Children are a blessing and they are our future
Miriam Cates MP | The Telegraph | March 2020
Last week the Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi stated publicly that the decision to close schools during the pandemic was a mistake. This was a deliberate and considered intervention that is highly significant for our children.
Zahawi is absolutely right.
Preventing children from going to school for months at a time was enormously damaging and the cost to our children of lockdowns has been appalling.
I will never forget the moment in March 2020 when Zahawi’s predecessor, Gavin Williamson, announced that schools would close their doors to most pupils for the foreseeable future. Watching his statement from home with my three school-aged children, I remember shouting at the television “Don’t do it Gavin”. My heart sank as I foresaw the terrible consequences of this decision for my own kids and for millions of families across the country.
The next few months were pretty hellish in our household, but what my children went through was nothing compared to the experience of so many others.
As an MP my inbox filled with cries for help from constituents, despairing as they watched the mental health of their children decline or unable to cope without core support services for their disabled children.
Two years on we are beginning to get a measure of the full impact of school closures on a whole generation of children and young people. We have seen a 77 per cent rise in acute mental health referrals for children, and a 167 per cent increase in self-generated online sexual images of 11-13 year olds. The academic impact has been substantial, especially for deprived children, and 100,000 have still not fully returned to school.
In the context of such a tragic outcome, we should not underestimate Zahawi’s bravery in admitting that the Government made the wrong call. As someone who has consistently spoken out against COVID restrictions on children, I was rather moved by the Minister’s statement, but many have commented that it is “too little too late”.
Of course it is too late for many, and sadly there will be children who never recover from the consequences of missing so much school. But Zahawi’s statement is nevertheless an essential step forward because it forces us to ask some searching questions about how this tragedy was allowed to occur in the first place.
Closing schools for such a long period wasn’t just an error of policy, it was a moral failure. I don’t envy the difficult choices that the Government had to make in the early days of the pandemic, and perhaps the initial school closure was unavoidable. But it very soon became clear that COVID carried almost zero risk for children, and that lockdowns were doing unacceptable harm.
It was therefore a conscious choice – a value judgement – to continue to sacrifice our children’s welfare for the interests of adults. And whilst the Government must take overall responsibility for this choice, the media, teaching unions and opposition politicians all called for continued lockdowns and openly resisted attempts to get kids back to the classroom.
School closures are not the only evidence of how society is putting adult interests before those of our children.The promotion of adult political agendas in schools, a lack of proper support to strengthen families and our failure to implement online safety legislation (soon to be rectified) all point to the same conclusion. Perhaps we don’t value our children as highly as we thought.
Our actions, whether as individuals or governments, are an outworking of our values. School closures were of course driven by COVID, but they were allowed to continue for so long because we don’t value children highly enough. It is worth noting that British children missed more schooling than almost any others in Europe, losing out on more than half of their days in the classroom.
If we are going to be successful in putting things right for our children – and the Government’s plans for catch-up, mental health investment and family hubs are a good start – then we must begin with an acknowledgement not just of what went wrong but why it went wrong. It doesn’t matter how important your destination, or how determined you are to get there; if your compass is broken you will fail to reach it.
We now have the opportunity as a society to reflect honestly on our attitude to children and to try to fix our compass. Good parents lay aside their own interests and make great sacrifices for their children and so it should be for society.
Children are not disease spreaders, they are not granny killers and they are not a buffer for adult priorities. Children are a blessing and they are our future and we must re-commit ourselves to putting their welfare first.
Thank you Nadhim; you’ve given this mother hope.
This article was first published in The Telegraph in March 2022
