What school closures are doing to our children

The suspension of schooling has already led to fears of a lasting impact on children’s education, especially among poorer children. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, the Education Endowment Foundation has estimated that a six-month closure of schools could lead to an attainment gap of 36 per cent between children from the best-off and worst-off households.

But what about the effect of school closures on children’s emotional development? A team from Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, warns that deprivation of peer contact among adolescents could have a serious impact on brain development, leading to anxiety, depression and aggression. In young children, they say, parental contact is vital for brain development. But between the ages of 10 and 24 people go through a period of heightened sensitivity to social stimuli, and experience an increased need for peer interaction.

The amount of work on humans is, they admit, limited, but they cite a number of animal studies where mice and rats have been deprived of contact with their peers during a crucial phase of adolescence – which for them equates to days 21 to 60 of their lives.