supporting employers through the crisis, finding a few million to provide laptops and tablets to the poorest children should not be difficult or controversial. Technology firms and broadband providers should be demonstrating their commitment to a fair society by offering cheap or even free kit, connections and services.
Getting disadvantaged kids online would be a step in the right direction, but it won’t erase all the inequality the lockdown or of the education system in general. Part of the wider answer here must be helping parents to be better parents, something politicians have too often shied away from.
And when schools do return to something like normal, there will be more decisions to take, and maybe even some opportunities for useful long-term reform. Imagine schools are fully operational again from the start of June. On the standard timetable, children could then expect around six weeks of teaching before starting a long summer holiday of equal length, breaking up in late July and not returning until September.
Is that really the best way for children to catch up after the disruption and loss of the lockdown? Wouldn’t a shorter summer break allow more classroom time and support that would help children, especially disadvantaged ones, start to make up lost ground?
More broadly, could a different pattern of school holidays be a sensible change that could benefit kids who lose most from long breaks? Why should an advanced economy in the 21st century persist with a school year devised in the 19th century so that the Victorian middle-classes could enjoy summers by the sea?
It’s a question worth asking. But when Anne Longfield, the admirable Children’s Commissioner for England, raised the issue of this year’s summer break recently, she immediately came under fire from teachers’ unions insisting that the six-week holiday was a contractual right for their members, so no change in school year could be discussed.
That defensive, short-sighted reaction was out of step with these extraordinary times, where so many old certainties of politics and policy have already been abandoned. It also makes the teaching unions look badly like organisations that care more about their members’ terms and conditions than about children. Rank-and-file teachers, who make daily sacrifices for those children, are surely more open to change than those who speak for them.
We keep hearing that the virus will change everything. It’s already started to change education, to the detriment of too many poor children. For them, the lockdown can’t end soon enough. And for their sake, this year’s dramatic. changes in the way things are should not stop when the lockdown ends.
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